Tag: Bluegrass Alliance

Bluegrass Memoirs: Jackson, Kentucky Bluegrass

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

[Editor’s note: Photos by Carl Fleischhauer]

On Monday August 7, 1972, with fresh memories of Maritimes old-time and bluegrass, I drove from New Brunswick to New England to join my wife and kids, who were house-sitting for my in-laws in Norwich, Vermont. 

On Thursday the 10th I headed south. A fourteen-hour drive brought me to Morgantown, West Virginia, the home of my friend and partner in research, photographer and film-maker Carl Fleischhauer, then employed at West Virginia University. We’d known each other for twelve years. (Our stories are in Bluegrass Odyssey: A Documentary in Pictures and Words, 1966-86 [U of IL Press 2001]). We were about to embark on fieldwork.

During the preceding year, when I began planning for the book Bluegrass: A History, I asked Carl to help me think about photos. In addition to documenting bluegrass festivals and other venues he, with Sandy Rothman, had recently looked for traces of earlier days in a field trip to the old Monroe home in Rosine, Kentucky. Now, we made plans for our own field trip. Carl would take photos. I would make notes and do interviews. 

We spent that Friday in Morgantown looking at Carl’s photos and films and listening to LPs as we prepared for the research. At the end of the evening, my notes say,

Did some picking.

Early Saturday morning we piled in my new Toyota with our gear (cameras, tape recorder, axes, tent, sleeping bags) and headed southwest, crossing into Kentucky from Huntington, WV and snaking down through the mountains to Jackson, the seat of Breathitt County. Three hundred miles; we arrived around 2 o’clock.

There we headed just outside of town for Bill Monroe’s Second Annual Kentucky Blue Grass Festival. When I went to Canada in 1968, Bill Monroe had one festival a year at Bean Blossom in Indiana. Now he was running a bunch in other states, as were other artists. Festivals were the big news in bluegrass music in 1972. We sought to document the bluegrass festival experience.

Later others would write about this, like Bob Artis (“An Endless Festival” in Bluegrass [1975]) and Robert Owen Gardner (The Portable Community [2021]). Here’s how my notes from Jackson begin:

West of town on main hwy, down short steep road. Paid camping & Sat. fees, never did pay for Sunday. Parked & walked down to the stage area — tent set up, natural amphitheatre, uncovered stage, bad sound. Lots of cops around on Saturday.

Made contact with Pete & Marion Kuykendall, and agreed to move in next to them to camp. Set up tent, attempted to speak to Monroe but he was busy coping with the Goins Bros. problem of being hassled by the cops for drinking. Later Kuykendall said that cops had asked Monroe for $ (3 or 6 hundred) and he had refused to pay off so they were taking it out in fines. Lots of racing around on Sat. with flashing lights et al, but they stayed away on Sunday.

Listened then to IT’S A CRYING TIME, hot & exciting Japanese bluegrass band. Then back to Kuykendall’s bus/home whatall. Thunderstorm; discovery that cassette recorder didn’t work on batteries because plug distorts switch; got it running eventually. Oldest Kuykendall girl Sam/Ginger comes in with bass player of above-mentioned Japanese band, then leaves. Kuykendalls are a bit worried about this but Carl & I both notice later that a number of young girls (McLain girls, for example) are hanging around, with this group.

Dinner with Kuykendalls. Frank & Marty Godbey come in and are around for the rest of the evening. Mostly we sit & talk, though I went down to the amphitheatre to catch Jim & Jesse and the Japanese bands. Came back, then returned to catch Monroe. Afterwards listened to picking group in tent near us. Did mainly Emerson & Waldron, Newgrass Revival, Bluegrass Alliance, Gentlemen, etc. Chromatic banjo. Noisy night in Carl’s tent, as sessions went on late and busses started early. I got a spider bite.

Bill Monroe (center) and the Blue Grass Boys at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Saturday, August 12, 1972. Bandmembers include Monroe Fields, bass; Jack Hicks, banjo; Joe Stuart, guitar (hidden); Monroe, mandolin; and Kenny Baker, fiddle.

I’d known the Kuykendalls since 1966. Pete, a 1996 inductee to the Bluegrass Hall of Fame, was a musician, record collector, producer, publisher, and, since 1970 owner-editor of the first and leading bluegrass monthly Bluegrass Unlimited.

Pete Kuykendall, editor of Bluegrass Unlimited, in his RV parked in the camping area at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Saturday August 12, 1972.

Pete and I had already been corresponding about bluegrass history when we met on Labor Day weekend 1966 at the second Roanoke Bluegrass Festival. Subsequently, I visited the Kuykendalls in Virginia where Pete encouraged me to write for the then all-volunteer magazine he would later own. I began with a review of the festival, published the following January — the first of eight articles I did for BU in 1967.

Photo made by Pete Kuykendall’s son Billy with one of Carl Fleischhauer’s cameras. Carl is seated at left with two other cameras on the table. This photo was made at the time of Neil Rosenberg’s (top of head above stove) interview of Pete Kuykendall, editor of Bluegrass Unlimited, in his RV at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Saturday, August 12, 1972. In the background, at left, is Pete’s wife and Bluegrass Unlimited co-manager Marion Kuykendall.

By 1970 Pete and Marion were running BU full-time; I’d done an article for them earlier in 1972 (eventually I would write a monthly column) so we had been in touch recently by mail and phone. Conversations with Pete were never brief! He loved to share the business scuttlebutt and he had plenty since they were selling the magazine at festivals every weekend and had just launched BU’s own annual festival. 

I think this may have been the first time I met the Godbeys. From Lexington, and before that, Columbus, Ohio, they had been following the bluegrass scene for a decade. Frank is a musician who is still performing these days. By 1972 he and Marty had begun writing and publishing photos in BU. For them, as for me, hanging out with the Kuykendalls was a good way to keep up on the bluegrass news. People were already talking about starting an industry association, though that — the IBMA — wouldn’t happen until 1986. Pete was one of its founders.

Neil Rosenberg (facing camera) interviewing Pete Kuykendall, editor of Bluegrass Unlimited, in his RV parked in the camping area at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Saturday, August 12, 1972. In the background, with an air rifle, is Pete’s son Billy Kuykendall.

With the growth of the festivals came clubs, newsletters, and magazines. Bluegrass enthusiasts (many of them musicians) followed their favorites to festivals and other venues. Paths crossed; networks grew. The politics of bands was a favorite discussion topic.

Over the course of the festival, I made note of gossip about the always changing bands. Ricky Skaggs had just left Ralph Stanley — there were rumors about where he was headed next. Was Bill working to get Ralph Stanley on the Opry? Some thought so. The II Generation was said to be splitting up. Stories were told of bluegrass festival camp followers. 

At this Jackson, Kentucky festival were a bunch of bands that had been appearing at Bill Monroe’s other 1972 festivals — Monroe, Jim & Jesse, Flatt, Reno & Harrell, the Goins, Ralph Stanley — mature musicians who’d been working with this music for a substantial period of time and who stuck close to the early models of which they were, often, the authors. Classic bluegrass, one could say. 

What the audience didn’t hear was the kind of stuff we’d heard from the jammers late Saturday night, like “One Tin Soldier,” The Bluegrass Alliance’s cover of a song popularized in the film Billy Jack. Their bluegrass version, with Sam Bush’s lead voice and Tony Rice’s harmonies and guitar work, was a hit, a big step on the road to newgrass.

The Japanese bands were new to the scene. Japanese bluegrass began in the early sixties. In 1971, Bluegrass 45 came from Kobe, Japan, with the sponsorship of their label, Rebel, to tour U.S. bluegrass festivals. They made a big hit at Monroe’s Bean Blossom festival with their showmanship and musical savvy. This year they were back, along with another Japanese outfit, It’s A Crying Time.

Visiting from Japan, the band It’s a Crying Time performs at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Saturday, August 12, 1972. Band members include Eiichi “Ei’ Shimizu, banjo; Kazuyoshi “Kazu” Onishi, mandolin; Satoshi “Sato” Yamaguchi, guitar; Akira “May” Katsumi, bass.

Monroe had booked the Japanese bands as a novelty, something you couldn’t see just anywhere in the bluegrass world. As I mentioned in my field notes, I found It’s A Crying Time’s music “hot & exciting,” and I was not the only one in the audience reacting this way. They came to the attention of Lester Flatt, who, after watching them rehearse, invited mandolinist Kazu Onishi to join him on stage at his final set. 

Backstage moment at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Saturday, August 12, 1972. Akira Katsumi, Kazu Onishi,
Lester Flatt, and Akira Otsuka. Otsuka was Kazu’s friend from the Japanese scene, a member of the Bluegrass 45.

This video comes from the Bluegrass 45’s appearance at Carlton Haney’s Camp Springs festival:

They are announced at the beginning of the video by emcee, writer, and DJ Bill Vernon. Vernon was here at Jackson, as I learned Sunday morning when I went down to the early morning gospel show. Pete Kuykendall introduced me to Bill there, and we had a long chat about the politics of the bluegrass industry. I wrote in my notes:

A very loquacious and complex person.

At that morning’s gospel show, the music came to a stop as a fundamentalist preacher began his sermon. At that point, I noted:

Bill Vernon cut out from the morning sermon, he’d had enough…

During the preacher’s sermon at the gospel program at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Sunday, August 13, 1972. Bill Monroe (wearing a black suit) is seated in the audience area at left.

I stayed and heard some good music, noting:

The gospel section’s high point was when the Goins Bros. did “Somebody Touched Me” and Eleanor Parker came on stage & started clapping hands and singing; Monroe caught on and came up to join in too.

During the gospel program at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Sunday, August 13, 1972. When the Goins Brothers band performed “Somebody Touched Me,” they were joined on stage by Eleanor and Rex Parker and Bill Monroe. Eleanor and Bill joined the Goins trio at the main microphone while Rex sang and played mandolin at the “stage right” microphone.

This kind of spontaneity, which gave festivals their appeal, was not there all the time. Jim & Jesse, I wrote, had:

A good show, with Jim Brock sounding especially good, but … a cut and dried quality to it all.

Describing Lester Flatt and his Nashville Grass, I concluded:

To me the whole band sounded tired, lackluster.

But Flatt’s final set was enlivened when It’s A Crying Time mandolinist and tenor Kazu Onishi came on stage to sing “Salty Dog Blues” with him. 

During my times around the stage area, I had a chance to talk with Monroe and with some of the musicians I’d gotten to know during my years as a backstage regular at Bean Blossom, like Birch Monroe, Joe Stuart, and Roland White.

I arranged with Birch, who was busy helping Bill run the festival, for an interview, to take place later in the week at his home in Martinsville, Indiana.

Joe Stuart offstage at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Saturday, August 12, 1972.

Joe told me about his experiences playing bluegrass in Canada with Charlie Bailey. He’d even appeared in Newfoundland.

Roland, whom I’d known since his days as a Blue Grass Boy, was now playing with Lester Flatt. He told me they were working solid, playing festivals every weekend.

Here’s what I wrote about the audience:

Audience — bluegrass die-hards from Ohio, Ky., D.C., Carolinas. Few freaks. Appear to be about 50% campers, 50% local people. Certainly no more than 1500-2000, on Saturday, though figure of 3000 was bandied about. Bill moved his Ky festival to Jackson from Ashland this year because the turnout at Ashland was dropping. Fact, bluegrass ain’t as popular in Kentucky as it is elsewhere — Ohio, D.C.

Audience on the hillside natural amphitheater at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Saturday, August 12, 1972.

The festival closed with a finale, orchestrated by Monroe. At the first festivals in the mid-60s, which were created to honor Monroe, such events were somewhat spontaneous, but by now, seven years after the first one, these events were highly ritualistic. By the time it happened, I noticed that the Kuykendalls had left. They were not the only ones.

The finale performance at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Sunday, August 13, 1972. At the center, in white suits, are Bill Monroe and Lester Flatt. Here are a few of the other performers, left to right: Curly Ray Cline (on the ramp), Melvin Goins (guitar, facing camera), Kenny Baker (fiddle, white hat, wearing a suit), Joe Stuart (just behind Baker, partly hidden), Buck Ryan (fiddle, white belt), Jack Hicks (banjo, white hat, wearing suit), Paul Warren (fiddle, white hat, at microphone), Vic Jordan (banjo, facing forward), Ralph Stanley (banjo, dark suit, hidden behind McCormick), Haskell McCormick (banjo, in profile), Monroe and Flatt with Don Reno (wearing white) partly hidden behind them, Raymond W. McLain and sister Alice McLain (hidden behind Flatt), Jesse McReynolds (mandolin, wearing striped jacket), Ruth McLain (bass, behind McReynolds), Raymond K. McLain (guitar, no hat), Roland White (mandolin, white hat), Rex Parker (mandolin, striped shirt), and Monroe Fields (leaning on van).

We packed up soon after and headed west for Lexington. I was hoping to interview J.D. Crowe.

[To be continued]

Thanks to Akira Otsuka and Carl Fleischhauer

Rosenberg is an author, scholar, historian, banjo player, Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame inductee, and co-chair of the IBMA Foundation’s Arnold Shultz Fund.

Photo of Neil V. Rosenberg by Terri Thomson Rosenberg.

Edited by Justin Hiltner

Bluegrass Memoirs: The First Canadian Bluegrass Festival (Part 1)

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

The first Canadian festival, a modest affair billed as a “Bluegrass Jamboree,” took place in August 1972. I was involved in its organization and presentation. Subsequently, the Jamboree grew into an annual festival that’s still running. 

The Nova Scotia-based Downeast Bluegrass & Oldtime Music Society’s website reads: 

The annual family friendly Nova Scotia Bluegrass and Oldtime Music festival is Canada’s oldest, and North America’s second oldest continuously running Bluegrass Festival, and is presented and hosted by the Downeast Bluegrass and Oldtime Music Society, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Bluegrass and Oldtime music in Eastern Canada. 

Here’s how it happened. 

By the summer of 1972 I had been living in Canada for four years, working as a professor of folklore and archivist in St. John’s, Newfoundland, at Memorial, the big provincial university.

Deeply immersed in bluegrass, I now stayed in touch with the music I’d left behind via bluegrass friends in the states, I read Bluegrass Unlimited every month, and I got County Sales‘ newsletters and bought new LPs from them by mail.

 

June 22, 1968. Banjo workshop at Bean Blossom, IN: Vic Jordan, Bobby Thompson, Dave Garrett, Neil Rosenberg, Ralph Stanley.
(Photo by Frank Godbey)

When I arrived in Newfoundland in September 1968, I’d just published my first academic article — on bluegrass — in the Journal of American Folklore. I’d been writing regularly for Bluegrass Unlimited. That past June, Bill Monroe had included me in a banjo workshop at his Blue Grass Festival in Bean Blossom, Indiana; and a few weeks before coming to St. John’s, I’d been at the Richland Hills fiddle contest near Dallas, Texas, jamming with Alan Munde, Sam Bush, and Byron Berline and the Stone Mountain Boys.

 

August 18, 1968. Richland Hills, TX fiddle contest: Neil Rosenberg
(b), Sam Bush (m), Byron Berline (f).
(Photo by David Stark)

During the late ’60s and early ’70s, bluegrass festivals were proliferating (I wrote about this in Bluegrass: A History, 305-339) and bluegrass was having success in the popular music business (I wrote about that too, 305-339).

By 1972 I was hearing at a distance about the adventures of my friends from the U.S. bluegrass festival scene. Alan and Sam had made a popular instrumental LP. Now Alan was picking banjo with Jimmy Martin and Sam was singing and playing mandolin with the Bluegrass Alliance. And Byron, working as a studio musician in Los Angeles, had recently recorded with The Rolling Stones. 

As I continued to study and write about bluegrass, I maintained my musical calling, moonlighting in the local contemporary folk and pop music scene. It was several years before I met anyone in St. John’s who played or knew much about bluegrass. 

In 1969, RCA Victor invited me to edit an album in their Vintage series titled Early Bluegrass. Aside from some Monroe LPs, this was the first historical bluegrass anthology. I signed its detailed historical liner notes with “Memorial University of Newfoundland” under my name. It got a good reception in the bluegrass world and introduced me to Canadian bluegrass record buyers. 

In 1971 I signed a contract with the University of Illinois Press to write a volume on bluegrass history in their new Music in American Life series. It was a book that would take years to write, for I had catching up to do. Not only was I out of touch with the bluegrass scene I’d been in before immigrating, I also knew little about the bluegrass scenes in my new home.

 

June 22, 1968. Banjo workshop at Bean Blossom, IN: Vic Jordan, Bobby Thompson, Neil Rosenberg, Dave Garrett, Ralph Stanley, Larry Sparks. (Photo by Doc Hamilton)

Learning About Canadian Bluegrass 

Even before immigrating to Canada, I knew it had bluegrass, thanks to Toronto’s Doug Benson, who put me on the mailing list of his magazine The Bluegrass Breakdown. The first issue had reached me in spring 1968 while I was still in Indiana. It told of bluegrass scenes in Ontario and Quebec.

En route to Newfoundland in September 1968, we entered eastern Canada via the Maritimes — the provinces of Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. Picking up our landed immigrant passes from Canadian Customs at the Maine border, we drove through New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, where, in Cape Breton, we caught the night ferry to Newfoundland.

During this trip I got my first taste of Canadian bluegrass in an Antigonish, Nova Scotia motel where we watched Don Messer’s Jubilee, a Halifax-produced CBC weekly TV show starring a fiddler who’d been recording and broadcasting nationally on radio since the 1930s and television later. Messer’s prime-time Jubilee was Canada’s second most-watched show, exceeded only by Hockey Night In Canada.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that Messer’s band included a five-string banjo played bluegrass style! To this immigrant’s eyes and ears, Messer was blending bluegrass into his country and old-time sound. Here’s his performance, taken from Jubilee footage, of “St. Anne’s Reel,” a popular Canadian fiddle tune:

The smiling banjo picker behind Messer was Vic Mullen, the youngest member of his band. Born in 1933 and raised in rural southwestern Nova Scotia, he had been working as a musician since his teens, playing with country bands in the Maritimes and Ontario.

In 1969, Mullen left Messer and began appearing with his own country band, The Hickorys, on another Halifax CBC weekly prime-time show, Country Time. There wasn’t much bluegrass on that show beyond Mullen’s occasional southern-style fiddle pieces.

Getting Acquainted 

My first meeting with a Newfoundlander who shared my enthusiasm for bluegrass came early in April 1971 when I had a letter from record collector Michael Cohen of Grand Falls-Windsor. 

By the time we met, Michael’s family owned six furniture stores in central Newfoundland. He’d grown up listening to country music on the radio and began collecting records. After attending university in Ottawa, where he’d heard lots of local and touring American and Canadian country music, he returned to Windsor to work in the family business, continue his collecting (he has all of Hank Snow’s recordings) and play in a country band.

He wrote me because he’d been told about me by a friend. “Early bluegrass and string bands … are my main interest,” he said, introducing himself and welcoming me to make tape copies of his rare records.

I wrote back inviting him to visit us on his next trip to St. John’s. This was the beginning of an enduring friendship. Through him I met others interested in bluegrass and Canadian country. The first was Fred Isenor of Lantz, Nova Scotia, a small community north of Halifax, who got my address from Michael and wrote me a few weeks later.

 

August 18, 1968. Alan Munde, Neil Rosenberg, unidentified fiddler.
(Photo by David Stark)

Fred, Vic Mullen’s contemporary and friend, worked at the local brick factory, and had a music store in Lantz. He was a record collector, a Bluegrass Unlimited subscriber, and a musician. He played mandolin and bass in The Nova Scotia Playboys, which he described to me as an “authentic (non-electric) country” band. They had represented Nova Scotia at the 1967 Expo in Montreal.

Fred had purchased his mandolin, a 1920s Gibson F5, for $100 at a Halifax pawn shop in 1960. Only later did he learn that its label, signed by Lloyd Loar, meant that he now owned an instrument like that of Bill Monroe, who’d just been elected to Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame. 

Our correspondence began with shared unsuccessful attempts to put together a Bill Monroe tour. I’d planned to speak with Monroe at a New England festival that summer. But the festival was cancelled; that plan fell through. In March 1972, Fred wrote of other plans:

There is a possibility of a one day bluegrass jamboree in Nova Scotia this summer. Not really a festival but if we can put it over it will be a start. Perhaps Michael has mentioned this to you. As you played with Bill Monroe and helped run Bean Blossom [I’d told Michael about this when we first met] I thought possibly you could offer some helpful suggestions, in other words some do’s and don’ts. 

He explained that with a limited budget the event would have to utilize local talent. 

Please do not mention this to anyone as definite … so far Vic Mullen and I just talked briefly about this and will be discussing it further on Monday night. 

He asked if I’d be able to visit him and take part in the program. 

I responded enthusiastically, calling the jamboree a festival, offering my suggestions, and saying I’d be driving through Nova Scotia in August and hoped to visit him then.

Meeting Vic Mullen 

In June 1972, Country Time came to St. John’s to tape some shows. I asked Vic if he’d do an interview, explaining to him that I was working on a book about bluegrass. He agreed. 

Still in his thirties, Vic had been playing country music professionally for a quarter century. He’d mastered instruments — mandolin, fiddle, guitar, five-string banjo — as needed, working on the road with a series of increasingly high-profile bands. Bluegrass chops were just one aspect of his professional tools — a flashy banjo piece, or southern-style hoedown fiddle as part of the show, that kind of thing. He’d worked with some bluegrass bands in Ontario, done TV, etc.

In the late fifties he started his own band, The Birch Mountain Boys. Working at first in southwestern Nova Scotia, he teamed up with Brent Williams and Harry Cromwell, young African Canadians from his home county, Digby. They played bluegrass in the Maritimes for several years before Brent and Harry started playing country and Vic joined Messer. 

Now Mullen was fronting his own national CBC TV country music show. He liked bluegrass and enjoyed playing it, but as a bandleader he chose it rarely. Most people in his audiences didn’t know the word “bluegrass” when they heard it and even if they liked it, it was just nice country music to them. Bluegrass was a niche genre. It had enthusiastic fans and great performers, but they were in a minority.

Vic was supportive of his old friend Fred; he understood Fred’s enthusiasm. He knew about BU and the bluegrass festivals that were happening in the States, but he didn’t think the festivals were going to catch on in Canada. Of Canadian bluegrass fans, he said that: 

Altogether in a group, there’d be a lot of people. But they’re spread out from coast to coast and particularly between here and Ontario … there wouldn’t be enough people for an audience in any one area, it’d be just too far for them to get there. 

Still, he was planning to be at Fred’s Jamboree. In our interview, Vic had given me an insider’s introduction to the world of Canadian country music. From him I heard for the first time many names and facts that would become familiar to me later. I was encouraged that a musician of his caliber, experience, and reputation would be there.

A week after the interview, I wrote Fred and told him I’d be catching the ferry to Nova Scotia on August 1, driving to Lantz the next day and staying to get acquainted. I explained that this was just the start of a crowded trip for “some hurried field research on bluegrass music … in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana.” I closed by mentioning that I’d had a pleasant experience interviewing Vic. 

Fred’s reply came a few days later. He was looking forward to my visit, he said, and then, referring to my earlier letter, told me the event would be a jamboree — “outdoors, just one evening.” Referring to a nearby farmer who held dances in his barn, Fred explained: 

John Moxom is building an outdoor stage as soon as his hay is made and it appears now that we will be holding it either Friday, August 4th or August 11th. All the local bluegrass musicians are willing to help and take a chance on it being a flop. We hope to find out if there is enough interest to try something bigger and better next year. I know you have a busy schedule but if August 4th turns out to be the date we would sure like to have you present. 

By the end of July 1972, I was headed first to visit Fred in rural Nova Scotia. Then I’d drive to New England, stopping near the border at Woodstock, New Brunswick, to see Don Messer’s Jubilee perform at a county fair, and then going to Vermont where my family was vacationing. After a short rest I’d be heading for West Virginia to join my photographer friend Carl Fleischhauer on the trip we described in Bluegrass Odyssey.

On August 1, I headed for the Canadian National ferry terminal in Argentia, Newfoundland, ready to sail west for some bluegrass. 

Rosenberg is an author, scholar, historian, banjo player, Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame inductee, and co-chair of the IBMA Foundation’s Arnold Shultz Fund.

Photo of Neil V. Rosenberg by Terri Thomson Rosenberg, all other photos by Neil V. Rosenberg. 

Edited by Justin Hiltner

New Grass Revival: Sam Bush and John Cowan on the Early Years (Part 1 of 2)

Posted on by Editor

One of the most celebrated and innovative bands of the 1980s, New Grass Revival will be inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame during the IBMA Bluegrass Music Awards on October 1. As part of our coverage of the 75th anniversary of bluegrass music, BGS caught up with founding member Sam Bush and vocalist/bass player John Cowan to talk about the early years in this first of two stories exploring their remarkable discography. Read part two of the story here, featuring insight from Béla Fleck and Pat Flynn, as well as Bush and Cowan.

The four founding members of New Grass Revival are Curtis Burch on guitar and Dobro, Courtney Johnson on banjo, Ebo Walker on bass, and Sam Bush on mandolin. They had all played together in the five-piece band, Bluegrass Alliance.

Sam Bush: We wanted to fire our [Bluegrass Alliance] fiddle player Lonnie Peerce, and when we told him this he said, “You can’t fire me, I own the name of the band.” So we said, “Let us put it this way: we quit.” We were already influenced by the Country Gentlemen and the Osborne Brothers and Jim & Jesse and the Greenbriar Boys and a really great record by the Charles River Valley Boys called Beatle Country. That’s one of the reasons we called ourselves New Grass Revival — we were trying to point out that we were reviving a new bluegrass that had already been invented by those people. We were only hoping to further the progressiveness we already dug.

Bush had been friends with Courtney since he was a teenager, when the banjo player was lead singer in a band playing Stanley Brothers tunes.

SB: We had no particular plan to play differently but our very first practice I remember Ebo hitting a bass lick in D minor that we later discovered he got from Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.” We played licks back and forth over it and all of a sudden Courtney went into the melody of “Lonesome Fiddle Blues” by Vassar Clements. That’s how we came to work up “Lonesome Fiddle Blues” for our first album. It was like a band epiphany, that we could improvise over a riff the way rock ‘n’ roll bands did. We were just playing it the way we felt it.

Courtney and Curtis were steeped in traditional bluegrass, but Bush was a musical sponge, soaking up everything from Homer and Jethro to Jefferson Airplane to the Rolling Stones to French jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty. The band’s first, self-titled album, from 1972, included covers of Leon Russell’s “Prince of Peace” and Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire.“

SB: This is the days before cars had cassette players, so Ebo had a tiny cassette player we took with us on the road, and we’d made a tape we could listen to. One side was John Hartford’s Aereo-Plain. And on the other side we had Leon Russell and the Shelter People. Without John Hartford there would be no newgrass. Growing up close to Nashville, I would watch him on local TV, and one night he did a bluegrass version of “Great Balls of Fire” on the Glen Campbell show, and I recorded it from the TV — that was the one we learned. Courtney even played his chromatic run the same way John did it.

While making their first album Bush encountered the man who would be his songwriting partner, Steve Brines.

SB: We lost our Louisville club gig when we ended Bluegrass Alliance, so in order to make a living that first winter in ’70-’71 I ended up playing electric bass with a folk group called the Cumberlands: Harold Thom and his wife Betty, and a banjo player called Jim Smoak. Jim had co-written a couple of songs with this poet-lyricist over in Lexington called Steve Brines and we played one on that early album — “Cold Sailor.” After I made his acquaintance Steve and I started trying to write together. Steve lived up in Lexington and I lived down in Barren County, and he’d send me five to ten sets of lyrics in the mail and I’d make up music, put it on a cassette and send them back. Our rule was I wouldn’t change one word, if he didn’t change one note.

It was a productive partnership – Bush and Brines wrote half the songs on their second album, Fly Through the Country. By then, Walker had left the band and they had gained a new player: John Cowan.

John Cowan: I joined in 1974. I did not grow up in bluegrass. I was a rock ‘n’ roll kid playing in local garage bands. But I had an awareness of New Grass Revival because I lived in Louisville, which was their home, and the woman who became my wife once dragged me to go see them. I didn’t want to go, but I was blown away. Six months later I got a phone call from Sam living down in Western Kentucky with Courtney and Curtis and he said he got my number from this guy, and would I be willing to come down and audition for us?

SB: He was a city guy, and when he pulled up and saw us, it was like “Oh my god what have I got myself into?”

JC: Courtney and Curtis were truly unique individuals. They were from South Georgia, super country dudes, born and raised playing bluegrass. I was wild-eyed and “What is all this stuff?” To their credit they welcomed me with open arms.

SB: We played some tunes together and asked him to join the band and he said, “I sing too — do you mind if I sing a song?” And in the tradition of Barney Fife I puffed up my chest and said, “Well, I’m the lead singer but yeah, go ahead.” And he sang “Some Old Day” in the same key as John Duffey did it in, only with this powerful voice and this beautiful vibrato. At the end of it I said, “John, I used to be the lead singer, now you are.”

JC: The day they hired me we rehearsed with the drummer. The next morning I got up and he was gone! I was like, “Where did Michael go?” Courtney said, “Oh hell, we fired him. We don’t need him with you!” I felt kind of bad about it, he was a really nice guy.

Soon the band’s rock ‘n’ roll influences were coming to the fore.

JC: They were already experimenting with jamming on traditional instruments over songs and it was right up my alley, because I was also a big prog rock fan. I was obsessed with Yes. On the title track of Fly Through the Country, Sam played this little thing that looked like a can of Spam — it was a resophonic mandolin, he played slide on it. When Béla joined, he said the big joke was that you could listen to the first part of the song, go out for lunch, come back, and you’d still be playing it.

SB: People would call us “The Grateful Dead of Bluegrass” because of our long tunes and our experimentation. We had to put it in our contract that we wouldn’t be billed like that, because then we had Deadheads coming expecting us to play their songs, and we didn’t do any.

JC: Our touchstone was the Allman Brothers. Their live album At Fillmore East came out three years before and we both knew it by heart; to this day I could sing every note and every solo. So that was a crucial record for our band. Sam exposed me to Jack Casady’s [of Jefferson Airplane] bass playing. When I joined the band I was 21, and Courtney was already 38, I was so out of my element. I’d only ever played with guitars and keyboards and drums, and I was smart enough to at least say, “I don’t know what I’m doing, you guys have to help me.” They’d give me a joint and say, “Go listen to this stuff — here’s John Hartford, here’s Norman Blake, here’s the Dillards….” It was so foreign and beautiful to me.

SB: One of the first songs John taught us was “These Days.” He sang like Gregg Allman when he first arrived, and his voice and vocal style changed to fit into what he had joined.

JC: I would imitate him [Gregg Allman], Lowell George, Stevie Wonder. But when I got in that band, now what do I do? I was smart enough to realize it wasn’t going to work for me to try and sing like Ricky Skaggs or Bill Monroe, that’s not in me. But Sam was very encouraging to me and the more I sang the more I developed my own voice.

SB: Garth [Fundis, the band’s producer] had introduced me to a piano player, Chuck Cochran, and Chuck played electric piano with us on “These Days” at the end of the Fly Through the Country. It was the last song we recorded, and we went, “Huh… We can make this fusion of more instruments into our sound.”

Their next album, When The Storm Is Over, went further, incorporating more of Cochran’s keyboards, as well as drums and percussion.

SB: We wanted to augment our sound and appeal to a wider audience, and Chuck and Garth introduced us to the great drummer Kenny Malone. He played on our next three records and I started producing the records myself. Stephen and I continued to write. The subject matter of our songs was totally different than bluegrass-style songs. I’ve always just said newgrass music is contemporary music played on bluegrass instruments.

JC: Sam’s going to solo for eight minutes, then he’s going to toss it to Courtney, then Curtis, and I’m the guy who’s in charge of keeping the train on the tracks and keeping the coal in the engine. That was my job and I loved it. To this day, when you’re playing that kind of music and all the players are in sync spiritually and musically and emotionally there’s nothing like it. To me that’s what punk music is: just this tremendous energy of people.

In 1977 their first live album, Too Late to Turn Back Now, was recorded at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival.

JC: It was such a fruitful time for music and we were in the middle of it. Jackson Browne, Miles Davis, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, John Coltrane, Little Feat…. Those people were our models, we listened and listened and it came out in our music. At Telluride we took this Willis Alan Ramsey track off this one solo album he made, the song “Watermelon Man,” and to me that was us doing Little Feat. That’s “Dixie Chicken.” That’s “Fat Man in the Bathtub.” There was a lot of Little Feat groove in what we were doing.

SB: We were trippier on stage than on most of our records, but you can hear it on that live record. Our association with Leon Russell — we’d opened for him in 1973 — had opened the doors. I don’t know that we were psychedelic exactly, but I was trying a phase shifter on my fiddle, like Jean-Luc Ponty, and Curtis would play lap steel with distortion.

JC: We had all grown together. Sam and I were fixated with Delaney & Bonnie at the time. We played “Lonesome and a Long Way from Home,” which Delaney co-wrote with Leon Russell, and we were so obsessed with them vocally that we talked about this: “I’m going to do Bonnie, you’re going to be Delaney.”

The band’s popularity was growing and they were finding their audience, thanks to the support of fellow musicians like the Dillards and Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. In 1979, Leon Russell had dropped in on the band’s soundcheck when they played at the Apollo Delman Theatre in his hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The band released the album Barren County that same year.

SB: Leon saw our name on the marquee and hadn’t seen us for years so he stopped by. We went back to his house that night, we jammed all night, and then we went and recorded with him in Nashville and in Hollywood where his studio was. It was really cool. We were teaching Leon bluegrass songs.

The result was the album Rhythm and Bluegrass, Vol 4, which Russell recorded in 1980 under his country alter ego, Hank Wilson. However, the project stayed unreleased until 2001.

SB: We were always most proud of that record. I co-produced it, I just didn’t know that’s what you called it. Leon had a bluegrass songbook and he’d say, “What do you think, should we do this one?” And I’d say, “Nah, let’s try this one.” So that’s how we started as his backup band. For two years! John and I had so much fun singing harmony with him. I love singing baritone, and vocally we were glued to him. And the way John and I did call-and-response in our singing was very influenced by the way Leon and Mary [his wife] did it on their records.

A live album, recorded in 1981, captures the spirit of their collaboration with Leon Russell.

SB: There were shows where you’d see him bounce up and down on his piano stool and that’s when we knew we were going to go into this Pentecostal church service with him, and the songs would just keep speeding up and speeding up and the audience was getting more and more excited. It was amazing, the rock ‘n’ roll hysteria. We learned a lot about show business from him.

Russell played keyboards on Commonwealth, which was Johnson and Burch’s last album with the band.

SB: Listening to the solo that I played on “Deeper and Deeper” [on Commonwealth], having not heard it for years, that one I managed to go to place I hadn’t planned on. Of course you have a game plan and an outline of what you want to achieve with a solo, but that solo was one of the happiest surprises.

(Editor’s note: Read part two of our oral history of New Grass Revival.)