Bill Monroe Archives - Page 14 of 15 - The Bluegrass Situation

MIXTAPE: Mark O’Connor’s Bluegrass Basics

Posted on April 19, 2017August 4, 2021 by Editor

From Bill Monroe on down the line, bluegrass has always stayed rooted even while it has reached its branches out to embrace each new generation of players. Fiddler Mark O’Connor knows a thing or two about that history, growing up listening to the greats and, eventually, playing with many of them. He collected a dozen bluegrass basic tunes for anyone wanting to explore the form.

Bill Monroe — “New Muleskinner Blues” (1940)
The virtuoso singer Bill Monroe introduced his new bluegrass sound in 1939 to the Grand Ole Opry with “New Muleskinner Blues.” Jimmie Rodgers also called it his “Blue Yodel No. 8” on his recording of the song 10 years earlier. In an Atlanta recording session in 1940, Bill and his Blue Grass Boys revved the song up with his high tenor voice, a faster tempo, and his trademark hard-driving rhythm. Along with his unusual lead mandolin solos and the bluesy fiddling by Tommy Magness, it set the pace for bluegrass to come. I am proud to say that I got to record with Monroe on one of his signature instrumentals, “Gold Rush” in 1992.

Flatt & Scruggs — “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” (1949 Mercury Single)
Flatt and Scruggs made bluegrass wildly successful, bringing it to the mainstream of television, the movies, and to Carnegie Hall. Lester Flatt had, perhaps, a more accessible country music voice than Monroe did, but it was his instrumental counterpart, Earl Scruggs, who lit the music scene up with the perfected five-string banjo roll he adopted from North Carolina banjo pickers. Forward, backward, and alternating, he was an absolute virtuoso on the banjo. I had the Scruggs book and tried to learn banjo the way he did it, as did thousands of others. A thrilling opportunity for me was to record with Earl on his second instrumental banjo album produced by his son Randy Scruggs.

Osborne Brothers — “Rocky Top” (1956)
When the mandolinist and virtuoso singer Bobby Osborne recorded “Ruby, Are You Mad at Your Man?” featuring his astonishingly clear tenor voice, the bluegrass world had another standard-bearing tenor after Monroe. The brothers soon took “Rocky Top” to being one of the most successful bluegrass songs in history. Not many have the chops to sing “Ruby,” but our own Kate Lee sure can in the O’Connor Band! We recorded it in a loving homage to these greats from the 1950s.

The Stanley Brothers — “Angel Band” (mid-1950s)
My mother had nearly 30 Stanley Brothers albums during my childhood. Like with Mozart, mom thought that listening to the Stanley Brothers on the phonograph was good for her children. And it was. Ralph had the most alluring lonesome tenor voice in bluegrass music, and there is no one really close to him on that account. When the old-time mountain soul singer comes in on each chorus to join his brother Carter, Ralph’s was a lonesome, enchanting beauty. The sacred quartet singing of the Stanleys moved the soul.

Doc Watson with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band — “Tennessee Stud” (1972)
When I was 11, this is the album that I actually took to bed with me at night. It replaced my stuff animal and security blanket, I loved it so much. I wanted this music more than anything else really, and so did a lot of people as the three-LP set went platinum. Besides the virtuoso performances on it by Vassar Clements and Earl Scruggs, I was transfixed by Doc Watson’s guitar playing and voice. He was a larger-than-life figure on this recording. I joined Doc on the road, along with his son Merle, for a few years in my early 20s on the fiddle and mandolin, and it gave me the mountain groove for a lifetime that I will never forget.

Old & in the Way with Jerry Garcia, David Grisman, Peter Rowan, and Vassar Clements — “Midnight Moonlight” (1973)
The folkies and hippies from the unlikely bluegrass stronghold of California were blowing minds in the ’70s. For the next generation like me, it appealed to my contemporary sensibilities. These rockers navigated the bluegrass byways with their long hair, virtuoso playing chops, and a modern attitude with the old music. While it was hard for Monroe to accept, this generation of bluegrass was among the best thing that happened to his music. It gave bluegrass music its future, and prevented it from becoming a museum piece. I must have played “Midnight Moonlight” on stage with former Monroe sideman Peter Rowan hundreds of times in the ’80s.

J.D. Crowe and the New South with Tony Rice, Ricky Skaggs, and Jerry Douglas — “Ten Degrees” (1975)
At the same time that the California bluegrassers were establishing the genre’s jamband future, Crowe ran his ship tightly with this group of new bluegrass virtuosos out of Kentucky. In much the same way that Monroe rehearsed his boys, the New South vintage 1975 album achieved perfection in bluegrass music for their time. Ricky became a superstar and Jerry became a person for which the dobro could have been renamed. And there was the legend in the making — Tony Rice. He was defining what bluegrass guitar was to become and, at the same time, bringing modern songs and singing into bluegrass repertoire.

David Grisman Quintet with Tony Rice — “E.M.D.” (1976)
When this album came out, it changed my young life and musical direction. I knew what I wanted to be, all of the sudden. Although I loved the old bluegrass, I could not see myself embarking on a career doing it. Tony’s switch to the DGQ from traditional bluegrass gave many of us bluegrass musicians permission to partake in swing and jazz, and that we did. I got to join the David Grisman Quintet just three years after this recording was made, replacing Tony as the lead guitarist and playing Dawg music.

Strength in Numbers — “Slopes” (1989)
Once upon a time, there was this group of bluegrass players that upped the ante from the swing, modern country, and rock explorations of its predecessors, bringing in modern jazz and classical sensibilities to the bluegrass music, successfully, for the first time. No one really knew what to call it or knew what to do with it, at the time. Decades later, the words “seminal” and “iconic” are ascribed to the five Nashville lads who dared to take it another step further.

Mark O’Connor — “Granny White Ridge” (1991)
This is one of my recordings and one of the biggest-selling albums I have released. Receiving two Grammys, this album put Nashville session musicians from the 1980s front and center. For a blistering track, the bluegrass and newgrass cats of Nashville were summoned: I called on Béla Fleck, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Russ Barrenburg, and Mark Schatz who all rose to the occasion and answered bluegrass’s call once again!

Alison Krauss & Union Station — “Every Time You Say Goodbye” (1992)
Alison made history as the first great female bluegrass star. With the voice of an angel and great bluegrass fiddling to match, she took a page from J.D. Crowe’s seminal bands and made bluegrass about smart, contemporary songs for a new generation of music lovers. Two of my best memories of getting to know Alison are when she beat me in a fiddle contest at age 13 and her parents apologized to me! And when I arranged the old tune “Fishers Hornpipe” for both of us to play fiddles with Yo-Yo Ma. Today we carry that arrangement of the old hornpipe into the O’Connor Band.

Kenny Baker — “Jerusalem Ridge” (1993)
I was like a kid in a candy store when I got to create an album that featured all of my fiddle heroes on it — all 14 of them! But the fun didn’t end there … I got to play fiddle duets with each of them on the album, and recording the very music of theirs that inspired me to play the violin in the first place. The largely out-of-body experience culminated in one of my classic records. For one of the cuts, I got to record with the bluegrass great Kenny Baker on a fiddle tune he wrote with his boss at the time — the Father of Bluegrass, Bill Monroe. Perhaps the greatest bluegrass instrumental tune of all time. We added the tune to the O’Connor Band repertoire as well with our three fiddles in the mix. Always a highlight, it is timeless.

Photo credit: mauxditty via Foter.com / CC BY.

New Box Set Dives Deep into Bill Monroe’s Archives

Posted on March 24, 2017 by Editor

If you’re a Bill Monroe fan, it’s likely that there are few things that excite you more than discovering music from the “Father of Bluegrass” you’ve never heard before. And, thanks to the folks at Richard Weize Archives, there’s a new opportunity to do exactly that.

Released last month, the Castle Studio 1950-1951 five-CD box set features Monroe’s Decca recordings from the years 1950 and 1951, alongside many never-before-heard outtakes, with some tracks like the beloved “Rawhide” featured in six different incarnations. Singers on the project include Jimmy Martin, Carter Stanley, and Edd Mayfield. Of special note is an alternate version of “The First Whipporwhill” that corrects a tape blip found on the commonly available version of the song.

In addition to the CDs — which span a whopping 181 tracks — the set includes a detailed 68-page booklet with a discography by folklorist Dr. Neil Rosenberg, notes from musicologist Dick Spottswood, and anecdotes from Blue Grass Boy fiddler Charlie Smith. The release is limited to 1,000 copies.

“A lot of people told us that there is no market for old-fashioned bluegrass/country music,” the label’s Janice Braband says of the Monroe set. “Probably they are right, but we decided to give it a try. And we are very proud that this box will hit the stores.”

The Richard Weize Archives is the passion project of Weize himself, who left his post as founder of independent German label Bear Family Records to launch RWA Records, a division of Rockstar Records UK. A majority of the releases offered through RWA Records come from Weize’s extensive private archives, ensuring that the releases will be of special interest to collectors and diehard fans. Weize also lends his deep musical knowledge to writing and researching content for detailed liner notes that accompany each release. Other RWA Records projects include releases from Johnny Cymbal, Cab Calloway, and Frankie Miller.

A Slice of Life: A Conversation with Mac Wiseman

Posted on March 10, 2017 by Editor

Members of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys — and there were more than 150 of them during his half-century career — often started their own bands in the style of their mentor. This was a huge part of Monroe’s influence: He was both bandleader and charismatic evangelist, training future bandleaders to preach bluegrass in a Monroe-style band of their own. His star students (Jimmy Martin, Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, Carter Stanley, Del McCoury, Peter Rowan) started their own influential bluegrass bands — not carbon copies, of course, but homages to the Founding Father’s vision. It was an apprenticeship model.

But one early Blue Grass Boy, Mac Wiseman, left the band to do something unusual: He played solo. He still sang songs from the canon of bluegrass and early country, but he presented them with just his guitar and voice. For dyed-in-the-wool grassers, it was kind of weird. The inside joke went something like, “Did you hear the sad news? Mac Wiseman broke up.”

There was another thing that made him different — and this is just my impression, but I think our interview backs it up. Among the early Monroe disciples, he projected a pretty non-bluegrass relationship to his Southern-ness. Wiseman grew up during the Depression in Virginia coal country, having as much of an authentic claim to rural roots as any of the bombastic blue-collar belters like Jimmy Martin, but he de-emphasized the drawl. Wiseman started his career as a radio broadcaster and always sounded like one. He didn’t want to develop a groovy, bluesy, Monroe-style band or shake the rafters with a piercing tenor. Instead, he found a home in the ’60s folk revival crowd. He told stories. He enunciated. He crooned.

And now, at 91, he has a new album. I Sang the Song (Life of the Voice with a Heart) features 10 songs that tell the story of Wiseman’s long, busy life. Featured guests like John Prine, Shawn Camp, Sierra Hull, and Alison Krauss help pay tribute to his distinctive voice and one-of-a-kind career. Amazingly, Mac Wiseman can still hit the high notes.

I called Mac at his house in Nashville and first got his answering machine. He picked up, interrupting my message, and said, “Sorry I almost missed you! I had the vacuum going!” We talked about his childhood during the Depression, how he learned guitar while recovering from polio, his introduction to John Prine (it involves a threat — and Earl Scruggs), and his deep disappointment with the direction of country music. At 91, he’s gracious, funny, and sharp as a tack — and, maybe most impressively, he still does his own vacuuming.

First of all, I think it’s amazing that you’re 91 years old and still singing. It’s amazing, too, to think of how much social and cultural change you must’ve seen in your lifetime.

Oh, it certainly is. And I’ve been blessed with a decent memory. When I think of all the different phases I’ve gone through, it’s hard to cope with it sometimes.

I know you were born in mining country in Crimera, Virginia, in 1925. I’m sure life in Virginia back then was pretty different.

The first four or five years I was alive, it was peaches and cream. Then the Depression hit and it was the opposite. It was onions and water! I have vivid memories of when I was four, five, six years old. I remember how carefree things were. When the new highways were being constructed all over the place, my dad was making nine dollars a day. He had a Ford Model T car with solid rubber tires on it in 1928. Then, the next year, he couldn’t even afford to buy the tags for it.

I heard that you started learning the guitar while you were recovering from polio, is that right?

Actually, it was while I was recovering from a few corrective surgeries. I had polio when I was six months old, but they wouldn’t do any surgeries until I was approximately the growth I was going to be. So, at about 13 years of age, I went to Charlottesville to the hospital — twice. They operated on my legs, and it made all the difference in the world. That’s when I started learning the guitar, just laying around with a cast on up to my butt!

I guess you couldn’t do much but sit and sing.

That’s exactly right. I had been very active, of course, working the farm for our livelihood, but when I was laid up that summer and fall through the seventh grade, my mother had to take me to pick up the school bus in a little buggy. Then I went on and became valedictorian. How do you like them apples? [Laughs]

That’s impressive! I heard another impressive quote about you. Bill Monroe called you “the best lead singer I ever had.” That’s pretty high praise from a guy who was a tough bandleader.

Well, he did say that, and that was very complimentary. Oh, working for him was very interesting. We toured a lot. He was from Kentucky, of course, and we played all the big theaters around there. We traveled and watched all the movie rolls. Bill and I watched them so much we could recite them riding along in the car! He was a very interesting man to work for. He knew exactly what he wanted to do, and he told you. But I enjoyed working for him and we never had a cross word.

You’ve made over 60 albums, recorded some 800 songs …

Yep, sure have. A lot!

… and most of that was before the Google era, when you could look up all 50 versions of a song with one click. How did you learn new songs, and how did you decide which ones to record?

In my growing up days, we mostly listened to live radio. In the ’20s and ’30s, radio was just coming into its own, you know, and it was mostly live — there were no disc jockeys. My mother was quite interested in music. She would play the organ and read shape notes and things like that. She encouraged me, hoping I would learn something that would get me out of the fields. That’s where I learned a lot of those old songs. She would sit out by the radio — we had the first battery radio in our community — in the wintertime, when it was too cold to work outside, she sat there and quilted and crocheted. She had a composition book laying on top of the radio, and when a live group would come on and sing a song, she’d get a verse or two of it. A few days later, they’d sing it again and she’d get some more. I’ve got 13 composition books in her handwriting where she wrote those songs down for me.

That’s really a treasure.

It is indeed. That’s where I got my background of the old songs. I can remember some of those songs from when I was four or five years old. “Granny’s Old Arm Chair” and “Barbara Allen,” things like that.

That’s interesting. Those old ballads like “Barbara Allen,” they’re story songs. And that’s sort of what the songs on this new record do. They tell your story.

That’s right. It’s my life story in song … 10 songs.

That’s one thing I really like about your singing, that sets you apart from some bluegrass and country singers — it may be a small thing, but it strikes me as important to you — that you sing words really clearly. It’s always easy to hear your lyrics.

Lyrics are very important to me. That’s been an important identity for me, as well. I went to college majoring in radio and did a lot of air work — news, pop records shows, working the control room — and that’s where a lot of my diction comes from.

Well, it shows in your songs. You know how to tell a story.

Well, I try to do that. You know, I actually lived those stories. They don’t change with generations. Even with a new batch of people, the old songs remain the same, and the themes remain the same. Disasters and love and train wrecks, things like that. They’re a slice of life, so to speak.

I’m only 26. My generation grew up with the Internet, many of us living in suburbs, getting our food from an air conditioned grocery store. Do you think all these songs about trains and cabin homes and farming can still resonate emotionally with people?

Well, like I said, they’re a slice of life. Maybe there aren’t many train wrecks that you know about anymore, but it’s also an historical look, these songs. I’ve played a lot of the colleges, the listening rooms, just me and a guitar. They’ve wanted to hear these old songs that paint a picture of a life these kids have never been exposed to. That’s the reason for the longevity of them, I think.

One amazing thing to me is that you’ve played through so many eras of history and eras of music. You were right there through the beginning of bluegrass in the ’40s, but you also played the Newport Folk Festival in the ’60s — what was the Newport folk scene like?

I never knew Bob Dylan, but I did a number of festivals with Joan Baez. After these festivals in the evenings, that was fun, we’d gather up in hotel rooms and sing old songs.

So you’ve been making music for a long time, and it seems like learning from every different generation — bluegrass in the ’40s, folk in the ’60s, pop along the way. Do you feel like you had to reinvent yourself for different eras?

No, I just kept on doing my thing, you know. I could’ve been a bigger star for a short period of time by following the trends, but I decided to just be myself and hoped people liked that. Fortunately, I’ve had a pretty good haul all these years. But I never tried to copy anybody else in the business or change my style to seek what they wanted.

You got to work with a lot of great musicians on this new record.

That’s right. Alison Krauss came by my house and we recorded “’Tis Sweet to Be Remembered” for the new CD. And I sang it the same key as I sang it in 1951 when I recorded it first for Dot Records! Even the new songs we wrote for this record, those are true stories in those songs: standing and warming my feet where the cows had been laying … wheat crop going bad because it rained on it … Every one of those are actual stories about my life. So, yeah, sorry to repeat myself, but it’s a slice of life.

John Prine is featured on this record, and you made a record with him in 2007. How did you get to know each other?

Well, I’d always been aware of his work. Then, one time, a guy who owned a studio came to Earl Scruggs’ birthday party — he’s a real boisterous fellow and he told me, “John says, if you don’t come see him Thursday, he’s going to kick your butt!” I admired him and all, so I went down to his office. What he had in mind was pitching me songs for me to do on my own. We got to talking and found out we knew a lot of the same things, so that’s how that record came about. That was one of the great experiences of my life, singing with John and swapping verses, you know. John still comes to my house to see me quite frequently.

You’ve been around for so much of country music history. I’m curious if you listen to any new music and what you think about it.

Today’s music? Well, I’m very disappointed in it, because so many of the younger artists don’t know the background. That’s the reason I go to colleges: They sit on the floor all hush-hush and listen to the old stories. Sometimes I have to do the same old song two or three times in a concert. So it’s an educational thing to the younger people. For so many industry people today, it’s all a mechanical thing. The record companies have publishing companies, so they can sign up an artist and put him in a room for four or five hours a day to write. Pretty often, one song out of the whole album is the one that hits, but the rest of them are junk. I still listen to it just to see what changes, but I don’t enjoy it like I did. There’s a few acts that I enjoy, but a lot of the younger ones, I don’t know who the hell they are!

So you feel like a lot of the younger artists don’t have an understanding of the history of country music?

No, they really don’t. They don’t have the knowledge of it. Actually, the record companies don’t have a knowledge of it. They’re business people out of New York and Chicago and L.A., and they come to Nashville to make business out of it. A lot of them have no idea of the history. I’ll give you a quick example: I was on the board of directors for the CMA where we nominated people for the Hall of Fame. And there was a young man on there from New York representing Decca Records here. We were at a board meeting, and folks like Owen Bradley were there, people of that vintage. [Note: Owen Bradley was an influential producer who helped modernize the Nashville sound in the ’50s and ’60s.] Owen nominated Brenda Lee. This young man stood up and quite innocently said, “Who is she and what did she do?” I wrote a letter of resignation right then and there. He was an honest fellow, and it was okay that he didn’t know, but what was he doing on that board?

Didn’t that make you want to stay on the board and change it and teach them a little more about the history?

No, you know, I was one of the founders. I worked at every facet of it. I’m the only living member of the original board of directors. I’ve been in it professionally since ’44, you know. Radio, bands, and recording. I was A&R director of the country department for Dot Records out of Hollywood for six years. Done a lot of things.

Well, you’re still singing at 91 — and you still sound like you. I’m sure a lot of people are wondering what’s your secret to staying productive into your 90s and still being able to sing so well.

I don’t know, but it is a blessing. I think it’s sticking to your guns and the good Lord’s blessing — that’s it.

Mr. Wiseman, I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me this afternoon.

Well, it was my pleasure. I’m so pleased you’re writing about this music. But at the same time, you know, it keeps me alive.

Hillbilly Soul: An Interview with Darren Nicholson of Balsam Range

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Editor

For some reason, North Carolina has long been the cradle of the Americana vanguard. In 1945, Earl Scruggs’ banjo sound created a rip-roaring hot rod of a genre called “bluegrass” (with Bill Monroe’s help, of course). In the ’60s, Doc Watson popularized a new guitar style while giving the folk revival a welcome dose of Southern authenticity. The “newgrass” boom of the 1970s owed a lot to a North Carolinian named Tony Rice, who became his era’s most important acoustic guitarist and, in turn, influenced a younger generation of fans, including Béla Fleck and Alison Krauss. Now fast forward to the 2010s and consider a Carolina string band called Balsam Range from a small mountain community in Haywood County, North Carolina.

If you approach Balsam Range with a discerning ear for key bluegrass ingredients, you won’t be disappointed. Great vocal harmony? Check. Killer instrumentalists? Check. Southern themes of home and hearth, with an accent to match? Check and check. But they also have something — a very important something — that an academic understanding of the genre tends to miss: They’re groovy. Balsam Range reminds us that bluegrass can be dancing music, hip-swinging music, backbeat music, as rhythmically hypnotic as all the plugged-in genres that formed in its wake. “It’s hillbilly soul!” says mandolin player Darren Nicholson. “It’s hillbilly funk and it’s hillbilly rock ‘n’ roll.” Not what you’d expect from the hills and hollers of Haywood County.

But Haywood County is just a stone’s throw from Asheville, after all, and maybe it’s not as culturally distant from that bohemian mecca as you’d think. Like so many hipster bourbon joints, whether in Asheville or Brooklyn, Balsam Range is playing with intriguing questions: How does Southern heritage fit into the present day? What can we learn from Appalachian traditions, and how can we carry them forward? Unlike these predictable bacon- and mason jar-themed bars, however, their approach to these questions shows some real originality, not to mention a deep knowledge of Southern music and a reverence for the richness of Appalachian culture as a whole — something they call Mountain Voodoo.

So y’all just put out Mountain Voodoo. I’ve been listening in the car. It’s a great record.

Yeah, it’s hot off the press. We’re really proud of it. I really feel like it’s the best thing we’ve ever done.

It’s clear right off the bat that you have your own style, your own sound. But I thought it was interesting that the description of Mountain Voodoo on your website mentions specific songs as if they’re different genres. It says there’s a “Tony Rice-style vocal song,” a gospel song, a honky-tonk tune, and others. How do you stay conscious of all those different styles and genres, but also just make something that sounds like Balsam Range?

Well, when you’re fan, when you truly love music, it’s like ice cream: You don’t like just one flavor of ice cream. So we can do a honky-tonk country song, we can do straight-ahead bluegrass, we can do a gospel tune, but the reality is that it’s always the five of us. You’ve got to get comfortable enough in your own skin to realize that, no matter what song you approach, it’s still us five.

I think that’s true. The whole thing sounds like one cohesive band.

Well, I hope so. We like traditional bluegrass and progressive bluegrass. We love the Americana stuff. We love playing to different crowds. We love playing to not just hippie crowds, but to any young crowd that has an open mind to music. And we try to express ourselves through different styles of music, but the reality is it’s going to sound like us. You could get George Jones to sing a Merle Haggard song, and it’ll be a Merle song, but he still sounds like George Jones! So, once you get comfortable doing your own thing — that’s the awesome part — it’s always going to sound like us.

So that’s what Balsam Range is doing, right? Focusing on having your own thing, not trying to be pigeonholed?

You’ll hear elements of all of our influences, of course. You’ll hear elements of Tony Rice or traditional stuff, but it’s about making the best music you can and being yourself. Bluegrass is like a curriculum. When you grow up playing bluegrass, it’s like learning your ABCs. You learn all that stuff, so it’s a part of you and it comes out sometimes, but that’s not what dictates who you are. You can show your roots, but you also have to do something that’s uniquely your own. Learning how … that’s a maturity thing. Once you realize how to blend that together, it can be a lot of fun.

That must be one of the hardest things to do in any style of music. You can learn the licks, you can learn other people’s songs, but how do you learn to sound like yourself?

I think that’s a problem with a lot of young musicians. Same as the problem with mainstream radio. They go with whatever is trending. You know, Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley or the Beatles didn’t just go along with whatever was trending. They stayed true to what they did. George Jones, Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs … they did their own thing. If you believe in it, then you keep hammering it out. It may take 20 years, it may take 50 years, but you have to stick with your thing.

It seems like some people treat bluegrass as a collection of licks that are supposed to be memorized and played in a certain way.

Well, the early generation really got it. Some of the newer bluegrass guys don’t — they’re trying to copy Tony Rice or J.D. Crowe. The first generation — Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs, Jim and Jesse, the Osborne Brothers, the Stanley Brothers — they all wanted to sound different. Then, if you’re doing your own thing, you’re not in competition with anybody else, even within your own genre. That’s what we’re trying to do in the modern day. We find songs that we like, a sound that is identifiable as us. And people like that.

People who really know bluegrass are aware of the history, about Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs, and the Stanley Brothers, like you’re saying. But when you’re playing mandolin, are you thinking, “This is a bit of what Bill would do?” Are you conscious of drawing from the history while you’re doing it?

There are elements of that, but, you know, I try to play what fits the song. If it’s a traditional-sounding song, I may put a Monroe twist on it. If it’s a modern, edgy kind of song, I may let the rock ‘n’ roll side of me come out. If you try to back up the singer and play to the song, you can never go wrong. If you get stuck in “I only play this style” or “I only play traditional bluegrass” or “I only play progressive bluegrass,” then you’re really limiting yourself. You’ve got to have an open mind.

So there shouldn’t be any problem combining Bill Monroe with rock ‘n’ roll energy?

He’s in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame! People forget this. He was an innovator. He was playing rock ‘n’ roll 20 years before Elvis. He influenced Chuck Berry. So he was part of the mountain music thing, the old timey fiddle music, but there was also a Black blues guitar player he grew up listening to named Arnold Shultz. That’s what makes bluegrass great. That’s what makes it uniquely American. Nothing was off limits to him.

People who are die-hard traditional Bill Monroe fans, they want to manipulate him into representing what their beliefs are. The reality is that he was open-minded. He’s the only guy in the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the Bluegrass Hall of Fame. That was the cool thing about the old generation: Whether it was Frank Sinatra or the Beatles or Bill Monroe, they all realized they had to do their own thing. Now, when there’s a hit, they try to make 10 others that sound just like that hit. They conform to whatever is trending. Those guys didn’t give a damn about trending. They wanted to be unique.

You mentioned all the influences that combined to form bluegrass music in the early days. Taken all together, how would you sum up what bluegrass is? What is it that you love about it?

It’s soul music. It’s hillbilly soul music! It’s hillbilly funk and it’s hillbilly rock ‘n’ roll. The things that I love about a great funk band or a great rock band or a great country singer are the energy and the heart, when somebody really makes you feel something. When a great bluegrass band hits the stage and melts your face off and makes you say “WOW,” it isn’t just a bunch of guys busking with a washboard — it’s the real damn deal. It high-octane music with some real substance behind it. And when there’s substance there, that overtakes everything else. Great bluegrass gets down to the raw power of music.

I’ve heard other musicians say that, when they watch a killer funk band, they’re watching the bassist. Or when they see a tight rock band, even when there’s a great vocalist, they’re watching the drummer. When you’re listening to a great bluegrass band, what are you listening for?

It depends on the band. There are some bands I like because they’re not polished. It’s that raw thing that I love. There’s other bands I appreciate because it’s so clean, so polished. Our band tries to bridge the gap. The way I see it, whatever the band, if someone is truly good, you feel something when you hear the music.

My son is a huge Beatles fan. I mean obsessed. And that’s awesome. I love the Beatles. So, this Summer, we went on vacation and stopped off in Cleveland and took him to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Bill Monroe is in there and Hank Williams is in there, as well as a lot of Black blues musicians. You can see the roots of where it all comes from. Monroe is in there all over the place. If you listen to his early stuff — there’s a song called “Bluegrass Stomp” — you can hear it, man! It’s like Chuck Berry 20 years before Chuck Berry. It’s clearly rock ‘n’ roll. So I was thinking, you know, you can’t move forward unless you can look backward at the early guys.

You think something’s different now? You think we’ve lost some of that early spirit or energy or whatever it was?

Yeah, it’s seems too commercial now, too focused on repetition. If Miley Cyrus has a hit, they want the next 10 singers to have a hit that sounds just like her hit. They don’t realize that competition is what makes it great.

I love that we’re covering ground from Bill Monroe to the Beatles to Miley Cyrus.

There you go! You know, American music from the ’30s to the ’70s, I just don’t think we’re ever going to see a period of creativity like that again. The machine of selling stuff has now gotten away from that.

How old were you when you got into bluegrass?

I’ve got pictures of me on stage at 18 months old. I’ve been around it all my life. My dad played old-timey music, country music. The people who grew up in Western North Carolina, Eastern Kentucky, Tennessee, we’re very fortunate to be a part of that Appalachian music tradition. Mountain Voodoo — that’s not just the title of our record; it’s what happens when you’re exposed to it. There’s a magic in this music that gets passed down from generation to generation. That’s what we hope to carry on. I can’t remember not being into music and I can’t imagine doing anything else.

I started learning guitar, including a lot of old folk tunes, Doc Watson tunes, when I was about 10. I have other friends who discovered bluegrass when they were 25. And then there’s your story — on stage at 18 months. Is there something different between growing up on it and learning about it later? What do you think it gives you when you’re really reared on it from a baby’s age?

Well, we all end up getting to the same watering hole. But how you appreciate it or respect it, that’s a different thing. It becomes a part of your blood. It’s not just something you do when you get off work on Friday — “Oh, I think I’ll go see a show at the Orange Peel.” Those folks enjoy it, but we wake up every day thinking about it, getting the instrument out of the case, and working at getting better, rather than something you do for fun on the weekends. It’s in the fiber of our being, a part of us. For some folks, it’s an outlet, and they enjoy it on that level, but it’s a question of what level you take it to. It’s like throwing a baseball in the yard versus working hard enough to be Greg Maddux. We all love and appreciate it. The question is, “Is music a part of your life or is it your life?”

Do you have a particular memory of being moved by music as a child and realizing you wanted to pursue it?

I remember getting a Louvin Brothers record — Charlie and Ira Louvin, early country music — and I would sit in my room when I was 10 years old and listen to these records. They were singing about dying, about working in the cotton fields, losing loved ones — nothing that I’d experienced — but I would just sit there and cry. I was just emotionally overtaken. They were singing so good, they were playing so good, and they were being genuine about what they were singing. That’s why I can’t get fired up about what’s trending in L.A. or Nashville. It feels forced.

Y’all are from the mountains of North Carolina, and it seems like that’s a big part of who you are. I’d love for this interview to help explain to people who don’t know tons about bluegrass how to place Balsam Range within the genre. Does being from North Carolina, or from the mountains, affect the way you play bluegrass, the way you relate to the music?

Sure, what we play is Carolina music. Also it’s mountain music. Bill Monroe, of course, was from Kentucky, but it didn’t sound like bluegrass until Earl Scruggs came into the picture. He was from Shelby, North Carolina. And there is a magic that happens here in the mountains. That’s the voodoo. It grows here, you know? So when we make music, we’re paying homage to the people who came before us. There’s a sense of nostalgia, sure. But, from our perspective, we’re just keeping in mind all those who influenced us and just trying to keep the bar high.

MIXTAPE: Lee Ann Womack’s Country Primer

Posted on February 6, 2017August 30, 2023 by Editor

When we needed an artist to make us a Mixtape of classic country tunes, we turned immediately to Lee Ann Womack … and not just because we love her very, very much, but also because she grew up hanging out in an East Texas radio station while her father played some of the greatest country music ever made. LAW noted that these aren’t, necessarily, her favorite country songs and they don’t go all the way back, but they are certainly a solid representation of the genre’s great past which has absolutely informed its wonderful present.

Johnny Cash — “I Walk the Line”
The ultimate crossover artist, he took country beyond all boundaries. He’s not just one of the greatest country artists, but one of the greatest American artists of all time.

Bill Monroe — “Blue Moon of Kentucky”
He might have been known as the Father of Bluegrass, but music in the country genre was heavily influenced by Bill Monroe. I love — and have borrowed from — the mournful sound of his vocals, the electricity of the harmony vocals, and the drive of the instruments in his music.

The Carter Family — “Wildwood Flower”
Nicknamed the First Family of Country Music, the Carter Family were pioneers of mountain gospel and country music, utilizing harmony vocals in a way that would influence the country genre for many years to come.

Waylon Jennings — “Lonesome, On’ry and Mean”
He had a career as a sideman for Buddy Holly and as a disc jockey in radio before he ever came to Nashvillle to make country records. He was part of the first platinum country album, Wanted: The Outlaws, along with Willie Nelson, Tompall Glaser, and Jessi Colter. To me, Waylon was the epitome of the marriage of rock and country, bringing all of his West Texas vibes to ’70s country.

Tammy Wynette — “Stand by Your Man”
You’d be hard pressed to find someone who isn’t familiar with Tammy and her song “Stand by Your Man.” It’s been a controversy several times over! Her voice is like a broken heart poured directly through stereo speakers and her life seemed like a living, breathing country song.

Loretta Lynn — “Coal Miner’s Daughter”
The ultimate country female singer, she wrote and sang about her life, which reflected so many of the people in rural America and the things they were going through. Listening to her music, one could learn a lot about the times she grew up in, and that’s country music: real life.

Dolly Parton — “Coat of Many Colors”
Her Appalachian roots, so present in her voice and music and, obviously, in the lyrics she wrote. The perfect example of a country girl with bluegrass/mountain influences.

Buck Owens — “Together Again”
From Sherman, Texas, and, along with Merle, created the Bakersfield sound. As is often told, Buck influenced countless other artists in and outside the country genre, not the least of which was the Beatles. I always loved his use of the telecaster and harmonies via Don Rich, and could hear their influences in so many of the country acts that followed.

Merle Haggard — “Okie from Muskogee”
The smoothest and prettiest voice of the male country singers, I always loved Merle for his music and his appreciation of music. I love his playing and especially love his studious approach, pouring over the catalogs of masters like Bob Wills and Jimmie Rodgers — not to mention the blues and jazz music influences you can hear in him. He fascinates me. Along with Buck, they created a whole new country music scene in Bakersfield and refused to play by the rules. I love it.

George Jones — “He Stopped Loving Her Today”
I could do a whole list of just George Jones songs. To me, he surpasses all others because he actually created a new style of singing. Often imitated but never, ever has anyone come close to duplicating. As Gram said, “He’s the king of broken hearts.”

Hank Williams — “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”
A country boy with so much soul, he transcends any genre and is one of the greatest songwriters in all of music.

Willie Nelson — “Crazy”
An American treasure, Willie is another artist who really transcends all genres, but there’s no mistaking his country upbringing. He puts music first, before any kind of labels or boxes, and he definitely influenced Nashville and Texas music in a huge way and showed that, when it’s honest, country music and country artists can have mass appeal.

Everyone’s Doing It: Bryan Sutton in Conversation with Billy Strings

Posted on September 23, 2016 by Editor

Bluegrass is a small community. Bryan Sutton and Billy Strings hail from opposite ends of the country — North Carolina and Michigan, respectively. There’s about a 20-year age difference between them, with Sutton enjoying the crest of a long career and Strings (birth name: William Apostol) just starting out. Sutton just released his fifth solo album, The More I Learn on the legendary Sugar Hill label; Strings recently self-released his first solo EP. Aside from a love of Doc Watson that borders on obsession and a mastery over the acoustic guitar, these two guys would seem to have little in common.

And yet, they’ve jammed a few times, usually backstage at a show or during off hours at a festival. They’re both steeped in the other’s work and even hang socially from time to time. Before they started interviewing each other for the Bluegrass Situation, Strings asked Sutton to recommend a restaurant to him, some place he could take his girlfriend and get brownie points (Café Rakka, if you’re curious about Sutton’s answer). Both Sutton and Strings will be in Raleigh, North Carolina, next week for World of Bluegrass.

How do you two know each other?

Bryan Sutton: I first heard about Billy Strings from Chris Eldridge — the fantastic Critter.

Billy Strings: Actually, the first time I met you was when we were playing somewhere in Pennsylvania. Maybe it was at the Sellersville Theater. You were playing with Hot Rize, and we played the front room before the show even started. They let us set up out there and sell some merch, then we hung back with you guys. I remember watching you warm up. I was a fly on the wall.

Sutton: We had a good chat. I remember talking about rhythm and keytars. One of the highlights of this year was our backstage jam session at MerleFest. I went to that festival with the intention of making that happen, finding some time to pick with you.

Strings: That’s why I moved down here — to be able to pick with badass musicians all the time.

Sutton: When I moved to Nashville, it wasn’t quite the scene it is now. There were good players. David Grier was here; Roland White would hang out of a lot. But it was nothing like it is now as far as the amount of players. It’s really exciting.

Why did you move here?

Strings: The reason I moved here was, I was getting ready to leave Michigan, where I had lived my whole life. I was just ready to check something else out. My friend Lindsay was like, "You have to come here. You can just pick all night and hang out. Don’t even think about Denver. Screw that. Nashville!" She was just putting it in my head. She even found the house I’m living in, which is literally next door to her house. But I would sit around and think, "I don’t have anybody to pick with." I’d play along with videos on YouTube or pick by myself, but you can’t interact. I was in a weird spot. I wasn’t getting any better.

Sutton: I’m not good at that. I’m not good at playing at home with records. I know you had some experiences picking a lot with friends and family. That really does get under your skin. You really need that.

Strings: When I was younger, I always had my dad to pick with, and I got to play with other people and sing harmonies with them. Playing solo is hard for me. I really like having other people to interact with. You figure out ways to make cooler music doing that.

Sutton: Definitely. But you spent some time playing with Doc’s records, right? You learned note for note and did some diligent Doc work?

Strings: Not necessarily. I never actually learned anything note for note. I just hear it. I just listen to it so much that I can try to emulate it. But I don’t know if it’s note for note.

Sutton: The way you talked about this the other day, the pocket of your crosspicking is as close to what Doc Watson would do than anybody I’ve ever heard. The emulation of that is really spot on — and not in an effort to copy it for the sake of copying. It’s a spirit and the groove.

Bryan Sutton

Strings: Nobody will ever touch him, as far as I’m concerned. I’m as big a Doc Watson freak as anybody out there. I’ve spent a lot of time with him. I listened to Bill Monroe and Lester and Earl and other bluegrass stuff. But my dad was spoon-feeding me Doc Watson … “Beaumont Rag,” “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down,” stuff like that. I was learning to play the rhythm to those tunes, and my dad would play the lead. Whenever I play “Beaumont Rag,” I try to put my dad’s flavor in there. He does the same thing. He’ll emulate Doc, but he puts a little bit of his own thing in there. And that’s part of my thing now, too. I think it’s a rock 'n' roll thing, the way he plays. You can hear him playing some classic rock licks, the way he bends the strings. It’s really cool.

Sutton: It comes out new. I remember one of the cooler Christmas morning things for me was about four Doc Watson records and a record player. That was big time. That was a good one. That was my first exposure to the Southbound record. Do you have a favorite doc record? Southbound’s the one for me.

Strings: I don’t think I have a favorite. They’re all the best. But they’re all so different. Later on, he was doing some rockabilly stuff. I’ve been digging into that Milestones thing hard. I’m so excited about it — all this new information that I didn’t have before, all these new tunes I haven’t heard Doc play.

Sutton: One of the more intimidating things in my life was to be around him and just interact. I wanted him to like me as a player, but my goal was just to get to know him and be on a first-name basis. I didn’t get to spend tons of time with him, but I think it got there.

Strings: When you were hanging with Doc, were you an established player?

Sutton: When I played with the Ricky Skaggs band, toured with him starting in 1995, that’s when I first played MerleFest. I was one of thousands of people who shook Doc’s hand that weekend, but as a I continued to hang around, a mutual friend had put together some benefit concerts, and I got to play with Doc and talk with him. That’s when I got to know him a little better. That was around 2003. When I was playing with him, I didn’t want to pick anything too fast. You’re sensitive to that kind of thing. He was getting on in years, and it’s weird to be around a hero like that when you know he’s not what he was on those records from 40 years ago. I had a similar experience with Earl Scruggs. You know it’s still there, and sometimes it comes out in their playing.

Strings: Listening to those older-generation players, they slow down a little bit, but just the knowledge in their playing is amazing. David Grisman still has a lot of years left, but he’s an excellent example of that. You listen to him play nowadays and he plays the coolest notes. It’s really spaced out and thought out. But you listen to his early stuff and he’s just ripping it up, really fast and crazy. Your stuff, too, man. Your new album in comparison to Into My Own, it’s a little more laidback. It’s not like you’re trying to prove anything.

Sutton: That was part of the goal. Going into the record, I was just trying to be honest and real. That was the agenda.

Strings: That comes across. That’s what I love about Doc’s playing, too. You can do all this fancy stuff, but you play those melodies pretty straightforward.

Sutton: It’s really hard for younger players … well, to be more precise, it continues to be hard for me to just trust the tune. Trust the melody.

Stinrgs: I’m guilty of that, too. I go out into outer space with my stuff, sometimes. But if I’m sitting there playing a tune, most of the time I just play the melody. But sometimes I’m just trying to put on a show for the folks.

Sutton: I agree, it is a weird space. I’m always intrigued by the balance of playing a melody and doing your own thing with it. John Hartford has that great phrase — “playing with the music” — which I think is really cool. Your effort is not to just break it down and rebuild it, but to leave it as it is and shift some things here and there.

Strings: I just love that freedom. In the last year, I feel like I’ve been accepted by bluegrass folks and jam band folks and the festival circuit. It feels good to not be pigeon-holed — not bluegrass or this or that. I can just play music. It’s boundary-less. I think it comes from playing some metal. Being onstage, I get up there and I’m looking out at the audience and thinking, "Let’s rock these people’s lives."

Sutton: There’s a huge amount of parallel between the energy of metal and bluegrass, especially when you look at old-time stuff. Not necessarily modern bluegrass. Are you an anti-Metallica guy?

Strings: Definitely not anti-Metallica. I used to not like them, but as I’ve gotten older, I can appreciate it. It’s like AC/DC. I never liked them — the same three chords and the same annoying vocal sound. But when I came back to it and just listened to it, that shit rocks. It rocks. Same thing with Metallica. You can’t sit here and say that doesn’t rock because it absolutely does.

Sutton: There’s a lot of the metal crowd that likes to be anti-Metallica. I have a tough time with that because I’m a fan. I finally got to see them live at Bonnaroo. That was the coolest thing in the word, to see them out in a field in front of 40,000 people. It was so big. It was huge. That’s what I like about it.

Strings: I miss the metal scene a little bit, because we would have our own shows. We would rent out a VFW hall or something like that, and we’d make everybody pay a few bucks so we could bring in a cool band. It was totally underground. Everybody’s just moshing and running off the stage, and the band members are jumping around and everybody’s covered in sweat. It’s so powerful.

Sutton: I almost got a gig with the guys that I played with in high school. We almost had a gig at this union hall, but it never happened. These were dudes that I went to high school with, and they were were a little more legit than I was. We would get together and play after school. It was the late ‘80s, so we had had a lot of AC/DC and Metallica, but there was a lot of Skid Row and Guns N' Roses. A lot of Ozzy Osbourne in there, too.

Strings: Do you play shredder guitar?

Sutton: I can sort of do that. It’s been a while. I learned the solo to “Crazy Train.”

Strings: I wanna hear you play that shit, dude.

Sutton: We should come up with an acoustic guitar duet version of “Crazy Train.” Were you ever hip to George Lynch, with Dokken? Dokken was a little more radio metal, so true, hard, metal guys probably would probably diss them. But George Lynch, I liked his tone. He had a good sound. When I was high school, I was heavy into Ibanez guitars. I thought those were the coolest things. I had a poster of Paul Gilbert [from Mr. Big] on my wall. He came through my town and did a little guitar clinic, which was cool. Steve Vai was another one. Back when he was playing with David Lee Roth, he had that guitar with three necks on it in the shape of a heart. He would tap on both necks with either hand. That was a real rock spectacle. It’s great. It’s show business.

So metal and bluegrass are pretty strongly connected for you?

Sutton: It’s all there. Think about the darkness of songs like “Little Sadie” or “Down That Lonesome Road,” Doc’s version. Just dark, heavy things. Most of the serious rock 'n' roll guys really understand how to respect bluegrass, especially the older stuff. That’s what it was when you listen to “Rocky Road Blues” and things Bill Monroe was doing in the 1940s. He’s hammering the mandolin like Chuck Berry. Bill Monroe was the Chuck Berry of the mandolin. Or Chuck Berry is Bill Monroe on guitar.

I think about those older guys being on the road almost constantly, playing shows every night. How do you feel about touring, especially since you’re both at such different points in your lives and careers?

Strings: I love being on the road. It’s an adventure for me. Every once in a while, I get tired, but it’s always fun.

Sutton: I have never been drawn to the road as much as other folks — or even as much as I probably should be. I’m always trying to figure out how to hang around the house a little more. But what I love about bluegrass is that it’s about playing with other people. You can do that in the studio and you can jam 'til you’re blue, but the stage thing has to happen. There’s a balance to it. That’s always been a little bit of a challenge for me.

Strings: You do a good business hanging around doing sessions.

Sutton: That’s the whole day job thing for musicians here in Nashville. I started doing it when I was really young. I was married by the time I was 23, so this year is our 20th anniversary.

Strings: Congratulations.

Sutton: I think that has made me think about why people get into music and why they stick it out, especially something like bluegrass and traditional music. You don’t get into it thinking you’re going to fill arenas and stadiums with 100,000 people. It’s about the small jam and the day-to-day grind.

Billy Strings

Strings: For me, it’s really about my childhood. Playing the tunes I was learning back then enables me to go back and revisit my childhood. Those were the finest days of my life — just sitting there playing with my dad, learning tunes and singing and being around him. He would sing songs all night long, and I love looking back on that. That’s how I got out of the metal stuff. I just realized that "Holy shit, this bluegrass stuff is really cool." For a while there in middle school, I didn’t exactly tell everybody that I played hillbilly music. It’s not that I was embarrassed by it, but everybody was into metal. So I went with that whole crowd. When I would break into “Beaumont Rag,” people would lose their shit. But it wasn’t something I thought was really awesome, just something I had done as a kid. Then I had this realization that I just love the music and I feel lucky to have grown up around it.

Sutton: Are you writing new stuff that you feel is inspired by those tunes you learned as a child? That’s where my head is right now. My head is full of the songs I’ve played all my life — other people’s songs or traditional songs trying to make that leap. Maybe I’ll have a particular idea … "Okay, then, how would I say that?" For me, the challenge of songwriting is trying to find that curious balance of what feels traditional and what feels unique.

Strings: Lately, I’ve been thinking more about giving myself some freedom to stop worrying about what the next line is going to be until I write it. If you listen to that early Hartford stuff, he was just so free with his pen. It was like he just took the pen and set it on the paper. When he lifted it, that’s when the song was done. The songs wrote themselves in a way. Maybe I’ll write a hundred songs and only five of them will work for this band. That being said, I can do whatever I want, really. I’m trying to give myself that freedom not to be so picky. But I’m still nervous about it, actually, especially showing people stuff.

Sutton: It’s a weird thing to get over. What helped me a lot was working with Tim O’Brien. It was really strange to sit in front of him and say, "Hey man, check this song out." Here’s a guy I’ve been listenin got since high school …

Strings: … who writes the most amazing songs ever.

Sutton: What you learn about being around those guys is that they’re really no different. They’re just as nervous to play a new song in front of people as anyone else. It just comes back to freedom. It comes back to just keeping it going. Especially over the last year and a half of touring, I find that I do a lot of writing on planes. Sometimes the guitar makes it a little too … not predictable … a little too much of the same old shit over and over again. So it helps to give myself a little freedom with lyrics and freedom with what I think a band might do with a song. For whatever reason, I can disappear into this little bubble on a plane. I like being captive for an hour or two hours. I’ve got this whole file of ideas on my phone. I just keep going back to it and adding stuff. Sometimes I’ll get whole songs; sometimes it’s just a good chorus. It really works as a strategy. I’ve never been the kind of writer who has to get up and write something every day. Stuff comes to me. Sometimes I’ll get whole songs in five minutes. I don’t have a lot of the patience to sit around and really hash over lines over long periods of time. It’s more like a puzzle that I come back to every now and again.

Strings: There are just so many dimensions to it all. That is the thing … I have to sometimes remember that we’re playing for the audience here. We have to engage with them instead of closing my eyes and playing the tunes the best I can. But it certainly is fun playing guitar. I can’t believe they pay us to do this shit.

Sutton: It’s pretty amazing. One day they’re going to figure it out — how easy it is — and everybody will start doing it.

Illustration by Abby McMillen. Photos courtesy of the artists.

STREAM: Blue Highway, ‘Original Traditional’

Posted on September 9, 2016 by Editor

Artist: Blue Highway
Hometown: Nashville, TN
Album: Original Traditional
Release Date: September 9
Label: Rounder Records

In Their Words: "This is a very special record for us. It's our first with Gaven Largent, and our first 'concept' record, in a way. It's all original material in the traditional style. That might sound like a contradiction in terms to some folks, but the 'founding fathers' of the music who created what we know as 'traditional bluegrass' wrote original music. Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt, Carter Stanley, Don Reno … so many great writers from that era. So, in one way, we feel like we are sort of carrying on the tradition even more by doing an all-original set of tunes that haven't been done before." — Tim Stafford

"My favorite part about this album is that it's simply rock-hard, straight bluegrass! Three out of the four songs that I co-wrote on this album were written while in a Stanley Brothers frame of mind, and I love that kind of music. There are other great traditional flavors on here, too. I hope you enjoy." — Shawn Lane

"After 22 years of creating some great music with my brothers in Blue Highway, I am so proud to be a part of yet another wonderful album. So thankful that God has seen fit to allow me to continue to do what I love so much. So glad that we have gotten back to the roots of what makes this music real to so many people." — Wayne Taylor

Counsel of Elders: Alice Gerrard on Growing with Your Voice

Posted on August 30, 2016October 12, 2023 by Editor

Some voices create passages to the past, as if they were secret wardrobes through which listeners can crawl and enter their own private Narnia. It’s not just what these voices sing about, but rather their color, tone, and timbre that conduct audiences to times gone by. Alice Gerrard has one such voice. She rose to fame in the 1960s and 1970s singing traditional bluegrass songs with her Appalachian music partner, Hazel Dickens. Their voices provided a juxtaposing force against one another, generating instinctive harmonies that felt closer to a familial note than any born from two unrelated musicians. Simply put, they raised the hairs on your neck.

Gerrard’s voice soars with Dickens, but it’s equally capable of standing alone, as sure-footed and earthy as the land that produced it. In 2015, she released her latest album Follow the Music, which she recorded with M.C. Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger. The two met when he was a grad student and she a visiting instructor at the University of North Carolina. The project would go on to earn a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album, and it’s easy to see why … or, rather, to hear. Her interpretations of classics like “Wedding Dress” and “Boll Weevil” pit her voice against the fiddle, the two rising to meet each other and fueling a thicker melody as a result. At 82 years old, Gerrard’s voice has aged, but it hasn’t withered. With over 50 years in the business under her belt, and a staunch determination to fight for traditional sounds, she proves how the past endures, offering its voice to any willing to listen.

What quality would you say age has brought to your voice?

That’s a hard question for me to answer. It’s probably better answered by people who have heard me. I don’t find that it’s diminished. I do find that it takes longer to get back into singing, if I’ve not been singing for a while. I think you do have to exercise it more as a muscle and it’s more important to do that when you get older. I find if I don’t do it for a while, it’s like “I’m not going to be able to hit that note so easily,” or little glitches come into your voice and you have to sing through a bunch of stuff and, eventually, it sort of comes back.

Male-male and male-female harmonies tend to be popular in bluegrass and alt-country. Female-female harmonies exist, but not to the same extent. What do you consider important about that kind of singing?

It’s pretty amazing when you get two or more women who can actually sing together. It doesn’t always work. You might love to sing with somebody, but maybe your voices are too much in the same range and it’s hard to harmonize, or something like that. To me, any harmony — whether it’s female-male, male-male — it’s all about the blend that you get with the other voice. There are many different harmony sounds. To me, it’s a sort of a special sound; it’s the same as if you had two brothers. It’s a well-known fact that within families, two sisters or two brothers, they have a family blend that’s unique, that you have to really work to capture, if you’re not a family member.

I was just listening the other day to Mountain Man — they don’t exist anymore — but it was three women, and they had beautiful harmonies. It had such a great blend. My feeling is that, no matter what the combination is, what you’re going for is that special kind of blend. Everybody has a unique voice, and the trick is to make your voice work with the other voice, and sometimes that just takes singing together a lot. When you sing together a lot, you tend to feel the other person’s energy and how they use their voice, but I think it applies to women and to men. I don’t see it as strictly a woman thing. But it’s always great to hear women harmonizing, when it’s a good harmony sound.

How long did it take you and Hazel to hit upon that blend?

Well, we sang together for a long time, and I think you have to pay attention to what the other person is doing. When you hang out with somebody a lot, it’s easier to sort of internalize some of the characteristics of their singing with your vocal sound. It’s like talking. When you grow up learning to talk as a child, you repeat whatever you hear around you, and it’s the same with singing. I was really listening to her. It’s not just two separate voices following their own path; it’s two voices listening to each other and bending and moving together. It becomes one voice.

It’s very interesting because I’ve been in a studio where they would track the lead vocals and then they track the harmony vocals. As you’re singing harmony to the lead vocals, you’re listening to it and you’re matching it, but then when they play your separate track — this happens to more people — you listen back to your track by itself and it’s like “Whoa!” It sounds terrible. Maybe it’s a little flat here, maybe it’s a teeny bit sharp there, that pronunciation is a little weird. But you put the two together and you realize what you’ve done is bent and accommodated to the other voice, and they’ve done it, too. But together it works, and that’s what it’s all about.

You’ve used the word “spare” to describe the photo that graces Hazel and Alice ’s album cover, as well as some of the more traditional songs. What does spare music offer that much of today’s overly produced music might not?

I can remember the days when you’d flip through the radio dial and you could immediately pick out the country station, and now you can’t. It all sounds like mass-produced pop music. To me, I always prefer — I like to listen to a lot of different kinds of music — but the American Idol over-production sound does not appeal to me. But I think people have gotten used to that in the mass market, so their ears are attuned to that over-produced, auto-corrected perfection. When stuff comes along that has a little more edge — a slight pitchiness or something that’s very simple — it can be a beautiful sound, but I think that a lot of people just don’t get it because they’re so used to the over-produced quality of most pop recordings. I know that that’s not my niche anyway, so who cares! There’s plenty of other stuff out there, and there’s a lot of really great stuff going on, so I don’t have to listen to that other stuff, if I don’t want to.

You’ve mentioned before, prior to releasing Follow the Angel, that happier songs don’t resonate the same way with you. Why is that?

You mean Follow the Music, not Follow the Angel. Woo hoo! Where’s that coming from? I might have to use that in a song.

You’re more than welcome to my mistake! What a slip.

I do not know. You could consult a psychiatrist, but I’ve always been drawn — there’s a kind of a melancholy side to me — and I’ve always been drawn to the darker, more melancholy side to country music. I love the dance tunes, too, but the things that really get my goosebumps up are the more melancholy sounds, and the sadder songs, and other kinds of stuff. I don’t know why that is true, but I’ve heard a lot of people — I’m not alone — say, “The sad songs are the best songs” or “Oh, man, I like those old mournful songs.” I think there’s something that raises the hairs on the back of your neck sometimes about some of them. I’m sure that there are people who prefer happier songs. This is probably an over generalization, but I don’t think too many people who are in the middle of, say, a bad breakup want to listen to happy music. They want to go and wallow around in slow George Jones or Merle Haggard or somebody like that.

They want that company.

Yeah, it’s very cathartic in some ways.

I’m not sure if you do this, but even when I’m at my happiest I really love listening to the saddest songs. It’s that idea of the sublime: watching something fearful from a distance.

There’s this saying, and I can’t remember who told me this, “The sadder the song, the happier I feel.” That can be true at times.

Bluegrass has come a long way since you first started singing. Is there anything about the way bluegrass has evolved that really excites you?

My heart is with early bluegrass, pretty much. I feel totally as though there’s room for all of it and I’m glad that some people hold the line and I’m glad that other people are experimenting. But my soul is much more in the Stanley Brothers and Bill Monroe. I feel like there’re some amazing musicians and they can do anything; they’re just really really talented musicians. Sometimes I feel like there’s too much emphasis on the technicality, rather than the soulfulness of the music. I have this sort of theory that, in this digital age where everything is very technical — you know there are computers and iPads and you can make everything perfect in a studio — there’s a huge emphasis on technical, so that I sometimes feel that people’s ears get used to what they think of as perfection: the perfect note, the perfect tone, the perfect blah. And, to me, that gets really boring. But there is so much good music out there. I think that’s what it’s all about.

Everyone finding their space.

Yeah, and there’s room enough for it all.

Do you have any advice for those interested in taking up the mantle of bluegrass?

I really feel like you have to follow your own path, and I always feel like, if what you’re doing musically has some basis in tradition, it will be more meaningful and have more soul, perhaps. That’s just my point of view. Songwriting is a very personal thing and people … there are factories that churn them out, for sure, but then there are people who don’t, who write really good songs, some of which will never ever get heard in this lifetime. And then there are people who write a lot of really bad songs, too. But I think you have to follow your path, and if you feel called by a certain direction, you have to try that path, see where it takes you. Get the editor out of your head.

Catch Alice Gerrard performing with Laurie Lewis at World of Bluegrass in Raleigh next month. To hear from another another bluegrass elder, check out our conversation with Del McCoury.

Photo credit: Irene Young

A BGS Back-to-School Playlist

Posted on August 16, 2016 by Editor

If you're a student (or teacher) of any kind, there's a good chance you have a pretty intense case of the back-to-school blues right about now. Whether you're already in session or waiting for that dreaded first day to arrive, having the right tunes to soothe those blues is essential this time of year. Check out a few of our favorite back-to-school-inspired songs.

"Good Morning Little Schoolgirl" by Mississippi Fred McDowell

So, this one is a touch creepy if you listen to the lyrics too closely, but if you don't, it's a great blues tune that should, at the very least, give you some good math class daydream fodder with images of flying an airplane all over town.

"I'll Fly Away" by Ralph Stanley

That walk into the building on your first day of classes may feel like a death march, so here's an optimistic take on life on the other side.

"What Would You Give (In Exchange for Your Soul)" by Bill Monroe and Doc Watson

… Because we all have that one class we'd sell our souls to ace (or just pass).

"Coat of Many Colors" by Dolly Parton

Your first day of school outfit is the most important one you'll wear all year, so don't forget your coat of many colors. Just be sure to thank Dolly when everyone wants to sit with you at lunch.

"School Is Out" by Ry Cooder

Yeah, yeah, yeah … school is technically in, but hey, that three o'clock bell has to ring sometime, right? Might as well celebrate, if only for the afternoon.

"School Days" by Chuck Berry

American history, practical math, the Golden Rule … at least you have the juke joint to look forward to once you've survived a long day of burdens and books.

"Keep on the Sunny Side" by Flatt and Scruggs

Here's a good one for those of you especially afflicted by those back-to-school blues. Try to let the sunny side brighten your day, math test be damned.

Lede photo credit: pellethepoet via Foter.com / CC BY-NC

8 Weird Items from Bill Monroe’s Estate Sale

Posted on August 3, 2016 by Editor

Over the weekend, bluegrass legend Bill Monroe's family held an estate sale at their family property in Gallatin, Tennessee, just 30 minutes outside of Nashville. The sale included a number of items — some personal, some collectible — from Bill, who passed away in 1996, and from his son James, who is also a musician. The collection drew fans, locals, and curious folks, alike. We stopped by to check out the goods and rounded up a handful of the most interesting items we saw. (Unfortunately, we weren't able to snag them for ourselves.)

Original pieces from the "Million Dollar Mandolin"

The mandolin itself is at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, but the instrument's original keys, rosewood bridge, hardware, box, and framed newspaper article were up for grabs for a cool $10,000.

A patriotic denim blazer