Tag: Bill Monroe

Roland White: A Tribute to a Bluegrass Hero

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To begin, a disclosure: Roland White is kind of a hero of mine for his perseverance, his originality, his sense of humor, his experience and much more. Also, he’s an employer of mine; I’ve been playing in the Roland White Band on most of its dates for close to 15 years now, and I’ve recorded two albums with him, including his new one, which I also co-produced. Lastly, and maybe most importantly, Roland’s a friend of mine. And he has a great story.

Played with Bill Monroe, the Father of Bluegrass? Check. Played with Lester Flatt? Check. Toured around the world as a member of the Country Gazette and then the Nashville Bluegrass Band? Check. Had a band with Béla Fleck? Check. Helped organize and make Jim Lauderdale’s very first album? Check. Fronted his own band since the turn of the century? Check.

That’s a lot of boxes, and any one of them could be turned into a meaty article. Here, though, I’m going to concentrate on the story of the group whose legacy inspired the new album, Roland White & Friends: A Tribute To The Kentucky Colonels; it’s the starting point for the larger Roland White story, illuminating the way it was for young bluegrass musicians in the 1950s and 60s and how Roland, his brother Clarence, and the rest of the Colonels were able to craft an enduring and influential body of music.

Shortly after he turned 16 in 1954, Roland’s family relocated from Maine to Southern California. He was already playing the mandolin by then, and younger brothers Clarence and Eric were playing guitar and banjo (tenor, not the bluegrass 5-string). They joined their sister, JoAnne, who sang, around the house and at local functions. Soon after moving to Burbank, the boys rather casually entered a talent contest, and in short order found themselves dressed in hillbilly clothes and, as The Three Little Country Boys, performing on a variety of local stages and radios shows — even, if briefly, on television. All of this before any of them had heard a lick of what was just beginning to be called bluegrass.

Roland recalls that it was in a comment from a visiting uncle in the middle of 1955 that he first heard Bill Monroe’s name — and naturally, it was in connection with the instrument they shared. “My uncle Armand asked me if I’d ever heard of Bill Monroe. He said, ‘He plays the mandolin, he’s on the Grand Ole Opry and,’” Roland adds with a grin, “‘he is fast!’” Not surprisingly, that piqued his interest — but to actually get hold of a record was, at the time and under the circumstances, something of a project, involving a walk into town to the music store, perusing a catalog, ordering it, waiting, and then picking up the little 45rpm disc of his choice: “Pike County Breakdown.” (It was actually the B-side of “A Mighty Pretty Waltz,” and yes, it was fast.)

What followed was a “conversion” experience of the kind that was happening around the same time to other people his age, give or take a few years — a cohort that includes the slightly older Mike Seeger and Ralph Rinzler; the slightly younger Del McCoury and Neil Rosenberg (like Roland and Clarence White, all members of the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Hall of Fame); and the slightly younger still Jerry Garcia, David Grisman, and Peter Rowan. What most of them had in common was some distance, geographic and sometimes sociological, from the Southeastern epicenter of the emerging bluegrass sound; what all of them had in common was a profound desire to hear and play more of it.

More records soon made their way into the White household, often mail-ordered from Cincinnati’s Jimmie Skinner Music Center, and so did a five-string banjo, which Roland learned to play in the Scruggs style. Eric moved over to bass, and the band, now just The Country Boys, began studying the picking and singing of Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, Reno & Smiley, the Stanley Brothers, Jimmy Martin, and more. While they focused on the whole sound, there was room, too, for Clarence to study the lead guitar stylings of Earl Scruggs, Don Reno, and the Stanley Brothers’ George Shuffler, as well as the rhythm guitar playing of Flatt, Martin, and others. And though skilled banjo players were still rare — especially in California — by 1958, they’d met and recruited Arkansas native Billy Ray Lathum for the job, allowing Roland to devote himself once again exclusively to the mandolin.

1959 was a big year for The Country Boys. For one thing, they were joined by Leroy McNees — Leroy Mack, as he’s still known — whom they met first as a fan, but soon persuaded to take up the Dobro. Mack not only rounded out the band’s sound, but quickly became a valuable asset as a songwriter. For another, the band got its first bookings at the Ash Grove in Los Angeles, a key venue in the emerging folk revival, and one that also booked national bluegrass acts as they made their long journey out to the West Coast.

Indeed, the Ash Grove turned out to be an important place where folk audiences and bluegrass musicians could meet one another; as Roland put it, “Playing the Ash Grove opened the way for us to play to a totally new audience — a folk music audience that we had known nothing about. They dressed differently from the Country-Western audience (they were college students, professors, beatniks, doctors, and lawyers) and they paid close attention to the music.”

Not only did the Ash Grove provide the group a new audience, it gave them a different sound; the less raucous, more attentive audience and more sophisticated sound system allowed Clarence White to hear himself better than ever before. Within a matter of weeks, he began to take solos — plenty of practice time at home had allowed him to explore and build on what he’d been hearing on records — and The Country Boys started to build a unique sound that featured lead acoustic guitar in a way that reached well beyond their influences.

By 1961, The Country Boys — now a five-piece band — had built a good circuit for themselves, playing to folk audiences at the Ash Grove and on college campuses around Southern California while maintaining a foothold in the dynamic country music scene. Their prominence gave them an inside track that landed them an appearance on The Andy Griffith Show — just before Roland got his draft notice, a then-common occurrence. While he served for the next two years, the band continued without him, taking a couple of important steps, including the replacement of bass player Eric White with Roger Bush; a name change to The Kentucky Colonels; and recording their first LP in 1962. The project, which featured some of Leroy Mack’s most enduring originals, also debuted Clarence’s distinctive, increasingly powerful lead guitar work. Over in Germany, where he was stationed, Roland admits that “it floored me.”

By the time Roland was discharged from service in the fall of 1963, Mack had left the band, replaced by transplanted Kentucky fiddler Bobby Slone. With Mike Seeger’s then-wife, Marge, acting as their booking agent, the Colonels were booked for their first East Coast tour, playing folk clubs in the Boston area, New York, Washington D.C., Baltimore and beyond. In each, they made connections with local bluegrass musicians, ranging from melodic banjo pioneer Bill Keith to the members of the Country Gentlemen to David Grisman, and when they came east again in 1964 — a trip anchored by an appearance at the Newport Folk Festival — they did more of the same. Interestingly, though, and a sign of the distance that still separated the folk revival circuit from the country music one, they never got even as far south as Nashville; as Roland says, “there was nothing for us there.”

Sadly, while their focus on folk audiences had served to give them broader appreciation than they might have gotten while working in Southern California’s country music scene, it also meant that, as those audiences began turning their attention to more electrified folk-rock and newly emerging rock artists, the Colonels would see harder times. Though they continued playing into 1966, the group eventually disbanded, with Roland soon taking the guitar/lead singer job with Bill Monroe and moving to Nashville, and Clarence turning first to studio work, and then to electric guitar playing with the Byrds.

Even so, the magic that the Colonels had made continued to appeal to both Roland and Clarence, and in 1973, they reformed their original brother trio with Eric. Adding banjo man Herb Pedersen and dubbing themselves the New Kentucky Colonels, they embarked on an April tour of Europe and, though the banjo position remained unstable, they started to make plans for more touring and recording — only to have them come to an end when Clarence was killed by a drunk driver while loading out from a Palmdale, California club.

What did the band leave behind? Not much in the way of recordings, unfortunately. The Kentucky Colonels made hardly any in the studio — the album done while Roland was in the Army and an all-instrumental album, Appalachian Swing!, one of the most influential bluegrass recordings of the 1960s are the sum total — and while enough of their shows were recorded at the Newport Folk Festival, at California venues, and on that final European tour to fill a couple of albums, they’ve often been out of print or hard to find.

Yet it’s clear — and the new record makes the point with its wide-ranging roster of guests, from guitarists like Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle and Jon Stickley to banjoists such as Kristin Scott Benson (Grascals) and Russ Carson (Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder) and fiddlers like Brittany Haas (Hawktail), Kimber Ludiker (Della Mae) and Jeremy Garrett (The Infamous Stringdusters) — the legacy of the Colonels can’t be measured so simply. From songs like “If You’re Ever Gonna Love Me” and “I Might Take You Back”— both co-written by Leroy Mack, and recorded by scores of bluegrass artists — to guitar showcases like “Listen to the Mockingbird” and “I Am a Pilgrim,” their influence has been carried forward through the bluegrass generations, not only by Roland White, but by Tony Rice, Jerry Garcia, and a host of others who met and heard and jammed with them during those critical years in which they were playing the national folk music circuit.

And for Roland White, for whom those years were just the beginning of a storied career that has taken him, by turns, deeper into the heart of bluegrass and further out to broad-ranging audiences, the opportunity to revisit them in the company of new generations of musicians has been an exciting one. “I really enjoyed playing and singing with all these musicians,” he says. “They appreciate the old music that we made, but they brought their own touch to it, too. It’s good to know that these songs, and these sounds are in good hands.”

Illustration by Zachary Johnson
Photo by Russell Carson, Carson Photoworks

LISTEN: On Big Shoulders, “Heavy Traffic Ahead”

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Artist: On Big Shoulders, executive producer: Matt Brown
Hometown: Chicago, Illinois
Song: “Heavy Traffic Ahead”
Album: On Big Shoulders
Release Date: November 2, 2018
Label: Allograph Records

In Their Words: “Each On Big Shoulders track has a Chicago connection. We performed new songs from contemporary Chicago songwriters and covered older artists who recorded or lived here, ranging from The Delmore Brothers and Barbara Carr to Wilco and Bill Monroe. ‘Heavy Traffic Ahead’ is the first track. For that Monroe tune, we may have dialed up the ‘blue’ and dialed back the ‘grass.’ You’ll hear Steve Dawson on rhythm guitar and lead vocals, Brian Wilkie on lead guitar, Aaron Smith on bass, and Gerald Dowd on drums.

Produced by Art Satherley, head of country and blues A&R for Columbia Records, Bill Monroe’s recording of ‘Heavy Traffic Ahead’ was made just after 8:00 p.m. on Monday, September 16, 1946, in the WBBM-CBS studio in Chicago’s Wrigley Building. Though not released until 1949, it was the first song cut at this famous session featuring Monroe on mandolin and lead vocals, Lester Flatt on guitar, Earl Scruggs on banjo, Chubby Wise on fiddle, and Howard Watts on bass. The other two songs they recorded that night were ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’ and ‘Toy Heart.’

On Big Shoulders features eleven of my favorite Chicago musicians: Steve Dawson, Brian Wilkie, Aaron Smith, Gerald Dowd, Elise Bergman, Gia Margaret, Keely Vasquez, Liam Davis, Anna & Evan Jacobson, and Liz Chidester. We recorded with engineer Shane Hendrickson at I.V. Lab Studios. Liam Davis co-produced, edited, and mixed the record.” — Matt Brown

Photo credit: Tim Brown

John Jorgenson Revisits His Southern California Bluegrass Roots

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John Jorgenson is not only a man of many talents, he’s a musician with many interests. Perhaps you’ve heard his gypsy jazz, or remember when the Desert Rose Band — a neo-trad country group that included Jorgenson, Chris Hillman and other luminaries of the California country and country-rock scene — was riding high at radio, or perhaps you saw him playing an indispensable role in Elton John’s touring band. As Jim Reeves might have put it, he’s done a lot in his time.

Even so, you might not know that John Jorgenson is also a bluegrass guy — unless, that is, you saw him on the road with Earl Scruggs during the legend’s final touring years, or happened to buy his 2015 box set, Divertuoso, which included a disc of bluegrass alongside one of gypsy jazz and another of eclectic, electric music. Earlier this year, that disc was issued as a standalone album, From the Crow’s Nest. Featuring the regular (and equally eclectic) members of the John Jorgenson Bluegrass Band (J2B2) — Herb Pedersen, Mark Fain and Jon Randall — it’s a delicious collection that scatters well-known songs (Pedersen’s “Wait a Minute”; Randall’s “Whiskey Lullaby” co-write; and the Dillards’ “There Is a Time”) among a trove of newer material, much of it written or co-written by Jorgenson.

From the Crow’s Nest ought to go some distance in alerting wider audiences to a new standard-bearer for a style of bluegrass that, while its roots trace back to the early 1950s, hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. Though Southern California is a long way from the Grand Ole Opry and other spawning grounds for the original bluegrass sound, it served in the post-World War II years as a magnet for job seekers from both sides of the Mississippi River, and that meant bluegrass pickers, too — and so, when we met up, that made for a good starting point for our conversation.

Listening to your album reminds me that you are a product of a Southern California roots music scene that included bluegrass from early on. How did you get exposed to it?

Probably the first time was when a band came to my high school and I thought they were from another planet, because I’d never heard anything so fast in my life. I played music already — I played classical music, and rock — but that was sort of an anomaly, and then I didn’t really see it again for a while.

I came to it sort of in a backwards way. I had a scholarship to the Aspen Music Festival. They brought me in as a jazz bass player; they wanted to start a jazz program. And I accepted the scholarship as long as I could also be in their classical program, playing the bassoon. Well, I had my tuition paid for, and my room paid for, but I didn’t have money for meals. So I needed to figure out how to make some money, and then I saw an ad that said: Wanted: strict jazz player for immediate gigs. So I checked out an upright bass from the school and went to this audition. And they weren’t playing jazz — what they were playing was David Grisman’s first album. This was the summer of 1978, so this album was new. I’d never heard it.

So they’re playing all instrumental stuff and I thought, OK, I really like the sound, especially of that mandolin. I liked the flatpicking guitar, too. I was already a guitar player, but I just loved the mandolin. When I got home that summer, my neighbors had a Gibson A model and I borrowed it. Not too long after that, I ran into a friend who had been instructed to put together a band that could play bluegrass and Dixieland to cover two different areas of Disneyland. And he asked, “Hey, do you know anybody that could play bluegrass fiddle and Dixieland cornet?” And needing a job at the time, I said, “I can play mandolin and clarinet.”

And then I kind of learned backwards, whatever I could. I learned from New Grass Revival, and then Bill Monroe, and Flatt & Scruggs, and the Stanley Brothers, and the Osborne Brothers. And all the others — Tony Rice, Sam Bush, the Bluegrass Cardinals, whoever was playing around at the time. Larry Stephenson was playing with the Cardinals at that time, and I remember I was — I don’t want to say shy, but I’m shy around people I don’t know. And to me at the time, they were real bluegrass musicians and I was a pretender. I sort of felt an attitude from some people, too, but he was not like that at all. He was really friendly.

Did playing bluegrass at Disneyland motivate you to build connections with the larger bluegrass scene, or was it a standalone kind of gig?

Actually, when we first started, we were terrible! We learned three songs and then we’d play those, move to a different place and play them again. But everyone was ambitious, so we all practiced; we learned songs, we got better. And then we started to play out around Los Angeles. I think the first time we played out as an act, we opened for Jim & Jesse at McCabe’s [Guitar Shop]. There was also a venue called the Banjo Cafe, with bluegrass every night, on Lincoln [Boulevard] in Santa Monica. So the Cardinals played there; Berline, Hickman & Crary would play there; and touring acts, too — Ralph Stanley would play there. And a young Alison Brown, a young Stuart Duncan.

I know that there are a lot fans of Desert Rose Band among bluegrassers, and some gypsy jazz fans, too, but for a lot of people, you came onto the radar when you were going places with Earl Scruggs — 15 years ago, maybe? How’d that come about?

Actually, it was because of Brad Davis. He was playing with Earl, and we were kind of guitar geek friends. We ended up sitting next to each other on a plane one time, and were chatting, and he said, “I’m playing with Earl Scruggs,” and I said, “I’d love to do that.” He said, “You know, they like to have an electric guitar, maybe there might be a spot.” He really set that up for me.

I said, “OK, I’m happy to play electric guitar, but I would really love to play the mandolin.” So I would bring both, and if I played too much mandolin, Louise [Scruggs] would say, “John, don’t forget that electric guitar.” Then they said, “Don’t you play saxophone? We used to have that on a song called ‘Step It Up and Go.’” So I said, “What about the clarinet? It’s not quite so loud.” And as it turns out, Earl said his favorite musician was Pete Fountain, and he loved the clarinet. So every time after that, Gary Scruggs would call me up: “Dad says don’t forget the moneymaker.”

The J2B2 record was originally part of a box set — a disc of gypsy jazz, one of bluegrass, one of electric stuff. So you have these different musical itches, and some musicians would choose to try to synthesize these things into something new and different and unique, but you seem to have an interest in keeping them each their own thing. Why is that?

It’s because, to me, the things that I love about bluegrass are what make it bluegrass. I love the trio harmony, I love these instruments, the way each instrument functions in the band. And I love gypsy jazz, and some folks might say they’re closely related — they’re string band music, they both have acoustic bass and fiddle and acoustic guitar, and each instrument has a role. There are a lot of similarities, but the things that I like about each one are what make them different. I think each music has an accent, and a history and a perspective, and I really want to be true to those, because those are the elements that touch my heart.

I feel like what I do and what this group does is quite traditional, compared to a lot of people. It’s not jamgrass. It’s not Americana. It’s bluegrass. There are folk elements, and all those other things, of course. But really, my touchstones for that style of music are all the classics: the trio harmonies of the Osborne Brothers, and the slightly softer Seldom Scene and Country Gentlemen sounds, the early Dillards, the Country Gazette, and the whole Southern California sound… you don’t think of Tony Rice’s roots as Southern California, but they are.

And probably at one point, if I could have sounded like I was from Kentucky, I wouldn’t have minded that. But at the end of the day, well, I love Bill Monroe as much as the next guy, and I’m going to take inspiration, but I feel like I’m part of a lineage of bluegrass that’s just as viable as any other, and why not have that sound be a part of me?

Photo credit: Mike Melnyk

Hot Rize Turns 40: Nick Forster and Tim O’Brien Look Back

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He’s had 40 years to think about it, but it took Nick Forster a while to get to a real answer to some existential questions about Hot Rize, the bluegrass-rooted band he, mandolinist-singer Tim O’Brien, banjo wizard Pete Wernick and guitar master Charles Sawtelle formed in in Denver in early 1978. Just what is it that made Hot Rize, well, Hot Rize? And just what is it that make the band — which will host the 29th annual International Bluegrass Music Association Awards on Sept. 27 in Raleigh, North Carolina — still treasured, still distinctive, lo these two score years later?

Forster paused at the question, and then hemmed and hawed a bit before giving it a try. First he tried to break it down to the talents and sensibilities they each brought to the mix. Then he tackled the way they all interacted — the natural combo of O’Brien’s and Wernick’s instrumental skills, O’Brien’s voice, the instinctive guitar skills of Sawtelle (and later of Bryan Sutton, who stepped in when Sawtelle died of cancer in 1999). And then he looked at the balance of celebrating traditions and exploring new paths with choices of material. Blah blah blah. Whatever.

Finally, almost sheepishly, he mentioned one other thing: “Also maybe, I don’t know if it came through sonically, but we were having fun!” he offered. “We were pretty young and had a sense of humor and were having fun!”

Well, there we have it. For fans, for anyone who’s heard the band, there’s no “maybe” about it. From the very first gigs through the three-night anniversary celebration at the Boulder Theater in January with guests Sam Bush, Stuart Duncan and Jerry Douglas — commemorated on the new 40th Anniversary Bash album, recorded in January at the Boulder Theater — it’s that ineffable spirit that stands out, even if we can’t really identify it any better than Forster did.

But let’s let O’Brien have a stab at it as well.

“I don’t want to compare to Bob Marley or anything,” O’Brien says, risking those dangerous waters anyway. “But he was trying to make country music and rock ’n’ roll, and that’s what came out. He had his thing and place and time and what he did. We were too hippiefied and too Western or something to play it like the guys from the Southeast, I guess. We were a Boulder band, a college town band. But we were also a reaction to the Newgrass movement. We adjusted the steering a bit. That was a little too far to the left of us. So we went to the center, but we were still a good deal left of center. … So I don’t know,” he concludes. “It was a weird recipe that seemed to work.”

Not that they followed any recipe, let alone a long-term game plan.

“We thought we’d just play for the summer,” says O’Brien, pulling one right out of the Famous Last Words file.

That was the view from their first gig, in Denver, on May 1, 1978, growing out of jam sessions at the Denver Folklore Center, where they all had found jobs. From the very start there was something different, distinctive about them — the first song the four of them remember playing together was not bluegrass at all, but “Wichita Lineman.” Just two weeks after the May Day gig they were up in Minneapolis booked to play on a new public radio show called Prairie Home Companion, and a month after that they were on the bill of the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. And without even thinking about it, they found themselves in a full-time proposition.

“The fact that we didn’t have a long commitment meant we would just be a band for as long as we had gigs,” Forster says, noting that Wernick, a.k.a. Dr. Banjo, served as de facto booking agent as well as band member. “So we kept saying, ‘Yes.’ Pete would say, ‘Do you want to play this wedding? This party? This club?’ ‘Yes!’ We had a goal of trying to make $100 a week take-home pay each. That was a lot of pressure on Pete.”

It was quite the time. Forster and O’Brien were in their mid-20s, Wernick and Sawtelle in their early 30s, all having found their way to Colorado from various points on the compass, meeting through working at the Denver Folklore Center. Fairly quickly, jam sessions grew into something more solid. Forster was recruited to play electric bass (which packed into a car trunk more easily than an acoustic bass), though it was an instrument he’d never played before. As soon as they hit the road they found themselves in the middle of some amazing settings.

“It was an incredible time to be in a bluegrass band, in my view,” Forster says, a time when many of the founding fathers of the form were still going strong, while a new generation — the “newgrass” crowd — was searching for fresh ways to expand the bluegrass lexicon. “I don’t know that we’re fully the third generation of bluegrass, but maybe two-and-a-half. So if we played festivals in the late ‘70s, and because there weren’t as many bands then, a lot of times you’d play the whole weekend, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, two shows a day. So Bill Monroe and Ralph Stanley and Jim & Jesse, and [such younger bands as] Seldom Scene and Hot Rize would do two sets a day.”

That was just a part of the vibrant world in which they found themselves.

“Between the sets, you’d sit at your merch table and there’s Bill Monroe sitting at the merch table, and Jim & Jesse, and you’re at someone’s farm in Oklahoma or Georgia, so lots of personal hang time with everyone.”

They didn’t exactly become pals with the old-timers, but a community quickly formed among the younger musicians, particularly after Hot Rize became a client of booking agent Keith Case, whose roster included Newgrass Revival (featuring Sam Bush), John Hartford, autoharp magician Bryan Bowers and Norman and Nancy Blake. Case took advantage of any opportunity to have two or more of those acts sharing bills as much as he could.

“That was so incredible,” Forster says, “to be part of this rolling band of gypsies. Almost every other weekend you’d run into one or even three or four of them.”

Gig by gig it kept going, and kept getting bigger, abetted by their association with their, uh, friends, Western swing ensemble Red Knuckles & the Trailblazers. (“Oh yeah,” Forster sighs. “Those guys.”) By 1990 it had gotten so big that Hot Rize was named Entertainer of the Year in the very first IBMA Awards. But it had also gotten so big that O’Brien and Forster in particular found themselves reassessing things.

“Three things happened concurrently,” Forster says. “We achieved so many of our original goals, frankly. We got to make records, got a bus, got to play the Opry and Austin City Limits, could play any festival. Spectacular. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but we felt a little like, ‘Okay, we’ve done this. This is the end of a chapter.’ Pete and Charles, being older than Tim and me, said, ‘You guys, you don’t understand! This is the brass ring! We hit the jackpot! We’re a band and we can play together and it’s going to get better.’ And we being in our mid-30s rather than mid-40s thought, ‘That’s cool, but we’re going to do other things.’”

And so Hot Rize went into “rest mode,” as Forster puts it. O’Brien, who had established himself as an in-demand songwriter, signed a solo deal with RCA and recruited Forster, who had gone on tour with Sam Bush and John Cowan, to join his band. In the course of that, Forster came up with the idea for a radio show combining roots music and discussion of environmental sustainability, about as Colorado a concept as you could find. That show, eTown, launched in 1991, with its demands ultimately being too much for him to stay on the road with O’Brien.

Meanwhile, Wernick started Live Five (sometimes known as Flexigrass) with some Klezmer-meets-Dixieland approaches, while Sawtelle worked with Peter Rowan and opened a studio, taking on production gigs. There were many calls for reunions, and now and then they would get together for one-offs or a few gigs. When Sawtelle was diagnosed with cancer in 1996 there was a feeling that they needed to do something bigger and took on a full tour, resulting in a live album. After Sawtelle died in 1999 there were occasional shows with several guitarists stepping in, including Peter Rowan a few times. Then Sutton came on board as a full-time member in 2002, though “full-time” was still fairly sporadic, peaking with a 2014 album, When I’m Free, and the first real tour since the sorta-hiatus.

And then they saw that 40th anniversary looming and it was too big to overlook.

“The approach was frankly just celebratory,” Forster says of the concerts. “This is a milestone and it should not go unnoticed. So let’s just do something fun and have a party.”

Photo credit: Jim McGuire

Punch Brothers’ Gabe Witcher: Finding Narratives

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Gabe Witcher, the fiddle player – and some might say secret weapon – in Punch Brothers, has been a performer for nearly his whole life. As a kid, he toured the Southwest playing bluegrass with his family’s band; that’s how he met Chris Thile, forming a musical friendship that has spanned more than three decades. Though his stage presence is low-key, his musicianship is undeniable, playing as joyously or mournfully as a song requires. This is also true on Punch Brothers’ newest album, All Ashore.

In this interview, Witcher kicks off a five-part series as the Bluegrass Situation salutes the Artist of the Month: Punch Brothers.

I love the fiddle part you play on “Three Dots and a Dash.” I was wondering, how much of your music is arranged when you go in to record, or how much of it unfolds by feel when you’re in the studio?

Yeah, this record is a lot different than our previous records. We really had the bare minimum amount of time to get it done. Historically, there is a good deal of improvising on all, throughout our music, and so that’s always spontaneous every time we play – in the studio, out of the studio, whatever. But there is a good deal of highly-arranged stuff as well and historically that stuff would have been written and rehearsed for months leading up to getting into the studio … and we just didn’t have that luxury this time. So, while there’s a good deal of arranged things on the record, it all kind of came together in the studio anyway.

“Three Dots” is a good example where we had the form, we had the melodies, we knew “this is how the arrangement is going to unfold, this is who plays when, this is what the song’s going to do” when we got into the studio and played it a few times – and didn’t like it. So, we put the brakes on recording and went and huddled up in one of the corners of the studio for three or four hours and completely reworked the entire middle section of the song. From post-middle-solo until when the melody returns at the end.

It’s just one of those things: “This isn’t good enough yet, so let’s make it good enough.” When we did, when we finally got something we liked and went back in and recorded it, a lot of that section, I’d say it’s about 50/50 arranged and improvised. Solos are improvised, but we got something that we absolutely loved and that all happened in the moment in the studio. That is a new thing. That has never happened to us before because we had always historically gone in super prepared with, “This is the music, this is what it’s going to be.”

One of the things I love about this record is that what you’re hearing on the record is the first time any of these songs were performed to our satisfaction. You’re getting the excitement of us discovering this music and playing it for the first time. That’s always an exciting thing to hear.

Yeah. So you said bare minimum. What was the timeframe for this?

Oh, let’s see. I think we wrote the record in about four weeks. Not all together. We had three days in October, we had eight days in December and then two weeks in February to get it all situated. Then we recorded it over the course of three weeks in March. And then mixed in April.

The Phosphorescent Blues took almost three years to write. We had the luxury of writing it over the course of three years not work every day, of course. We might have worked twelve weeks total on it, but we had the chance to sit with things and revise, and change, and live with it. This one was more of a “Let’s just get it out.” And I think it worked to our benefit because everything feels super fresh on the record.

I read that you played on the score for Brokeback Mountain and Babel – and they both won the Oscar for best original score. Do you think there’s a cinematic component to Punch Brothers’ arrangements as well?

Yeah, absolutely there is. That’s a comment we get quite frequently. It’s not intentional, but I think everyone is in love with trying to find narratives that can happen instrumentally along with a lyrical narrative. We’re always trying to find textures and new ways to approach presenting musical ideas and finding interesting ways of getting you from point A to point B. I think there’s a definite classical music influence in that regard. Not only is the music supporting the lyrics in a vocal as it would in folk-based or pop music, but the music itself is also helping to create the narratives.

You in particular have a bluegrass background, from playing in your family’s band. How did that prepare you for this experience of touring with Punch Brothers?

Surprisingly enough, doing that is how Chris and I met. We met at a festival called Follows Camp Bluegrass Festival that happened in Southern California. My family would always go up and camp and play and my dad would emcee a lot of the time at that festival. There was a contest and our family band got booked to play it. I think it was the second year or the second time it happened. A 5-year-old Chris Thile just happened to be there that time. As he tells it, he saw me playing onstage with my dad and was like, “Oh my God, that’s so cool. Another kid plays!”

After we got done, we were introduced and immediately became friends. I think we played baseball in the road that ran along the campground, then spent the rest of the time playing tunes with each other. Doing that led directly, a couple decades later, to this band becoming a thing. Of course, you can’t discount the years and years and years spent learning the craft of playing, and playing in an ensemble, and performing. I didn’t know it at the time, but it’s a unique way to grow up.

The good news is, I got all the … well, not all, but a good portion of the dues-paying out of the way before I even knew I was paying any dues, so by the time I was out of high school I had a level of proficiency as a professional that most people don’t have the luxury of gaining until they are well into their 20s. I was able to hit the ground running. I went to college as well, for music, but I’ve got to say: music was there all along. The only thing that changed was that I finished school. So that went away but the music continued.

You were able to play with Bill Monroe as a kid, too, right?

Yeah, when I was 6, we were at the Strawberry Music Festival. This is the thing that launched the family band. My folks decided that we were going to go up to the Strawberry Music Festival, which at that time happened in Yosemite, California. I had been playing for almost a year at that point. We just went to camp and hang out and check it out. One of the days my dad and I were jamming at the campground, and people wandered around the campground, so people were coming in to listen. Then they’d wander off.

Monroe was playing that night at the festival. He was headlining the show that night and they had gotten him to do a workshop during the day, a mandolin workshop. My dad took me over to that. I didn’t know who that guy was. He was just some old guy up there playing. There were a couple hundred people at this workshop listening to Monroe, and right towards the end, and my dad would probably remember better than I do, but somehow, someone pointed me out and said, “Have you heard this guy play? You should pick a tune with him, Monroe.” And so Monroe got me onstage and he and I played a tune called “Gold Rush.” It’s actually one Byron Berline wrote when he was in Monroe’s band.

So Monroe and I played that tune and I got a pretty cool picture with Monroe afterwards. Then, later that day, probably because of that, the Strawberry folks asked if my dad and I would do what they call a ‘tweener set, where you go up and play two or three songs in between the main stage bands. So, Hot Rize was playing and then New Grass Revival was going to play after that. I think this was the day after Monroe played. So my dad was like, “Yeah, sure! Yeah, we’ll work up three songs.” So he grabbed a bass player and a guitar player and also asked Byron if he would sit in on the solo. And so we got up and played three songs, and Byron came out, and we played “Gold Rush” together. And it was so much fun, my dad said, “Hey, do you want to do this more?” And I said, “Sure!”

Illustration: Zachary Johnson
Photo: Courtesy of Red Light Management

LISTEN: Peter Rowan, ‘Carter Stanley’s Eyes’

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Artist: Peter Rowan
Hometown: Boston / Northern California
Song: “Carter Stanley’s Eyes”
Album: Carter Stanley’s Eyes
Release Date: April 20, 2018
Label: Rebel Records

In Their Words: “We were playing over on the Tennessee-Virginia border, and Bill Monroe asked me to drive him up to the Clinch Mountains to have a meeting with Carter Stanley. I think, now, that Carter had received bad news about his health, and Bill wanted to lend his support. We drove up there, and I knew nothing as far as Carter’s health, but he didn’t look well. It was emotional, and I made it a song, after all.” –Peter Rowan

Jerry Garcia: Expanding the Musical Consciousness

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Before becoming the psychedelic guitar-playing icon of the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia was already living a life completely dedicated to music. Heavily immersed in the folk idioms that coalesced with the beat poet scene in San Francisco — and in the peninsula towns of Menlo Park and Palo Alto — in the beginning of the 1960s, Garcia’s concentration, determination, and passion for musical collaboration planted the seeds for a force that would not only influence the world in song, but that would let loose a seamless tie to multiple genres through multiple generations. What’s now viewed as Americana, Garcia was creating with the Dead right from the outset. His impact looms far and wide, perhaps even greater as the years since his passing roll on. From the bluegrass world of the McCourys to esteemed guitarists like Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, David Hidalgo of Los Lobos, and David Rawlings, to jam bands like Leftover Salmon, and the current generation of musicians like the National, Jenny Lewis, and Ryan Adams, Garcia’s ethos is being deeply felt and utilized.

Garcia had a mind hungry for knowledge and interested in art, comics, and horror films, even as music ran through his family. After initially getting an accordion for his 15th birthday and successfully trading that in for a guitar, the quest for constant improvement was born as he devoured the styles of Chuck Berry, Jimmy Reed, Buddy Holly, and Bo Diddley. As the ‘60s approached and the initial rock boom faded, Garcia and his friend (and soon to be Grateful Dead lyricist) Robert Hunter found themselves in the middle of a very fertile Bay Area folk scene. Being steeped in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music led to a fascination with the Carter Family and then Flatt & Scruggs.

It was at this time, in 1962, that Garcia began his complete immersion into the banjo and the bluegrass style of Earl Scruggs. He formed the Hart Valley Drifters with Hunter and David Nelson (later of New Riders of the Purple Sage and the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band), and the scene grew to encompass the likes of Eric Thompson, Jody Stecher, Sandy Rothman, Rodney Albin, Janis Joplin, Jorma Kaukonen, David Crosby, Paul Kantner, and Herb Pedersen. The Hart Valley Drifters performed at the Monterey Folk Festival in 1963 in the amateur division and won Best Group, and Garcia took the Best Banjo Player award, which strikes with irony as, throughout his career, Garcia would never consider music to be a competition of any kind. He was more into turning people on.

While absorbing as much music as possible and focusing on his craft with diligence, Garcia came into cahoots with people like Ron “Pigpen” McKernan and John “Marmaduke” Dawson through a string of continuous collaborations and a rotating cast of characters at joints like the Boar’s Head, Keppler’s Bookstore, and the Tangent. McKernan was the blues aficionado with the biker looks and heart of gold who would lead Garcia into the electric blues band the Warlocks, which then became the Grateful Dead, while Dawson would be the one who had the canon of songs for Garcia to base his pedal steel guitar learning around to form the New Riders of the Purple Sage.

But it was on a cross country road trip with Rothman in 1964 that Garcia met David Grisman, the young mandolin player to whom Thompson had tipped him off. It was at Sunset Park in West Grove, Pennsylvania, where acts like Bill Monroe and the Osborne Brothers were featured, where Garcia and Grisman first did some pickin’ together, and a friendship was born that would lead to musical ventures that would have more than a lasting impact.

Both Garcia and Grisman were imparted with some crucial advice from Monroe, which was to start your own style of music. Garcia, no doubt, led the Dead (as much as he refused to admit to any leadership role) to their unique musical domain, while Grisman created his own “Dawg” style of music that was the precursor of “New Grass” in the ‘70s. According to Grisman, “Jerry was always the true renaissance music man.”

While each had gone on to create their own paths, it was 1973 when they started hanging out together at Stinson Beach, picking and having fun, when Peter Rowan (a former Bill Monroe Bluegrass Boy member) joined in along with legendary fiddler Vassar Clements, and, needing a bass player, John Kahn was brought in. Old & In the Way was born. In typical Garcia nature, the musical fun led to some local gigs which, thankfully, were recorded by Owsley “Bear” Stanley. With the guitar and the Dead being Garcia’s main drive, getting back to the banjo and picking with his pals in Old & In the Way was not only stress free, but fun and a piece of his musical puzzle that really exemplified how the muse consumed him. It wouldn’t be out of the norm, at the time, to find him in the span of a week or two playing gigs with the Dead, Old & In the Way, and one of his other musical soulmates, Merl Saunders.

The release of Old & In the Way, taken from Bear’s recordings at the Boarding House in San Francisco in October of 1973, hit the world in 1975 on the Dead’s Round Records label. It was through the Dead Heads fan club mailing of a 7-inch, 33 rpm sampler that many fans got their first dose of Old & In the Way. Many of that generation — and a few that followed — were exposed to bluegrass thanks to that release. The album continued to turn on the masses and was widely respected as one of the best-selling bluegrass albums of all time.

While fame was never of interest to Garcia, the expansion of musical consciousness was, perhaps, the most beneficial and unintended consequence of his popularity. Just like the Dead were doing with their music — turning kids onto Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, and Johnny Cash songs — here, Garcia and Old & In the Way were turning rock and rollers onto bluegrass and the songs of Peter Rowan, the Stanley Brothers, and Jim and Jesse McReynolds. The aspect of turning people on to music was certainly not limited to bluegrass, where Garcia was concerned. The Jerry Garcia Band was his outlet for a good 20+ years, wherein he’d groove to just about any and everything. Motown, Louis Armstrong, Los Lobos, Allen Toussaint, Irving Berlin, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Van Morrison … the stream of tremendous musical taste was just about endless. And, of course, adding his own flair, passionate vocals, and one-of-a-kind guitar to it all made for hundreds of satisfying shows and numerous albums.

Jerry Garcia made music that was loaded with adventure. Improvisation was his nature, always seeking out what was around the bend, never wanting to play the same thing the same way twice. That adventure is what drew so many to him and his music. That adventure lives on, not only eternally in his music, but also through the lives, songs, and good deeds of those he inspires.

Illustration by Zachary Johnson

Give Me the Wintertime: 10 Bluegrass Songs for the Cold

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If we really have no choice but to endure winter (other than high-tailin’ it toward the equator), we might as well give in, cozy up, and spin some wintry bluegrass songs. Cold rain, cold snow, cold wind, cold hearts … some folks like the summertime when they can walk about, but wintertime … well, it’s a season that happens, too.

Tony Rice — “Girl From the North Country”

The north country = where the wind blows cold on the borderline. It feels like Tony sings about winter and its themes quite a lot. It just fits.

Emmylou Harris — “Roses in the Snow”

Not to throw around the term “iconic,” but this one is iconic. We’re familiar with the idea that love is like the seasons, but this time, love is like a greenhouse. It can grow roses in the snow! It’s a refreshing twist on a concept that usually ends up with the flower of love frozen over and wilted in the cold.

Larry Sparks — “Snow Covered Mound”

The only conscionable reason to highlight any recording of this song besides Ralph Stanley’s is … Larry Sparks. His voice captures winter and its grief perfectly. It will send a shiver up your spine.

The Osborne Brothers — “Listening to the Rain”

Some places aren’t lucky enough to enjoy the austere beauty of snow in the winter months, getting rain, and gray, and mud, and gloom instead. Of course, cold rain with a heapin’ helpin’ of lost love sounds about right.

Ronnie Bowman — “Cold Virginia Night”

IBMA’s 1995 Song of the Year leans into the cold heart metaphor. It is beautiful. And catchy. And still reverberating off the walls and in the halls of every former IBMA convention host hotel.

Jim Mills — “Sledd Ridin’”

If you gloss over the strange spelling of “sledd,” you’ll find this rollicking banjo tune feels like a day spent on the snowy neighborhood hill. Time for hot cocoa.

Reno & Smiley — “Love Oh Love Oh Please Come Home”

In a dynamic twist, the woman has left the man alone, at home, with their baby, while the snow has covered up the ground.

Del McCoury — “Rain And Snow”

It’s a murder ballad. It’s a lover’s lament. It’s sung in an astronomically high register. And it’s pretty sexist. It’s bluegrass to a T. It also happens to be a goddamn classic. Del McCoury does it right.

J.D. Crowe & the New South — “Ten Degrees and Getting Colder”

Somehow the saddest part of this song isn’t that he’s traded off his Martin. This song is a masterpiece and distillate of the troubles of a working musician: The coldest months are always the hardest months.

Bill Monroe — “Footprints in the Snow”

Once again, we are reminded that the father of bluegrass not only originated the genre, he’s responsible for a good many of its themes, too. In this case, winter isn’t an analog for heartbreak; it’s a silver lining, guiding the song’s speaker to his love via her footprints. You can’t trace footprints in the summer!

Photo by The Knowles Gallery on Foter.com / CC BY

11 Bluegrass Songs about Bluegrass

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Every genre of music out there has its self-referential moments, certainly, but bluegrass accomplishes these meta masterpieces with a specificity, nostalgia, and flair that is unparalleled. It just wouldn’t be bluegrass without bluegrass songs about bluegrass. (Now if that ain’t a hook for a song …)

Junior Sisk & Ramblers Choice — “A Far Cry From Lester & Earl”

To start us off, this bluegrass chart smash hit is the perfect example of the bluegrass-songs-about-bluegrass phenomenon. But it isn’t just about the music; it also gets into the nitty gritty of how the music has changed since … well, Lester and Earl. Essentially, it’s the bluegrass “big tent” debate in song form!

Tom T. Hall — “Bill Monroe for Breakfast”

Country Music Hall of Famer Tom T. Hall gives us a textbook example of the pure reminiscing and sentimentalism that makes these songs just so dang easy to love. Bill Monroe: an important part of a balanced breakfast.

Steep Canyon Rangers — “Bluegrass Blues”

Do you think the Steep Canyon Rangers still got those blues? Probably not. The road-dogging required of bluegrass bands will get just about anybody down, so we understand where this one is coming from. It’s just one of the many causes of the “bluegrass blues.”

Jerry Salley — “The Night Flatt & Scruggs Played Carnegie Hall”

Not to be outdone by bluegrass songs that are simply about the genre itself, or its founders, or an iconic song, Jerry Salley goes a step further and writes a song about a specific album that was recorded at a specific concert. Does it start with applause, like the record? Yes. Is each banjo break a reference to a different song from said show/album? Yes. Do the pickers each take turns referencing licks played by the Foggy Mountain Boys? Yes. It’s a 3:34 distillate of what ended up being an almost 70-minute double album in its final form. Bluegrass sparknotes!

The Gibson Brothers — “They Called It Music”

This may technically be a song about the music(s) that preceded bluegrass, but when you know a little about the Gibson Brothers’ approach to creating and performing, you know that this is a pure-and-simple reference to their worldview. Other people may call what they do bluegrass, but to them, it’s just music.

Larry Cordle and Lonesome Standard Time — “Black Diamond Strings”

There’s a joke that pickers and guitarists have been making for as long as we can remember about how Black Diamond Strings were so great, they used to come pre-rusted! After a dose of Larry Cordle’s longing for the simpler times and simpler strings, it makes you miss those pre-rusted wires bad enough that you wish you hadn’t laughed. Wonder if they still make ‘em …

Donna Ulisse — “It Could Have Been the Mandolin”

Donna Ulisse conjures Bill Monroe’s mandolin wafting over the radio in a classic Cadillac on lover’s lane — it could’ve just been love, but it could have been the mandolin. Let’s be honest: We already knew that good ol’ traditional Monroe style is pretty much an aphrodisiac.

Rhonda Vincent — “Bluegrass Saturday Night”

Rhonda poses an important question herein: How is anyone supposed to resist bluegrass and its intoxicating call? Oh, and heaven apparently has a bluegrass band. Our heaven definitely does. Hope yours does, too.

Irene Kelley — “My Flower”

Thanks to Irene Kelley for straightening out one of the most perplexingly crooked traditional songs ever written … and in a beautiful, catchy, heartfelt homage. Doing meta bluegrass right.

The Osborne Brothers — “Fastest Bluegrass Alive”

Now, the Osborne Brothers definitely did accomplish some of the fastest bluegrass known to man (with musical integrity entirely retained … an important caveat). Interestingly though, this is not a particularly fast song. But those speedy bluegrass playin’ outlaws mentioned need to be fast to outrun the tempo sheriff and his posse! Run ‘em right outta town!

Bill Monroe — “Uncle Pen”

If you assumed that this style of song came long after the first generation of bluegrass, oh no, you are mistaken. Bill Monroe — the pioneer, master, father, and creator of the form — had more than one bluegrass inception song; “Heavy Traffic Ahead,” considered the first bluegrass song ever, is arguably a song about … bluegrass. So this tradition is well-entrenched in the genre for good reason. If Bill was singing about what he was doing on stage while he was doing it on stage and playing songs about tunes that quoted those tunes from the beginning, who are we to change course? Bluegrass bluegrass forever!

Photo by Joerg Neuner on Foter.com / CC BY-ND

That Ain’t Bluegrass: Bobby Osborne

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Artist: Bobby Osborne
Song: “They Called the Wind Maria” (originally from the 1951 Broadway musical, Paint Your Wagon)
Album: Original

Where did you first hear this song?

The first ones I ever heard do it were the Browns — Jim Ed and Maxine Brown. I kind of liked it then, but my brother and me didn’t want to cover it right then. It’s been a long time ago since I heard it. This project that Alison [Brown] came up with, with me and Compass Records, I thought about that song. My son and me were trying to get some songs together so we put it down on the list. The chord progression on it and the song itself, I’ve always really liked it. Of course, the Browns did a great job with the recording they had on it. I never did hear anybody else, maybe I didn’t listen, but I didn’t hear anybody else do it.

When I put it down on the list, Alison wrote me back, she said, “That was one that I wanted you to do!” [Laughs] So that turned out real good. Then I had to learn the thing, then. The melody and the harmony and all that on it. To me, it was just right down my alley.

What about the song made you think it would be such a great fit for bluegrass?

Well, it’s different from what most people would do, I think, in the story of it. A lot of people nowadays are doing arrangements like that, something similar to the way the melody and the harmony goes with that song. A lot of people are doing stuff that they didn’t do back when the Browns did it. If you went into a key that wasn’t just G, C, and D, you lost a lot of people, way back then. Nowadays, why, it’s not unusual at all.

My brother and me did some things — I don’t know if we were the first or not — but a lot of people in country music were doing that [sort of a thing]. But, as far as bluegrass goes, most of the time it was just plain Monroe-type music, Flatt & Scruggs, and the Stanley Brothers. A lot of folks didn’t go to those keys — what I always called it, the off-keys — with the melody of a song. My brother and I, we got tied in with that harmony we’d come up with and the endings that we had, everything just fit right into the melody of “Maria.” I was really familiar with that type of thing.

Fans might think, “He’s changed that around. I don’t like that kind of music.” But the song was written like that, so you can’t deny that. It fit us so good. Alison said it was always one of her favorite songs, too. Her being the producer, she asked me to do that, and it just tickled me to death. The more we worked with it, the better it got. It turned out to be a great recording.

You and your brother have always covered non-bluegrass songs throughout your career, and it’s kind of a tradition in bluegrass to take songs from outside the genre and repurpose them for bluegrass. Why do you think this is a tradition and why have you always made a point of recording these types of songs throughout your career?

You remember the song, “Once More”?

Yeah, of course!

We were doing just plain bluegrass, you know, Monroe-type and Flatt & Scruggs. Just G, C, D, bluegrass — three chords to it. Well, we were up in West Virginia, and a man up there by the name of Dusty Owens had a band and he had written that song, “Once More.” He had recorded it on a little label up there. He gave me one of the copies of it and, when I listened to it, I felt that would be a great thing for us to do with the harmony that we had. When we first recorded it for MGM Records, they were strictly [having us record] three-chord bluegrass.

I got the words to “Once More.” We had a couple hundred miles to drive home from Wheeling, and Red Allen was with us at the time — it was just three of us. We got to singing it just like we would normally do any other song, but there was just something missing with it. Of course, we were just doing regular harmony singing then. We had never featured a high lead on a thing in the world. My voice being the type that it was, it was made for high lead. We were just sitting in the car driving along. We didn’t have any instruments or nothing. We were just trying to learn the song. All of a sudden, I don’t know, I started singing the lead in a way-up-higher register. Red Allen was a tenor singer when he came to work with us, so he just started singing the tenor, but then it was the low part. My brother was good on the parts and chimed right in with the middle part and, boy, when we got to singing it like that, we knew right there we had run into some kind of harmony that we had never heard before. We had 200 miles to go and we sang that song all the way home so that we wouldn’t forget what we had learned. That’s how we came across that type of harmony.

When we went to Nashville to record again, we were dead set on putting that on a record, because that was brand new and it was different from Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, and all that. It was so different from anybody. Wesley Rose was the A&R guy for MGM at that time, so we approached him with that type of harmony, and he looked at us and said, “You can’t do that. That’s some other kind of music and harmony besides bluegrass.” We had a talk and talk and talk. He said, “You put something like that out after what you’ve already done, you’re liable to lose your recording contract.” We were so set on it we said, “We’ll just take a chance on it, if you don’t care.”

When we recorded it, we had been using everything regular bluegrass people used — fiddle, mandolin, guitar, banjo, and bass. We figured the snare drum was perfect with bluegrass. We went back to [Wesley] and said we wanted to add dobro and drop the fiddle. Well, he had a fit over that, too. We hesitated to mention that there was one thing we’d like to do with the rhythm on it, the snare drum, but just the brushes. The guy says, “You’re getting completely away from bluegrass!” Well, no. It’s just going to match our singing. We finally talked our way into him letting us do “Once More” just like the recording is now. He was not happy with that at all.

Well, we all know how that turned out!

[Laughs] Back then, I think it was on the top 40 country, I believe. It made number 15 or 16 on the charts. We never heard another word out of Wesley. [Laughs] That right there led us into going deeper and deeper into that kind of harmony. It became our trademark.

What’s your favorite thing about performing “They Called the Wind Maria”?

I kind of like the hesitation between each line, you know? I like that because we were kind of used to that kind of thing and changing from one key to another. That’s one of the main things that really took the song off with me. The hesitation between each set of two lines. Then the tune of it, the melody to the song. When we put the three parts to it, it really dressed it up and made it even different from what the Browns did.

Now you know that ain’t bluegrass, right?

Well, after what me and my brother have done, there’s not much we can say to argue with what anyone thought! [Laughs] People still ask us about it.

When we switched from MGM to Decca Records, Owen Bradley was the producer over there. He knew about us and he latched onto [what we were doing] in a hurry. He said, “Do what you want to do. You know more about what you want to do than I do.” We got a taste of country to go along with the bluegrass, and he went right along with us. It really worked out pretty good. When we were allowed to just do what we wanted to with the harmony, the instrumentation, and the lyrics to the songs, when we got into that, it became a standard thing for the Osborne Brothers. A lot of other people jumped on that type of harmony in a hurry. It became a standard thing about every one of them wanted to do.

I love that on your latest record, Original, you’re carrying on that tradition of doing songs that some people might not expect to be on a bluegrass record.

Oh yeah, that was a thing we knew [from the begining] with one playing the banjo and one playing the mandolin and singing [in the Osborne Brothers]. There’s no way we’d ever get away from the sound of bluegrass instruments. What we had in mind was to play those instruments and make them fit with what we were doing. We were putting bluegrass and country music right together, and people just loved it. Our harmony singing fit bluegrass and country music, both. In one sense of the phrase, we had it made right there.