The Delete BinYasmin Williams Plays “Hummingbird”
Listen to this track by North Virginian guitarist and multi-instrumentalist known for her lap-style technique Yasmin Williams. It’s “Hummingbird”, a prime cut off of her 2024 record Acadia, her third. This cut features renowned players in their own right Allison de Groot on banjo and Tatiana Hargreaves on fiddle. Their contributions ratchet up the Appalachian feel of this particular piece; a stylistic angle being only one facet of Williams’ varied musical profile even on this one album of hers.
Williams’ introduction to the guitar was from a more recent source than the centuries-old traditions from which she draws on this track. As a pre-teen, her brothers played the video game Guitar Hero 2. When she discovered how much better she was than her siblings at that particular game, Williams love of music and her fascination with the guitar began in earnest. Fandom of rock and metal followed with the idea of becoming a heavy metal shredder, applying her seemingly natural agility to the real instrument.
As she developed her own style, she favoured more melodic and acoustic sounds with an emphasis on exploring creative ways to express her songcraft. One of those approaches was to experiment with open tunings. Another was to master the “lap tapping” technique to playing the guitar. This means playing the instrument flat on her lap while fretting chords and melody lines in an inverted style as if playing a keyboard.
This technique allows Williams to explore various chord voicings and to open up melodic and rhythmic possibilities while doing so. It also allows her to play multiple instruments at once on several of her songs, most notably the African instrument the kalimba, which Williams mounts on her upward-facing guitar. She plays it with her left hand while tapping the guitar fretboard with her right. Her use of tap shoes on some tracks provide self-driven percussion lines as she plays the melodic and harmonic parts.
Yasmin Williams playing in a lap-tapping style. image: Rene PassetHere on this cut, she also displays traditional chops on the guitar, playing it in the conventional way while intertwining her lines with those of the banjo and fiddle. She mixes it up by intercutting it with the lap-tapping style, capturing the energy and beauty of her subject matter; the titular sap-seeking dynamo of the bird world, inflaming the imagination to be the closest thing to faeries a person is likely to see.
The melody and rhythm heard in “Hummingbird” is full of brightness and optimism to shore up this effect. It’s replete with tempo changes that help tell a story with sound rather than with lyrical content. Although she wrote the song in Pittsburgh, it evokes the grandeur of nature far from any steel city landscape.
The melody makes it easy to imagine that the hero of the story isn’t just a single creature, but an embodiment of nature itself; beloved and worth celebrating and preserving. It also suggests a series of single moments in catching sight of a near-mythical creature in an idyllic setting. It feels free of any specific era and is highly meditative as a listening experience in our particularly troubled one.
As much as one might assume that Yasmin Williams is embracing her culture as a North Virginian by playing this tune in a bluegrass style, it turns out that she is a relative newcomer to the world of string bands and Appalachian folk traditions:
“This style of music is not one that I grew up with and is still relatively new to me; however, I can’t help but be somewhat influenced by the amazing musicianship of all the bluegrass, folk, and old-time musicians I’ve seen in the last few years. Although this wasn’t on my mind consciously when I wrote this tune, I assume these influences entered my subconscious.”
~ “Yasmin Williams – Hummingbird”, Stereogum, September 5, 2024.
This demonstrates that apart from her mastery of her instrument, Yasmin Williams has a keen musician’s ear for a style and the compositional chops to capture its heart. That’s what the best musicians and composers do; listen to each other, and allow themselves to be open to stylistic possibilities to help them tell their own stories.
This takes their music beyond the boundaries of technique and makes it into works of sheer imagination and of human experience of the wider world in its fine details. Here, the music conjures the feelings of gratitude when one finds oneself bearing witness to the small wonders that nature can demonstrate; the simple awe of observing a wondrous tiny bird on its floral adventures being one of those. Even if the song had a completely different title, one might still imagine that image. The emotional impact would be the same; a sense of brightness and warmth and well-being.
“Hummingbird” belongs in a tradition of music that is in part a reaction to one’s natural surroundings, tied to a sense of place. It suggests a landscape in celebration of its memory. This kind of string band folk music also acknowledges a history of playing that kind of music as we hear it and it tells a story of the lives of the people who play it, too. On this tune, it also celebrates the simple moments of beauty and clarity and even mystery that defines our lives wherever we live.
Yasmin Williams is an active musician today. You can learn more about her by visiting yasminwilliams.com.
Also, be sure to take a look and listen at her 2025 NPR Tiny Desk concert to see her play this song live with Alison deGroot and Tatiana Hargreaves. In it, you can see her switch up playing styles from the traditional position to lap-tapping. On another song, “Guitka”, you’ll see how Williams plays the kalimba and the guitar at the same time, intertwining melody lines in fascinating ways.
Enjoy!
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