Making a drop from the area’s underground, Murfreesboro’s folk/bluegrass/roots cabin crooner Alex Tumbleson released a self-produced, solo debut EP, Polly, under the stage name Barnum Brown. The release captures the darkly swooning discipline of a local multi-instrumentalist, a haybale/brewery-circuit picker proud to remain subterranean. But the music will probably earn some attention, because Barnum Brown throws around Dostoyevsky quotes like a true, traditional-style Middle Tennessee circuit picker.

Polly was recorded as a simple, no-BS production of triple talent—picking skills, lyric stylings and vocal discipline—arranged for a bluegrass-steeped, cabin-lit mood in each of its six tracks.

Polly opens with “Change Is Coming Soon,” featuring a strummed acoustic guitar accompanying vocals sounding like a late-middle-aged but still throaty Ralph Stanley singing a Dan Tyminski-penned song, one about a conflicted man awake at night, at the train station, thinking about his woman. Brown’s picking stumbles onto deft pinkie-ing of high-string 7th, 9th and 11th notes for the melody while the chorded down-strum of the lower three or four strings of the instrument act as the bass line. It’s a backwards, melodic claw-hammering technique borrowed from banjo masters like ‘Boro-area legacy and early Opry star Uncle Dave Macon.

A possibly area-telling “Vine Street Girls” livens up Polly as a Jewish-folk-sounding minstrel tune, properly layering the high-register, mandolin-style strummed banjo over a waltz-ish acoustic guitar, accompanying lyrics of a drunkard’s nightcap about three doors down on Vine Street. All three of Brown’s triple talents play an equal part in this banger and EP highlight.

Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor likely influenced the vocal style on the homely, solo acoustic homage to the area, “Tennessee.”

Brown’s vocals then closely resemble those of Trampled by Turtles’ Dave Simonett on the title track, as traditionalist clawhammer banjo picking plays, while lyrically the song explores a dark combination of time and failure, truly giving up, and having only Polly to say goodbye to.

“Undertow” follows as another solo-acoustic number, with noticeable impressive breath control as a sub-talent of Brown’s vocal discipline, all over some Neko Case-esque minor-chord rise-and-fall. Brown string-smacks and mutes for a percussive effect, and the resulting crescendo keeps feet tapping while sounding as if the artist was raised by wild, roving open-mic musicians.

Brown goes to town with a vocal style reminiscent of Andrew Bird on “The Bitter End” for an ultimate track utilizing guitar parlor tricks, acoustic mute strumming and chiming intonations while keeping a solid picking flow and running a bass line that fills in a wonderful, dark jazz/folk vehicle for a bluegrass-accompanied apocalypse (or acquiescing to an opioid death and succumbing to a true underground . . . “if you do not deign to give me your attention,” as Dostoyevsky would say).

Find Polly by Barnum Brown/Alex Tumbleson on Spotify or at alextumbleson.bandcamp.com.