Skip to main content
On the cover of Portland old-time strings trio Stone & Sue’s Forty Drop Few’s debut album, No. 1 (released this spring), is a portrait of founding members Candra and Ethan Francis, smiling modestly in bygone garb with guitar and banjo in hand. Edging the illustration is a tiny signature: “R. Crumb 2022.”
“It’s pretty simple how it happened, it’s not even crazy,” insists guitarist and vocalist Candra Francis, explaining how the first drawing by the cartoonist and counterculture icon since the 2022 passing of his wife and collaborator, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, came to grace the cover. “We told him, ‘You do not have to do this,’ and it almost didn’t happen.”
Stone & Sue’s Forty Drop Few is a collaboration between the Francises—who are partners in both music and life—and fiddler Elliot Kennedy. The band’s freshman record is a DIY effort of 14 songs from 1924 to 1936, along with two sneaky originals written and recorded with such faithful fluency to the time period that their modernity is indiscernible.
“The music is authentic to us—we don’t treat it like an artifact,” says Ethan Francis, who sings and plays guitar, banjo and cello, among other string instruments.
Stone & Sue’s album art was a Christmas gift from Crumb, who befriended the Francises after his daughter Sophie began corresponding with them via Instagram about her father’s love of their music before encouraging the couple to send her father a handwritten letter.
A two-year pen pal exchange culminated in an almost grandfatherly connection with the illustrator, who ultimately invited the Francises to visit the Crumbs’ estate in Southern France.
“We stayed up late listening to records,” Ethan Francis says. “We would go to dinner and [Crumb] would collaborate with his grandkids on placemat drawings. [Aline Kominsky-Crumb] had to take the placemats away just in case someone tried to sell his drawings.”
In France, Crumb accompanied the band in performing live as a quartet, taking up the banjo, baritone ukulele, and mandolin. “He still knows every single song we play,” Candra Francis says. “And everyone in the village thought we were Amish,” Ethan laughs.
Crumb and Stone & Sue are a match made in heaven. An accomplished self-taught musician, Crumb, who is left-handed, prefers to play string instruments upside down rather than string them backwards for left-handed play. Perhaps even more impressive is his extensive private collection of rare 78 rpm records, which number in the thousands.
Godfather of the “underground comix” movement, Crumb is best known for his alt-satire cartoons of the 1960s and ‘70s, featuring characters like LSD-soaked Mr. Natural, contending with the wily temptations of buxom Amazonian women, and the sex-obsessed Fritz the Cat. His anti-corporate oeuvre of unflinching observations lampooning American absurdism earned him folk hero status as an “equal opportunity offender.”
Despite moving from California to Cévennes, France (where he has lived quietly with his family since 1991), Crumb, like Stone & Sue, maintains warm nostalgia for the simple folkways of late 19th and early 20th century America. Overlapping interests have helped dissipate the decades between Crumb and the trio, who describe the famously reclusive cartoonist as “a humble sweetheart.”
Ethan Francis shares a singular bond with Crumb: He is also an illustrator and cartoonist, as well as a self-taught master of string instruments and music history expert. He counts Crumb as an influence and mentor as well as a friend.
“I sent him two zines that I made,” Francis says. “He has a whole drawer just for my zines and drawings, alongside drawers for each of his grandchildren.”
Stone & Sue’s Forty Drop Few is set to release their second album over the summer, along with a solo effort by Ethan Francis (they also have upcoming shows this Friday at the Landmark Saloon and July 23 at the Moon & Sixpence). The trio maintains close contact with the Crumbs and plans to meet up with the family this summer in Portland.
“They felt like family immediately,” Candra Francis says.