Since our first excursion to Bonnaroo in 2013 BGS has been filming, crafting, and releasing Sitch Sessions with the absolute best and brightest musicians and artists in roots music. We’ve been so fortunate to work with new and old friends, freshly discovered and up-and-coming artists, and legendary performers with enormous legacies. After nearly eight years, we’ve amassed quite an archive of sessions, and within that archive more than a few stellar songs and performances have seemingly fallen to the wayside.
These 8 Sitch Sessions from the BGS archives are a few of our most favorite, underrated moments from our years of shooting sessions. We hope you’ll enjoy a few of these “reruns” — and take a deep dive into our past featured videos yourself!
Nathan Bowles – “Burnt Ends Rag”
One of our favorite shooting locations is a rooftop in downtown Los Angeles, where countless BGS Friends & Neighbors have taped their Sitch Sessions over the years. One of our favorites is this clawhammer banjo performance by Nathan Bowles, which demonstrates that old-time music and its trappings can be perfectly at home in modernity — and in urban settings, too. More banjos in DTLA, please and thank you!
Andrew Combs – “Firestarter”
One fine AmericanaFest week in Nashville in September a few years back we partnered with Crowell Floral, Jacob Blumberg, and Dan Knobler on The Silverstreak Sessions, a series of Sitch Sessions set in a vintage Airstream and flanked by gorgeous flowers and verdant foliage. At the time, “Firestarter” had not yet been released — now you can hear it on Combs’ 2019 release, Ideal Man. For this session all Combs needed was his guitar, this heartfelt song, and that honey sweet, aching voice.
Alice Gerrard – “Maybe This Time”
Every opportunity we’ve had to collaborate or speak with Bluegrass Hall of Famer and living legend Alice Gerrard, we’ve taken it! This session is two of a pair we shot with Gerrard, the other a stark, awe-inspiring a capella number that was quite popular on our channels. This Alice original, “Maybe This Time,” is cheerier, lighter, and has that charming old-time bounce in its bluegrass bones.
With a new documentary film available, You Gave Me a Song, perhaps it’s about time for another session with this hero of ours!
Ben Sollee – “Pretend”
Maybe you’ve seen Mark O’Connor play fiddle while skateboarding, or Rushad Eggleston performing all manner of acrobatics and avant garde silliness with his cello, but do you remember when Ben Sollee toured America by bicycle? In this 2016 session, Sollee demonstrates his cello-while-pedaling chops.
We’re firm believers that the world needs more bluegrass, old-time, and Americana cello and we’re happy to return to this archived Sitch Session for that reminder!
Caroline Spence – “Mint Condition”
Another session filmed on our home turf in Los Angeles, Nashville-based singer-songwriter Caroline Spence brought “Mint Condition” to her taping fresh off her debut, eponymous release on Rounder Records in 2019. “Mint Condition” displays Spence’s unique skill for writing strong, unassailable hooks that on almost any other songwriter’s page might trend cheesy or trite. Spence instead displays the simple profundity in her lyrics, a skill evidenced plainly in this session.
Laura Veirs – “July Flame”
Over the years, we’ve partnered with festivals, companies, and brands on tailor-made sessions — like our Portland series, where we partnered with our friends at Ear Trumpet Labs on some of our most popular, most viral Sitch Sessions ever! This beautiful, sunny, summery rendition of “July Flame” by Laura Veirs certainly deserves a re-up.
In 2016, after this session was published, Veirs went on to release case/lang/veirs with Neko Case and k.d. lang. Remember that!?
Kelsey Waldon – “Powderfinger”
We first filmed a Sitch Session with Kentuckian country singer and songwriter Kelsey Waldon in 2015 — after the release of her debut album, The Goldmine, in 2014. In the time that’s elapsed since, Waldon has followed her golden debut with two more impeccable studio albums, the latest being White Noise / White Lines, which was released on the late John Prine’s Oh Boy Records in 2019. On the tail of White Noise / White Lines, Waldon gave us this gorgeous cover of Neil Young’s “Powderfinger” displaying her talent for cover song interpretations as well as original song sculpting.
Sunny War – “He Is My Cell”
Guitarist and singer-songwriter Sunny War has just released a brand new album, Simple Syrup, as charming and entrancing as ever and built firmly, yet again, upon her unique and idiosyncratic guitar picking style. In 2018 she released With the Sun, an album that included “He Is My Cell,” which ended up featured in a Sitch Session in early 2019 on BGS.
War recently appeared as a guest on our Shout & Shine series – read our interview here.
Tim Stafford could be renowned for any one of his many contributions to bluegrass music over his prolific career, his talents as a musician and writer having been showcased in so many of its important creations. He is perhaps most well-known as a founding member of Blue Highway, one of the most influential and decorated bands in bluegrass. Prior to that, he formed Dusty Miller in the late 1980s, and Alison Krauss hired him in 1990 as part of her band, Union Station, with whom he recorded the Grammy-winning album, Every Time You Say Goodbye.
Stafford is also an accomplished author. In 2010 with Caroline Wright, Stafford issued Still Inside: The Tony Rice Story, the authorized biography of the flatpicking icon and Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame member. As a songwriter, Tim has placed more than 250 cuts and was named IBMA’s Songwriter of the Year in 2014 and 2017. He notably co-wrote IBMA’s 2008 Song of the Year, Blue Highway’s “Through the Window of a Train,” with Steve Gulley. Tim and Steve were frequent collaborators and released a duo album in 2010 called Dogwood. Ten years later, they created another album of co-written material, but Gulley passed away suddenly from cancer soon after it was completed, making the title, Still Here, all the more meaningful.
BGS: How does it feel to release this record? With Steve’s unexpected passing I imagine it must be a more heavy feeling than a typical record release.
TS: Yeah, I’m really glad it’s finally out. Steve was really looking forward to this record coming out. We were both excited about the songs and it ended up being his last recording, which was hard on all of us. And now it’s part of his legacy. After Steve passed, I talked to the label about maybe coming up with a different title besides Still Here, but we decided it was a very appropriate title because his music is still here. He would have been proud of it. I know that for sure.
How long had you known Steve?
I didn’t know him when I was younger, although he was around and playing. He was mainly playing up at Renfro Valley in Kentucky and he didn’t travel much until he joined Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver which would have been in the late ‘90s or around 2000. I was playing a festival somewhere with Blue Highway and he came up to the record table and we started talking like we’d known each other forever because we knew a lot of the same people. We just hit it off. He was the one that first suggested we write and it was either the first or second time we got together we wrote four songs in one day. And all four of them got cut. I felt like at that point we had something special. We seemed to have a wavelength that we could touch off of each other. That’s really rare. You don’t get that with a lot of people.
The subject matter in the songs on this record seems very personal, and often about people you know. I would imagine that it’s sort of therapeutic, maybe in the same way that journaling might be, to write about personal things like that. Is that how you feel about it?
That’s a good way to put it and I did used to journal. Some of them, like “Back When It Was Easy,” are just about general topics that we know about. Whereas “Long Way Around the Mountain” and “She Threw Herself Away” are about things that actually happened that we chronicled about friends. And sometimes they are big stories that you just can’t stay away from. “She Comes Back to Me When We Sing” is a story we’d both seen on Facebook about this guy’s mother who was in advanced stages of Alzheimer’s and didn’t know anybody until she sang with her son. And when that happened, she remembered all the words and she could remember everything. We thought that was a really inspirational story and deserved to be a song.
You’ve been writing for so long that it seems like you’ve been able to build the skill of telling a story through song, rather than narrating a timeline to music.
Yes, that’s where it’s at. That’s where the craft comes in that you only develop by doing it. I really didn’t know how to write a song when I started. But you learn little things along the way through trial and error. It’s like anything but it’s really difficult to learn how to do something like write a song out of a book — although I have a whole collection of them here. I have lots of books about songwriting like Jimmy Webb’s Tunesmith and Sheila Davis’ The Craft of Lyric Writing which is really good. You can learn tips, but you’re not going to learn how to write from a book. So it’s a matter of doing it.
I don’t remember exactly where I heard it, but I think I remember Jimmy Webb talking about writing “Wichita Lineman” and him saying that it was fully fictitious. But that he felt like, as a songwriter, he should be able to write about people he didn’t know. That he should be able to understand people well enough to write a story that was convincing without it having to be true. I could be misremembering that, though.
You may not be. I think that there’s actually a book out about that song, “Wichita Lineman,” that I finished here last year and I believe you’re right and he’s right. I think that being able to tell a story about somebody you don’t know is important. There’s a song that I wrote really early on called “Midwestern Town” that Ronnie Bowman recorded. That song is totally fictional. I didn’t know anybody like the character in that song. But I’ve had a lot of people come up and say that they did know someone like that or that it could have been them and that song made a big difference to them. It was a comforting song. You’ve got to be able to get inside people’s heads and think the way that they would. You have to know what your character might do in any given scenario. I can’t remember all the times I’ve been co-writing and said, “What would this guy do?”
Have you written songs as long as you’ve been playing guitar? When did you started writing songs?
I guess I wrote all the way back when I first started playing guitar, but I wasn’t really serious about it. I had written some songs before I played with Alison in the early ‘90s and we actually recorded one of them, but it never came out which was my fault. She wanted to put an instrumental I’d written called “Canadian Bacon” on Every Time You Say Goodbye, but I talked her out of it. I told her we needed to record “Cluck Old Hen” because we were so psyched about Ron [Block] being in the band and his playing on that. And I don’t regret that though it probably would have meant more money.
You were in Union Station from 1990 to ‘92, right? That was a very cool lineup of that band. How did you feel about it at the time?
I was blown away by it. I loved it and it was really cool that it worked out because the first time she talked to me about playing with her, it was back when I was in a group called The Boys in the Band. We played at SPBGMA and her band was there but her guitar player, Dave Denman, was leaving. She called me a few weeks after that and asked if I’d be interested. At that point, she had only recorded Too Late to Cry and I was really impressed with the songs, with John Pennell’s writing, and her singing. I had already committed to playing with a different group though so I had to decline.
About two or three years later I had started a group called Dusty Miller that she was a fan of. That band had Barry Bales and Adam Steffey in it. The three of us kind of grew up together playing music. We’re all from Kingsport, Tennessee. I actually gave Adam his first mandolin lesson, which is such a joke. [Laughs] Adam didn’t know anything about the instrument at all at the time. I tried to show him some stuff and I just kept thinking, “That guy’s never gonna get it.” And I barely knew how to play myself but I tried to show him “Bluegrass Breakdown” and he just couldn’t get it. He got with a different teacher after that and got real serious about it. The next time I saw him play, I was like, “What happened here?” [Laughs] It was like the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I take absolutely no credit for that whatsoever.
Barry Bales was a student of James Alan Shelton. And James and I both taught at the Guitar Shop in Kingsport. That’s where I met Adam and gave him that lesson, and I met Barry down there, too. We all three ended up playing in The Boys in the Band. And then we started Dusty Miller. Alison liked that rhythm section so she offered the job to all three of us at the same time, and we took it. This was early 1990 and we played our first show in May — I think it was at the Station Inn. It was just incredible. We played some amazing places, but it was during the period of the band when we were all traveling in a van and staying in one hotel room.
I was playing with Alison when I met Tony Rice. We ended up playing a lot of shows together because he and Alison had the same agent and were on the same label. I never will forget the first time I really ever talked to Tony much. We were playing right before him at Winterhawk (which is now Grey Fox) and I broke a string on the last song we played. We got a standing ovation so I was backstage digging around, trying to find a string so we could do an encore. And Tony walks over with “the antique” and says, “Hey, man, here, play this.” I had a smile from ear-to-ear and Alison was smiling too.
What was it like getting to put that biography of Tony together? What led to that?
Well, a few years after that, after I left Union Station and started Blue Highway, I was still playing shows with Tony because Blue Highway had signed with Rounder, too. We were at a show with Tony and I said, “Man, have you ever thought about a biography?” And he said, “Well, actually, yeah, I have thought of that. But I’ll tell you what,” he said, “I think you’d be the ideal person to write it.” I said OK and started on it. That was about 2000 and it took 10 years to finish.
Three years into it, Caroline Wright came on board through Pam [Rice, Tony’s wife]. Caroline is a journalist and her mom was a member of the bluegrass community from New York state. Caroline lived in Hawaii at that time and had written a really well-done article about Tony in Listener magazine. I had started Tony’s book, but I was bogged down with it and wasn’t making a lot of progress and Pam suggested that Caroline come on board. We did four or five major, huge interviews with Tony that could have each been a book by themselves. And when we started transcribing them, we realized that Tony was so eloquent that we had to put it in Tony’s words. We couldn’t make it a narrative biography. That’s why it’s laid out the way it is. It’s chronological but in Tony’s words.
I’m really glad that we got to do it. Somebody would have done a book on him eventually, but I’m really glad that it came out before he left us. He’s one of those generational talents. I just don’t know that there’s going to be many people ever come along again who have an impact like that. He’s in the same league as Earl Scruggs, a top talent who created a language on the instrument.
So, it’s been a weird year, obviously. What have you been doing during this time?
I’ve been doing a lot of co-writing over Zoom. The other day I wrote my one-hundred-and-fourteenth song since the pandemic started.
Whoa!
Thomm Jutz and I’ve written 40 or so, just the two of us and, you know, you just get into the habit of doing it every week. I feel like Zoom is going to stick around and be the standard after the pandemic. I think it’s changed the way a lot of people think about co-writing. It makes you more disciplined and more productive. The technology just makes it easy. There’s no reason now for me to make a trip to Nashville, which is like four and a half hours, and get a hotel and all that when I can do all of it from home on my computer.
When you’re writing or doing work, are you the sort of person that has to change into regular people’s clothes to feel productive, or can you stay in your pajamas and be productive?
I think I’ve written at least a hundred of those 114 songs in my pajamas. [Laughs] I’m not going to dress up, I just want to be comfortable.
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.
Tom Power’s recent Toy Heart episode with Alice Gerrard, whom I first knew as Alice Foster, reminded me of a 1959 visit several of us Oberlin College folkies made to Antioch College. In 2009, doing research on my early bluegrass experiences, I sent my friend Mayne Smith an email asking about his experiences when he met Alice and her late husband Jeremy Foster during that visit.
Mayne and I are the same age and have known each other since 1953. We got into folk music as teens in Berkeley, California, and discovered bluegrass together from 1957 to 1959 while in Oberlin, Ohio. We first heard it on records and radio, and at this time had seen it live only once, when we met banjoists Eric Weissberg and Marshall Brickman at a 1958 spring vacation homecoming party in New York City. We had begun trying to play bluegrass with a circle of Oberlin classmates, folk music enthusiasts learning new music and working on new instruments.
In the introduction to my memoir, Bluegrass Generation, I mention our trips to Antioch as undergrads, where we met the Fosters.
Antioch was, like Oberlin, a liberal arts college that drew students from all over the country and beyond. At the time, its co-op system, which placed students in jobs every second semester or so, was thought to be radical. Unlike Oberlin, which still drew on a pious abolitionist point of view about many things, it tended to be a more socially relaxed place. A Fun Place to Party.
Mayne Smith, Kaz Inaba, and Neil Rosenberg after a morning of jamming at the Hotel New Hankyu in Osaka, Japan. April 31, 1991.
Mayne was the first of our Oberlin bluegrass circle to meet the Fosters during one of these trips. This music was still a new and distant thing to us; we didn’t own tape recorders. In my email I asked Mayne:
What memories do you have of visiting Antioch and meeting Alice and Jeremy? I went there several times and recall you being there, but don’t have any documents like tapes or photos that include you. Any recollections, however hazy, would be welcome. I remember that you had some kind of document from the Fosters giving you honorary membership in [their band] the Green County Stump Jumpers — do you still have that, was it dated?
Mayne answered the next day:
Neil, I have (for me) unusually vivid memories of our first visit to Antioch and hanging out at the Fosters’ place because it was there that I contracted the Stanley Brothers virus. I think it must have been in the spring of 1959 because I had already heard Flatt & Scruggs and understood that this was called bluegrass music.
But first, Jeremy’s hand-drawn certificate (on a 4×6 card) is undated, but it reads:
I also vaguely remember showing Marge [Ostrow] (later married to Mike Seeger for a while) how I played Carter Family style guitar. I think I got it from Dave Fredrickson — using the thumb to pick melody, then the index finger brushing down/up. I heard later that Mike was impressed by the fact that Marge had adopted this approach, and asked her where she learned it.
But about the Stanley Brothers. I recall a thinly carpeted living room with expansive white bookshelves along the wall opposite the windows. At some point, in an afternoon I think, Jeremy put on a tape of the Stanley Brothers in live performance — my gut tells me it was one of the ones Mike Seeger had recorded at New River Ranch in like 1957. As soon as I heard that totally live, undoctored sound I was captivated, and I believe I sat and lay on that hard floor listening to live Stanley Brothers shows (several sets, at least) for hours. My mind was blown. Knowing it was totally live and without studio gimmicks and buried background effects, it came home to me how the fluctuating balance of instruments and voices was accomplished by movement in relation to the microphone and each other, how at times there were lovely breathing spaces in the sound while people shifted from instrumental breaks to solo vocals to harmony vocals. How nobody was using a lot of physical effort to project the sound, yet it penetrated, flowed, darted ahead, waxed and waned like the mating dance of a single complex organism — and how comfortable and familiar the musicians were with what they were singing and playing.
I was learning not only about how bluegrass fits together, but also about what a band can be like when it’s been playing constantly together, day in and day out, for weeks — for years.
I don’t believe I’ve ever had a more intense listening and learning experience, nor one that had such a profound effect on my life.
I should also mention that this was partly possible because I could tell that [Jeremy] and Alice understood what I was going through and supported me by staying out of the way. I felt toward them the way a bridegroom feels about the best man and maid of honor: I could give myself over to the intensity of the music in a nurturing environment. (In retrospect, it was kind of like having a trusted support team when you first get stoned on something very strong.)
I will always be grateful to them both.
If you were around when this happened, I don’t remember it. I just blanked on everything else but those sounds.
I wasn’t at the Fosters when this happened, which was not in the spring of 1959 as Mayne recalled, but a few months earlier, during the January break between semesters. While he visited them, I was off jamming with Guy Carawan, who’d given a concert at Antioch that weekend. I didn’t meet Alice and Jeremy until they brought the Green County Stump Jumpers to an Oberlin Hootenanny a year later.
In May 1959, our old Berkeley folk scene friend Sandy Paton (co-founder of Folk Legacy records) was the headliner at the annual Oberlin Folk Festival. By then our circle had become The Lorain County String Band. Sandy heard our festival set and said he knew a British folk record company producer who was looking for American bluegrass and old-timey. He suggested we make a demo he could send to his friend. We cut it at the student radio station, but it was never sent.
That summer, back home in Berkeley, we started The Redwood Canyon Ramblers, Northern California’s first bluegrass band. The story of that band, and of Mayne’s subsequent career as a singer/songwriter and steel guitarist with continuing excursions into bluegrass, is told well at Mayne’s website.
But it does not include an important detail — his groundbreaking work as a scholar. His Master’s Thesis, “Bluegrass Music and Musicians” (Indiana U., 1964) and the article he developed from it, “An Introduction to Bluegrass” (Journal of American Folklore, 1965) opened the door to the serious study of this music. His transcendent aural immersion at the Fosters was the seed that gave him the vision to accomplish this work. I and the many who have followed are indebted to Mayne Smith for blazing the trail.
A visit to the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum will enlighten and entertain any fan of acoustic music. While a road trip to Owensboro, Kentucky, will inevitably have to wait, you can enjoy these new videos with museum executive director Chris Joslin, who gives a close-up look at the history of bluegrass, as well as insight about what you’ve gotta have to play bluegrass.
From the early sources to contemporary interpretations, the museum exhibits tell the story of bluegrass music via documentary-style films, artifacts, images, and hands-on experiences with bluegrass instruments. Joslin takes virtual visitors through each area commenting on the exhibits and concluding each area with a live performance of a song that was significant to that specific era.
“Until you can travel to the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum, we will bring it to you,” Joslin says. “The virtual tour is a great introduction, but I can’t wait for you to see the Hall of Fame in person and to experience the energy around the music firsthand. What Bill Monroe created is now enjoyed around the world, and Owensboro, Kentucky, is at the headwaters of this uniquely American genre of music.”
Curious about how bluegrass got its name? Wondering why bluegrass festivals became popular? Take a look and learn more about Bill Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, and so many others, with this guided tour through the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum.
Del McCoury and Jim Lauderdale will host the 30th Annual IBMA Awards show on September 26 in Raleigh, North Carolina.
“This year we celebrate both the 30th anniversary of the International Bluegrass Music Awards and the 80th birthday of Hall of Famer Del McCoury! What could be better than Del co-hosting the Awards Show with the legendary Jim Lauderdale?!” said Paul Schiminger, executive director of the IBMA. “It is sure to be a fun and memorable evening with unforgettable performances by awards nominees. This is the biggest night in bluegrass music, as we honor excellence over the past year and over entire careers.”
Even among the pantheon of music’s finest artists, Del McCoury stands alone. From the nascent sound of bluegrass that charmed hardscrabble hillbilly honky-tonks, rural schoolhouse stages, and the crowning glory of the Grand Ole Opry to the present-day culture-buzz of viral videos and digital streams, Del is the living link, headlining sold-out concerts to music festivals of all genres, including one carrying his namesake. In 2010 McCoury received a National Heritage Fellowship lifetime achievement award from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2011 he was elected into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame. A two-time Grammy winner, McCoury has won numerous IBMA Awards, as well, including Entertainer of the Year a record-setting nine times.
Jim Lauderdale won the Best Bluegrass Album Grammy in 2002 for Lost in the Lonesome Pines, his collaboration with Ralph Stanley & The Clinch Mountain Boys, and won a second Grammy for his album The Bluegrass Diaries in 2008. A lauded singer-songwriter, he has been a symbol for creative integrity and prolificacy for thirty-two albums over decades of recording. He’s an A-list Nashville songwriter whose songs have ruled the music charts while recording an eclectic catalog of albums. His prolific streak of releases continues in 2019, as he finishes his tenth bluegrass album.
Claire Armbruster and Mary Burdette return as executive producers of the show.
Photo of Jim Lauderdale: Scott Simontacchi Photo of Del McCoury from DelMcCoury.com
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