Tag: bluegrass

Reissued Recordings Highlight the Final Years of the Original Kentucky Colonels

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Bob Warford remembers a lot about the vibrant Southern California bluegrass and old-timey scene of the 1960s. But he doesn’t remember exactly how he came to be a member of what proved to be the final lineup of the Kentucky Colonels, the near-mythic group anchored by brothers Roland White on mandolin, Eric White Jr. on bass and, at times, guitar magician Clarence White.

“My life was getting complicated at that time,” Warford, a banjo player, recalls. “I knew Clarence slightly. Roland slightly. I knew Eric. Maybe it was Eric who suggested me for it.”

He had grown up in the college town of Claremont, about half an hour east of Los Angeles, where he fell into bands — the Reorganized Dry City Players and the Mad Mountain Ramblers among them — with such future notables as David Lindley and Chris Darrow. After starting college further east at the University of California Riverside, he was in a band that played festivals and on the popular “Cal’s Corral” TV show (hosted by flashy Western-fashioned car dealer, Cal Worthington), appearing on the latter alongside the Gosdin Brothers, the Hillmen (featuring future Byrds star Chris Hillman) and others.

In any case, at the end of ’66 or beginning of ’67, in the home stretch of his undergraduate work and with plans for grad school on his way to becoming an attorney, Warford was asked to join the Colonels for a series of gigs at the famed Ash Grove club in Hollywood over the course of a few months. And in that February, in the midst of the Ash Grove run, the band was recruited to go in the studio for sessions to be featured on the pilot of a radio show titled “American Music Time,” hosted by and featuring  married couple Dave and Lu Spencer and with crowd sounds added to give the impression that it was done in front of an audience.

It seems to have aired that March, though Warford can’t confirm that. It was, however, released on an album in the late 1970s — without the Spencers’ parts or the crowd noise — with the title 1966. On June 30 of this year it was reissued by label Sundazed and doubled in length with previously unreleased recordings of the Country Boys, the pre-Colonels band the White brothers had in the late ’50s and early ’60s.

“These were not done with any high-tech situation,” Warford recalls of the two (or maybe three) sessions held for the radio show. “Everything was played live. We didn’t do a large number of songs.”

There are some bluegrass regulars (“Soldier’s Joy,” in short versions bookending the original release, Earl Scruggs’ “Earl’s Breakdown,” two Osborne Brothers tunes), some adaptations from country (Merle Haggard’s “The Fugitive”) and such. The performances are strong and lively, especially so considering that this was a reconstituted lineup of the band which had not played together a lot. In fact, before this run of gigs, the last official gig had been in October, 1965. Three of the five members were now new. Roland White was still there, and Eric was back, too, after having split from the ensemble some years before. Founding dobro player Leroy (Mack) McNees and banjoist Billy Ray Latham had moved on, as was ace fiddler Scotty Stoneman, who had played with the band in ’65.

“One thing this shows is that with or without Clarence, the Colonels was a good bluegrass band,” says folk music journalist and historian Jon Hartley Fox, who wrote the liner notes for the new 1966 release. “It’s sort of looked back on now maybe as the vehicle for Clarence. But they were a really good band in their own right. I think Roland White has historically been undervalued. Roland was a really good band leader. When it’s just Roland and Eric from the original band it’s still got the spirit and the same feel. The band was way more than Clarence and four other guys.”

As for Clarence, he’d begun his shift to a focus on electric guitar, picking up some major session work, which would lead to him playing on the Byrds’ country landmark Sweetheart of the Rodeo album and then later joining the band. But at that point, he was around some of the time, too. The band Warford joined now was filled out by fellow newcomers Dennis Morris on guitar and Bobby Crane on fiddle — though Morris’ last name might have been Morse and Crane’s first name may have been Jimmy. There’s a lot of uncertainty around this time, not least the status of the band itself, which was fine by Warford.

“I was still in college and was going to start grad school,” he says from his home in Riverside, where he settled into a successful law career. “For me, I wasn’t looking at anything long-term. I was thinking, ‘This is fun and these guys are really good players and we can do this while we do it.’ I didn’t have a view that it was about to end or that it could continue.”

As it turned out, it was about to end. The radio sessions would prove to be the last official recordings by the band. It also, in some ways, captures the last glimmer of that vibrant Southern California roots-music scene.

“If people think it’s tough to make a living playing bluegrass now, which it is, in 1967, especially in California, it was impossible,” says Fox. “If you look around the rest of the country, it was lean times for bluegrass.” Still, the Colonels had earned status.

“Even without Clarence in the band, they would’ve been the leading bluegrass band in California,” Fox says, crediting Roland White for keeping the Colonels alive as a band. “And in the national consciousness they were still one of the biggest things going. They really showed a kind of drive and ambition that a lot of people admired.”

But as time went on, that meant less and less — big fish, shrinking pond. Even at its peak a few years earlier, the scene in the area was not a way for musicians to get big paydays. But once the Beatles arrived and Dylan had gone electric, it was a different world. Locally, nothing captured the change more than Chris Hillman turning in his mandolin for an electric bass and co-founding the Byrds. Bluegrass just didn’t have much of a draw.

In 1961, the band, still known as the Country Boys, had what could have been a big break when it was hired to appear twice on The Andy Griffith Show. Unfortunately, it turned out to be an opportunity that fizzled. The producers wanted to have them back, “But the family moved and they couldn’t find them,” Fox says. “So they put an ad in the paper.”

And answering the ad was, yes, the Dillards, who auditioned and were hired, playing members of the mountain family the Darlings, ultimately performing 13 songs over the course of six episodes from 1963 to 1966 and gaining a national profile.

“In retrospect, I think the Dillards were much better suited to that show,” Fox says, citing again the Dillards’ bigger flair for showmanship. “The Colonels never had a show really,” he says. “They got up and played music.”

“The Dillards were such a mowing-down machine,” says Grammy Award-nominated reissue producer and annotator Mary Katherine Aldin, who worked at the Ash Grove starting in 1960. Through that latter role, she worked closely with the Colonels and later won the 1991 NAIRD Indie Award for producing and annotating the collection The Kentucky Colonels, Long Journey Home and wrote the liner notes for The New Kentucky Colonels Live in Holland 1973. Getting festival bookings became increasingly difficult, she says.

“It was, ‘We already have a bluegrass band, don’t need more,’” she says of the frustrations, and of course the one they already had was the Dillards, more often than not.

An exception was the Newport Folk Festival, and the Colonels did play there in 1964. But any momentum from that appearance was hard to sustain. By the time Warford joined, options had become fewer and fewer, not just on the festival level but on the local circuit that had been at least a steady, if unglamorous, platform.

“Now that I think about it, other than the Ash Grove, which was always a venue for folk and blues and old-timey stuff, there used to be pizza parlors and stuff with bluegrass bands on the weekends,” Warford says. “I don’t recall any still around then.”

The Ash Grove did remain the prime location for the music, regardless, with such future stars as Ry Cooder, Jackson Browne, and Taj Mahal citing it as a place where they could meet and learn from their heroes. The Colonels’ and the club’s legacies were very much entwined, right from the start. The White brothers, with their family having moved from Maine to Burbank on the Eastern part of L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, started playing the Ash Grove shortly after it opened on Melrose Ave. in Hollywood in 1958 with folk and blues fanatic Ed Pearl at the helm.

A year before that, the band was known as the Three Little Country Boys, with Roland on mandolin, Eric on banjo, Clarence — barely in his teens — on guitar, and sister Joanne sometimes on bass. Soon they won a radio station competition and changed the name simply to the Country Boys, with Eric taking over the bass and banjoist Billy Ray Latham and dobro player Leroy “Mack” McNees added to fill out the lineup, though that would change, too, when Eric left and Roger Bush was recruited.

“It was 1959 when I joined them,” Bush says now. “Got a phone call one day from Leroy Mack, said he was playing with Billy Ray and Roland, and the brother Eric played bass fiddle. That is it. The whole little band. They were working, played a radio show and TV show with the car salesman who had live music. Playing at the Ash Grove, had a deal with the owner, if he could call us when somebody didn’t show up and we could come fill some time, we would have the full run of the building during the day to rehearse with the full sound system. Then [we played] every Saturday morning.”

The family dynamic had its tensions, it seems, and the breaking point that led to Bush’s entry was sartorial.

“Roland tried to put everyone in white bucks,” Bush says. “They got up one morning at home, the White family, there was a note hung on the bass fiddle from Eric that said, ‘I quit.’ They opened the back door and there was his white bucks that had been on fire. Leroy called me up, I said, ‘You know, I’ve never played the bass fiddle, but wouldn’t mind giving it a whirl. We did a show, a school or college. That was my first show. I hadn’t gotten together with them but one time. We did the first song, nobody stepped to the microphone. They looked at me and said, ‘Go talk to them.’ That was the beginning of me being the talker in the band. They didn’t call me Flutter-Lip for nothing. I was always the talker.”

This is the time period represented in the album’s expanded tracks. The recordings, raw but lively, show an exuberant, youthful ensemble with vibrant performances of mostly traditional material (“Head Over Heels In Love With You,” “Shady Grove,” “I’ll Go Steppin’ Too,” “Flint Hill Special”) and a modicum of hokum to boot (“Polka on the Banjo,” “Shuckin’ the Corn,” “Mad Banjo”).
Fox stresses that these early recordings were before Clarence broke out as a star attraction.

“He wasn’t playing lead yet,” he says. “He didn’t really start playing any lead until Roland went into the army in 1962.”

For the older brother, that produced something of a crossroads-level shock on return. “Roland talked about how surprised he was coming home from Germany, and here was Clarence playing fiddle tunes [on guitar],” Fox says. “But his rhythm playing on the old stuff is great.”

It was around this time that they recorded an album and, at the urging of mentor Joe Maphis, took on the name the Kentucky Colonels, regardless of the geographical disconnect. The album, The New Sound of Bluegrass America, came out in 1963. Clarence’s flat-picking shined, making him, for many, the band’s star attraction – even more so with the instrumental album, Appalachian Swing!, with fiddler Bobby Slone added to the lineup, released by prominent LA jazz, world, and folk label World Pacific Records.

Katherine Aldin witnessed this transformation and Clarence’s emerging stardom up close at the Ash Grove: “One thing about them – Clarence, even in those days, overshadowed everyone in the band,” she says. “So you’d get a whole flock of people who would come in and sit at the foot of the stage. There was a long metal bar with single seats in a V shape around the stage. The Clarence fanatics would get there early and sit there and glue their eyes on Clarence’s hands for 45 minutes and when they were done, just go away. He would suck the air out of the room. The other guys were really good too and wonderful human beings. But Clarence was head and shoulders above the rest of the world.”

His presence went beyond his skills. “Clarence would sit in the front room — there was a concert room and front room,” Aldin explains. “And he would sit in the front room between sets and any kid who came up to him, he would show them anything. And there were a lot of kids. He would show them a lick, or let them play his guitar, or if they brought a guitar he would play with them.”

But momentum was hard to sustain. Mack left the group in ’64 (he’s only on a few of the Swing! tracks) to work in his dad’s construction business, then Slone left and fiddle star Stoneman came in and for all intents by the end of ’65 the band was inactive until that short, final ’67 stretch.

“I think the band just kinda ran out of work to do,” Bush says.

The members went on to other jobs, in and out of music. Clarence famously became an in-demand session player with his switch to electric guitar and supported by James Burton, one of the top guitarists on the scene and a veteran of Ricky Nelson’s band (and later the leader of Elvis Presley’s TCB ensemble).

“James Burton had heard Clarence and started offering him session work — ‘I’ve got more work than I can do.’” says Diane Bouska, who married Roland White in the 1980s and performed with him until his death in April 2022 at age 83. “So Clarence started doing electric guitar session work.”

Clarence found himself working on Nelson sessions, as well as the Monkees and as lead guitarist on the album Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers, the first project for Clark after leaving the Byrds. Then Chris Hillman, still in the Byrds, brought him in to play on a couple of songs for the band’s Younger Than Yesterday album, which led to more work with the group (including on Sweetheart of the Rodeo) and ultimately full membership in the last version of the band.

As such, Clarence wasn’t around much for the 1967 Ash Grove shows or the radio sessions captured for this reissued album, though Fox says that he seems to be on at least one of the songs. Shortly after that, Roland was hired by Bill Monroe and moved to Nashville. He and Bush did reconnect in the early ‘70s in the proto-newgrass band Country Gazette, which also featured fiddler Byron Berline, an LA mainstay who had played a handful of dates with the Colonels.

Clarence made his place with the Byrds, showcasing his dazzling skills on a B-bender — a Fender Telecaster modified by him and Gene Parsons, the band’s then-drummer, with a lever attached to the strap allowing him to bend the namesake string to simulate the sound of a pedal steel. He also continued doing sessions for Joe Cocker, Randy Newman, the Everly Brothers, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, and Rita Coolidge, among others, as well as returning to his acoustic roots in Muleskinner, a progressive bluegrass-swing group with mandolinist David Grisman, fiddler Peter Greene, banjoist Bill Keith, and guitarist Peter Rowan, a precursor of the groundbreaking David Grisman Quintet.

Then in 1973, Clarence, Roland, and Eric came back together as the White Brothers (sometimes billed as the New Kentucky Colonels) for shows in the U.S. and Europe. Following a show in Palmdale in the Southern California, Clarence was hit and killed by a drunk driver as he and Roland were loading equipment into their car. He was just 29.

It is hard to extricate the Colonels’ legacy from that of Clarence.

“The main thing was Clarence White’s guitar playing,” says country star Marty Stuart in an email. Stuart is arguably the leading authority on all things Clarence White, not to mention the owner of the original B-bender, which he played alongside Byrds founders Hillman and Roger McGuinn on the 2018 tour marking the 50th anniversary of the Sweethearts album.

“To me they are still influential because of the level of musicianship and they remain as the beloved founding fathers of the Southern California bluegrass scene. I had dinner with Gene Autry one time and he said, ‘I didn’t say I was the best singing cowboy, but I was about the first and the rest don’t matter.’ I would place the Colonels as field correspondents, national ambassadors for the world of bluegrass music in Southern California when barely anyone else was there to help out. They also introduced bluegrass music to an entirely new generation of listeners that old timers might not have gotten to.”

But there’s more to it than just Clarence. McNees, who wrote several of the few original songs the band did in the early days, found that out when he learned that modern country-rock band Blackberry Smoke had done a version of one of them, “Memphis Special,” on the 2003 album Bad Luck Ain’t No Crime.

“I didn’t know anything about it,” he says from his home in Thousand Oaks, north of Los Angeles. “I got a phone call [a while later] from an accounting firm to make sure I was the writer. Lo and behold, a couple weeks later I got a real nice check for royalties not being paid and after that another. After that I became an acquaintance of the singer [Charlie Starr]. Then they were coming to Los Angeles to play the House of Blues. I couldn’t go so my son went for me. I said, ‘Ask where they got the song.’ He came back and told me, ‘Well, he said that when he was nine years old he was watching The Andy Griffith Show and saw these guys playing bluegrass and asked his father to buy our album for him. Glad he did.”

And glad it wasn’t one of the Dillards’ episodes.

Is it any surprise that there is still enough interest in the Kentucky Colonels to merit this new release? Marty Stuart has one crisp, pointed word to answer that question.

“No.”

Album cover illustration by Olaf Jens, courtesy of Sundazed.

LISTEN: Caroline Owens, “No More Blue Moons In Kentucky”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Caroline Owens
Hometown: Denton, North Carolina
Song: “No More Blue Moons In Kentucky” featuring Darin & Brooke Aldridge
Release Date: August 4, 2023
Label: Skyline Records

In Their Words: “I knew from the moment I heard this song that I wanted to record it. I’ve always been a sucker for a sad song, and this one hits me right in the heart every single time. It’s one of those songs that I know I will have to mentally remove myself from before I sing it; it hits that deep.

“I was fortunate to have my musical heroes, Darin & Brooke Aldridge, featured on this track – a lifelong dream of mine, and an absolute blast to work with in the studio. And as always, many thanks to my record label, Skyline Records, for their belief in me.

“I know I speak for all artists when I say that it takes a village to do what we do. And I am thankful for that village, and to everyone who has supported the release of ‘No More Blue Moons.'” – Caroline Owens

Photo Credit: Anna Haas Photography

Artist of the Month: Mipso

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

If one were to chart North Carolina string band Mipso’s career over the past decade on a line graph, you’d see a steadily rising, ever-growing musical output and an ever-burgeoning audience for their brand of grounded-yet-dreamy folk pop. This journey through roots music has paralleled their peers – bands and artists like Watchhouse, Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle, and Della Mae – but they’ve outlasted more than a few similar ensembles that have fallen to the wayside over those years. Strikingly, even while enjoying near constant growth since they coalesced in 2012, the band has eschewed higher echelons of the Americana star-scape, choosing instead to scale their business and their art intentionally and deliberately.

Theirs is a sound and musical aesthetic ready for the “big time” – they’ve garnered hundreds of millions of streams – but Mipso (made up of Wood Robinson, Libby Rodenbough, Jacob Sharp, and Joseph Terrell) seem very happy with where they’ve landed since their consecutive popular and critically-acclaimed releases Coming Down the Mountain (2017), Edges Run (2018), and 2020’s Mipso. Each album saw the group gain traction, gain fans, and gain notoriety. Still, they aren’t defined by their ambitions; and their ambitions don’t seem to ever be conflated with conquering anything. Instead, this is a band building something.

Mipso’s sixth studio album, Book of Fools (due out August 25), certainly speaks to this phenomenon. The group feels perfectly at home with one another; they’re a chosen-family band – together, they’ve been through their college days, their road-dogging era, their “I think this might not just be a pipe dream…” successes, landing with a crystalline point of view that’s expansive, complicated, and rich, but doesn’t feel like it has anything to prove. There’s no desperation here – to claw back pre-COVID reality, to tour arenas, to brand and merchandise their way to an empire. As songwriter, guitarist, and singer Joseph Terrell puts it in a press release, “Book of Fools feels more relaxed, more confident, more us – like we’re wearing our favorite clothes and telling our favorite story and it feels exciting again.”

“The Numbers,” the second single from Book of Fools, winks to this measured, black-and-white view of their own jobs and careers – versus “real jobs,” let’s say – and the economic access that’s never been a hallmark of either roots music or the generation to which Mipso’s members belong. By prioritizing building art and community over bottom line, Mipso demonstrate a class consciousness that places themselves and their music in alignment with workers, laborers, and the every-person, making the message behind “The Numbers” palpably genuine.

“I looked around at this cruel place where we live,” Libby Rodenbough explained via press release, describing the U.S. and the stock market, “And I felt forlorn that the NASDAQ offers anybody any kind of comfort. How do I know things are bad? Because I feel it, and I see it.”

Who are “The Numbers” supposed to comfort? And what exactly are they supposed to indicate? Mipso utilize their post-modern string band trappings – in a similar fashion to Nickel Creek or Crooked Still – to explore these ideas in ways that the forebears of bluegrass and old-time did as well, in their own time and within the social and political issues of their own days.

Genre-wise, Mipso may have traveled a great distance from their bluegrassy early days as a string band quartet dripping with North Carolinian roots music traditions, but again their journey, in this regard especially, does not feel overtly aspirational. These are not sounds and production values adopted in order to sell out bigger rooms or fill bigger stages. The music of Book of Fools  (and really any LP in their catalog since Dark Holler Pop) is as intentional as the messages within it, so one can feel and enjoy the old-timey touches that underpin these fully-realized sonic landscapes.

Mipso hasn’t lost touch. They haven’t lost sight of how real the stakes are outside of their own experiences – and within them. While they may not be building a business model reliant on “sheds” and arenas and radio hits and dynamic ticket pricing to be “successful,” you can feel the gratitude they have for their own daily lives and careers, even while they apply critical lenses through which to talk about the social and political issues they and their community face.

It’s exciting, encouraging, and energizing, to appreciate an album that isn’t merely a rung on a career ladder, but is meant to be its own constituent journey – both for Mipso and their listeners. Book of Fools speaks to a trajectory that is neither predictable nor totally quantifiable and isn’t merely about consumption or facilitating an ever-deepening appetite for consumption. That this could be said about almost any release by this prolific foursome speaks to exactly why we’re so pleased to name Mipso our August Artist of the Month.

Watch for our Artist of the Month feature to come later in August and for now, enjoy our Essential Mipso Playlist.

Photo Credit: Calli Westra

LISTEN: Alice Gerrard, “Remember Us”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Alice Gerrard
Hometown: Durham, North Carolina
Song: “Remember Us”
Album: Sun to Sun
Release Date: October 20, 2023
Label: Sleepy Cat Records

In Their Words: “Most of (I would say all) my music has grown from and been influenced by the music of the elders who came before me; by their lives and their experiences. Their daily hard work, whether forced or not, left its mark on everything, and their music reflected and told the story of their lives and their worlds. When I started writing this song, I was thinking about this and about enslaved men, women, and children who were forced onto ships and brought to this country, and how so many were lost. All are gone now but, as I say in the song, [their] ‘Toil and tears touch all you see… we are gone but still our truth remains…’

“We would do well to know the truth, to remember, and to carry on.” – Alice Gerrard

Photo Credit: Libby Rodenbough

Bluegrass & Roots Songs to Strike To

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Hot. Strike. Summer!!

It was just announced that hundreds of thousands of Teamsters driving for shipping and logistics company UPS will avert a strike after their negotiations came through, but even so, dozens of strike authorization votes are happening all across the U.S. as workers the world over watch WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, Amazon and Starbucks unionization drives, and smaller pickets like that at dinner theater Medieval Times. Union membership and public opinions toward unions are at highs not seen since the ’60s, and millennial and Gen-Z workers are joining unions, striking, and picketing at astronomical rates.

It’s important to remember that, although bluegrass in its modern iteration can often feel staunchly conservative, militantly patriotic, and delusionally nostalgic for “old-fashioned values,” it’s a genre that was born from the creativity of working class and impoverished Southerners, Appalachians, and immigrants – and it has always had a pro-worker, leftward bent. Singers, pickers, songwriters, and performers like Hazel Dickens, Ola Belle Reed, the Country Gentlemen, the Johnson Mountain Boys, Mac Wiseman, Earl Scruggs, and so many more were ardent supporters of the working class and hostile towards corporations, mines, and management. There are truly countless, never ending pro-worker, pro-labor songs to choose from in the bluegrass, old-time, and roots-music canon.

Bluegrass and old-time music, though entangled in a dense constellation of roots music and occupying space adjacent to folk music and the folk revival, were anti-corporate greed since before they had names, before Pete Seeger, before the folk revival itself. That legacy is important to place at the very center of bluegrass, a genre of music that was born out of industrialization (see also: Industrial Strength Bluegrass) as mountain folk, Appalachians, and Southerners migrated out of their rural homeplaces to urban industrial centers. Bluegrass was born from radio stations, railroads, from company towns and workers’ barracks. Whether rubber or auto plants in Ohio and Michigan, factories in Chicago, cotton mills and tobacco warehouses in North Carolina, or anywhere else in the region, as poor folks bled out of their ancestral homes to find work and upward mobility, they brought their music and their community mindsets. As bell hooks puts it in Belonging: A Culture of Place, the mountains and rural spaces are where mutual aid and anarchy are concrete, everyday practices, not just philosophies or concepts.

With those people and their music came a penchant for workers’ and labor rights, suspicion of management and company stores and towns, and a vehement, righteous anger at the injustices suffered by working class Southerners no matter where they migrated. It’s easy to find pro-Union songs, songs in support of workers’ health and agency, lyrics that espouse conservation and environmentalism in old-time, bluegrass, and string-band traditions. So easy, in fact, we quickly amassed a 4+ hour playlist featuring some of our favorite songs (bluegrass and beyond) for marching the picket line, raising a fist, and redistributing the power – and wealth – back to the world’s 99%.

Scroll to find the full playlist of Bluegrass & Roots Songs to Strike To. Below, enjoy a few selections from the list.

“In Tall Buildings” – John Hartford

John Hartford describes the doldrums of daily work as almost no one else can. (John Prine gets close with, “How the hell can a person/ Go to work in the mornin’/ And come home in the evenin’/ And have nothing to say?”) At the end of our 30-some years working, what will we have to show for ourselves besides a suit, haircut, and no more life left to give to our “retirement?” Plus, as any career musician can tell you, planning a life around retirement isn’t exactly a good option to begin with.

“Ain’t Gonna Work Tomorrow” – Wilma Lee Cooper

Ain’t gonna work tomorrow, cause it’s STRIKING day! Wilma Lee Cooper will, at long last, join the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame this September. A bluegrass forebear who saw broad commercial success before the genre had a name or an understood identity, she regularly landed tracks with decidedly bluegrass aesthetics on Billboard‘s early country charts.

“Lazy John” – Bruce Molsky

Under capitalism, laziness is a radical act! Be like Lazy John! If you’re working all week in the noon-day sun just for 16 cents, yes, it’s strike time.

“Cotton Mill Man” – Jim & Jesse

As we remember the life and legacy of Jesse McReynolds, who recently passed, it’s striking that although he and his brother Jim performed largely cover songs and tracks written by others, they were still able to express with great subtlety their own points of view through the material they chose. Like “Cotton Mill Man” and Prine’s “Paradise,” which was a hit for the duo, their catalog of recorded and performed material is dense with class awareness.

“Black Waters” – Jean Ritchie

A truly timeless classic that remains as relevant today as in the time of its writing, as clean water protections across the U.S. have been repeatedly gutted since 2016 – and before. Our country continues to show where its priorities are, beating down protests and demonstrations even as popular and supported as Standing Rock, in order to force us to acquiesce and give up protection of our waters. The lyrical hook is even more poignant to someone, like myself, living in Tennessee Valley Authority territory in the Tennessee River Valley – where coal ash and pollutants are still regularly dumped into our waterways. These tales, these experiences, are best told directly from their sources, as in Ritchie singing this song.

“Carpal Tunnel” – Tristan Scroggins

One can find many a recording of “Carpal Tunnel” from across the years, but mandolinist Tristan Scroggins, in his mid-twenties, pointedly places this track in the present, delivering the lament in stark a capella accompanied only by body percussion. He deftly ties the lyric to embodiment and agency and reminds all of us – especially in an age governed by devices causing carpal tunnel writ large – we’re all merely one injury away from bankruptcy. Musicians know this fear intimately, as many a livelihood has been threatened by tendonitis and carpal tunnel.

“Tear Down the Fences” – Ola Belle Reed

A perfect encapsulation of solidarity across our differences – differences constructed by the ruling class to keep us quibbling amongst ourselves while they amass their wealth. This sort of community awareness often feels like a pure byproduct of the internet’s version of globalization, but even a woman banjo player from a tiny town in rural Western North Carolina understood that “all we have is each other,” way back before the worldwide web. It feels obvious to state. It shouldn’t seem remarkable, except that we’ve accepted the narrative that such compassion and ideas couldn’t possibly be born from rural spaces or the South.

“Blue Collar Blues” – Joe Mullins & the Radio Ramblers

From the shop steward of Industrial Strength Bluegrass himself, Joe Mullins, a classic working-man-blues-style bluegrass number about that paycheck to paycheck life. An all-too-common reality for so many pickers! Though that might be more accurately described as blueGRASS collar blues.

“Dark as a Dungeon” – The Country Gentlemen

Bluegrass mining songs are just as iconic in the bluegrass songbook as train songs, cheatin’ songs, murder ballads, and singing about moonshine. This version of “Dark as a Dungeon” by the Country Gentlemen is one of the best examples of the form – many of which made it onto our full playlist.

There are so many more bluegrass, old-time, string band, folk, and Americana songs for striking. Check out our full playlist below and let us know: What is your favorite pro-worker roots song?

Playlist selections by Justin Hiltner, Shelby Williamson, Jon Weisberger, and Amy Reitnouer Jacobs.

Photo Credit: By John Vachon in 1938. “Untitled photo, possibly related to picket line at the King Farm strike. Near Morrisville, Pennsylvania.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

LISTEN: The Grascals, “I Go”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: The Grascals
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “I Go”
Release Date: July 28, 2023
Label: Mountain Home Music Company

In Their Words: “I sat down at the dinner table with one of my best friends, Darren Nicholson, (I work at a recovery treatment center in Asheville, North Carolina, often and I stay with Darren and his wife while in town) back in February of this year with the intention of writing our first song together. ‘I Go’ is the result of that writing session. The song ‘I Go’ comes from a previous vantage point and paints a picture of a darker time in both of our lives. Since Darren and I are now both in recovery together, we bounced some ideas off of each other from our personal journeys… combined with a little fiction that was easy to create from our past intoxicated minds. I feel like the story we came up with is one of my favorite songs I’ve written to date and I’m really glad that it was with Darren.

“‘I Go’ is a catchy melodic, up-tempo tune with an edgy, dark, true-life subject that many choose to avoid. However, we decided to face it head on and The Grascals took it and made it their own – OUR own. I am so excited to be back in this band and creating music with my friends again, and I’m thankful that we are the ones telling this story.” – Jamie Johnson

Photo Credit: Larry Bunn

It’s a Great Time to Be on the Golden Highway

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

(Editor’s Note: Explore more of our Artist of the Month content on Molly Tuttle here.)

It’s halfway through 2023, and Molly Tuttle is having an incredible year. The Grammy-winning artist released her new record — made with her band, Golden Highway — on July 21 via Nonesuch Records. Only days before, Tuttle and Golden Highway were nominated in seven categories at the 34th Annual IBMA Bluegrass Music Awards.

In the middle of her ongoing tour, we caught up with Tuttle and the members of Golden Highway to celebrate her selection as July’s Artist of the Month and to go behind the scenes of making City of Gold. Luckily, it’s easy to make music with friends, and the entire group goes way back. Tuttle says Bronwyn Keith-Hynes (fiddle), Dominick Leslie (mandolin), Shelby Means (bass), and Kyle Tuttle (banjo), have been a part of her musical life for years.

“I’ve known everyone in the band since I was in my late teens, early twenties,” Tuttle explains via video call.

Tuttle and Keith-Hynes attended classes and bluegrass jams together at Berklee College of Music. She met Kyle Tuttle (no relation) at around the age of 17 at an IBMA jam, and met Means while she was in Boston with the all-women string band Della Mae. Tuttle says she and Leslie met as kids, when they would both play the same bluegrass festivals.

“When Molly told me what she was planning, and asked me to join the band and told me who else was going to be in it, I was thinking, ‘I’m already friends with all these people. This is gonna be really cool!’” Means said during our group interview.

When it came time to record City of Gold, the group worked with modern roots music icon Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show on much of the writing. Tuttle says there’s a definite Old Crow influence on the tracklist, which makes sense given “Down Home Dispensary” is a tune on the record originally written for the group best known for hits like “Wagon Wheel.” Tuttle said she initially worried the song was “too Old Crow” for Golden Highway, but is glad it ended up on the record. She and Secor got “into a good groove,” as she puts it, and churned out the tunes for City of Gold in about six months, often while driving in the car or passing around instruments during jam sessions. At least one track, though, was extremely collaborative. Tuttle, Means, Secor and Melody Walker (formerly of Front Country) all had a hand in finishing the tune.

Jerry Douglas, the iconic resonator guitar player who’s worked with almost every name in the bluegrass industry, produced the album. Tuttle said that whereas she had only a few studio days booked for her previous album, Crooked Tree, the group had nearly two weeks of studio time to work with Douglas this time around. When asked what it was like working with the legend, every member of Golden Highway said they’d had a great experience.

“Working with someone who’s a hero, there’s a lot of baggage that comes along with that,” Kyle Tuttle said. “But he’s the kindest dude. He supported us in a really cool way. It wasn’t hard or intimidating or anything like that. I thought it was easy and fun. Every now and then he’d play on a track with us.”

Whether it was encouraging Golden Highway to take breaks or telling funny jokes, the group agreed that Douglas made sure everyone was comfortable and having a good time. Keith-Hynes said Douglas told the band that NASCAR drivers walk slowly to their cars to slow down their nervous systems, encouraging the musicians to do the same on walks between takes.

“Jerry has been a huge musical hero to all of us,” Leslie said. “Getting to spend all that time in the studio was the thrill of a lifetime. We all knew we were in really good hands with him musically going in, but what I didn’t realize was how good of a hang Jerry is. He [was] filling up any moment of dead air with a great story to break the ice.”

On tour, the band’s camaraderie is just as apparent as it is in the studio, or as it was in the group’s music video for “Next Rodeo.” After Tuttle catches her no-good, fictitious cowboy boyfriend cheating, the band collectively decides to kidnap him and give him what for — although, of course, all in good fun. They say they haven’t (yet) had to kidnap anybody on tour, but that doesn’t mean the on-the-road lifestyle isn’t taxing. Kyle Tuttle said he missed a connecting flight the night before the album release show and was up all night driving to make it in time.

“I was checking into the hotel and the sun was already up,” Kyle Tuttle said. “[There was] orange sky and some palm trees. I thought, ‘Damn it’s pretty. I sure wish I was in bed right now.’”

While it’s a good time to be in Golden Highway, it’s also just a great time to be in bluegrass, the group says. All agreed that bluegrass is having a moment, and were happy to report multiple sold-out festivals with lineups that include country, folk, bluegrass, blues, and other roots artists. Means said it’s incredible to see bluegrass acts opening for bigger country artists, because it means the genre is a real selling point.

“I wonder if it’s a backlash to how crazy everything is with technology,” Keith-Hynes thinks aloud. “People want something real. Nothing is more real than people playing acoustic music on acoustic instruments.”

Tuttle said the internet has also really leveled the playing field, making more music accessible to all kinds of fans. Golden Highway has had its own viral moments on TikTok, the short-form video social media app. Earlier this year Tuttle posted a 2022 Halloween clip that has now hit nearly one million views; inspired by a track on the new album, “Alice in the Bluegrass,” the band members are each dressed as a character from Alice in Wonderland, with Tuttle starring as the Queen of Hearts.

“It took people by surprise to see this bluegrass band playing Jefferson Airplane in full Alice in Wonderland dress,” Tuttle said.

As for what’s ahead, the group says they hope to see everyone out on the road. Means shared that the band will announce more dates soon, and that they’ll be touring both coasts after the annual IBMA Bluegrass Music Awards in September. Tuttle and Golden Highway are currently nominated for Entertainer of the Year, Instrumental Group of the Year, Song of the Year and Album of the Year. Tuttle is also nominated for Collaborative Recording of the Year, Female Vocalist of the Year, and Guitar Player of the Year. Bronwyn Keith-Hynes is nominated for Fiddle Player of the Year.

City of Gold can be streamed online wherever you listen to music. Check out more of our Artist of the Month coverage of Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway here and here.

Photo Credit: Chelsea Rochelle

WATCH: Tommy Emmanuel, “Tennessee Stud” (Feat. Nitty Gritty Dirt Band)

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Tommy Emmanuel
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Tennessee Stud” featuring Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
Album: Accomplice Two
Release Date: April 28, 2023
Label: CGP Sounds

In Their Words: “I’ve always loved this song. I wanted to pay tribute with Nitty Gritty to Doc Watson and the original version that appears on the Will The Circle Be Unbroken album. Jeff Hanna sang on that version with Doc. Jeff and I split the verses up so we could come together on the choruses. It was a very relaxed feeling recording with the Nitty Gritty guys. They know it so well and I loved coming up with little changes in the riffs and chords to try to add my own touch to this classic. I love working with such an iconic band. I see them still giving music their ALL! Their passion for music, good songs, and performing for the fans is all still present when you see them and doesn’t seem like the years have taken their edge at all. More power to Nitty Gritty!” – Tommy Emmanuel

Photo Credit: Simone Cecchetti

LISTEN: The Cleverlys, “Creep” (Radiohead Cover)

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: The Cleverlys
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Creep”
Album: Solid Butter
Release Date: July 28, 2023
Label: Mountain Home Music Company

In Their Words: “The audience is loving ‘Creep’ in our live show. Starting with the initial recognition of the iconic Radiohead tune and the irony of us doing it — classic. The 3/4 timing gives it a fresh sound and sets it apart from other covers of the song, but the shining moment comes when Haggis sings the bridge. There’s a point, when he hits and holds out the last note, that the audience explodes, sometimes even giving him a standing ovation in the middle of the song. It’s a chill pimple moment for sure.” – Dr. Digger Cleverly

Photo Credit: Libby Danforth

First & Latest: Special Consensus’ 40+ Year Career

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

(Editor’s Note: BGS is excited to debut a brand new column and feature series, First & Latest, which examines the discographies of artists, musicians, and bands by comparing and contrasting their first album against their latest album.)

Chicago-based, long-running bluegrass outfit Special Consensus have been making records since 1979, when they released their debut, self-titled album. Since then, they’ve put out about 20 records – and they’ve criss-crossed the country and the globe spreading their modern-yet-traditional, hard-driving sound. Banjo player Greg Cahill, who is also a bluegrass industry leader and community builder, is the band’s sole remaining original member and, across those decades, has been the linchpin, the keystone of what has become a true legacy act.

To mark the occasion of their latest release, Great Blue North (released May 12 on Compass Records), we compare and contrast the band’s debut record with this new project with Cahill – it’s First & Latest, from BGS.

What goes through your mind when you hear a song from that first record, like “Like a Train?”

Greg Cahill: I cannot believe it was so long ago! This was our first time in a recording studio and we knew nothing about the process of making a record. It was truly a complete learning experience and we had a wonderful engineer who was a master at finding the exact place to punch in, and he even manually lined up and spliced the ¾” tape on one of the songs so we could use the first part of the one pass and the second part of a later pass. The album is pretty basic and far from top notch, but we did our best and actually sold a good number of that vinyl record.

At that point, did you ever think this band would have such longevity?

We had no idea about where our journey would take us. Special C actually formed sometime in 1973 – two of us were grad students and two had full time jobs. By 1975, I had finished my masters degree and was playing in local pubs and venues while working a full time job in social work, and all I wanted to do was play the banjo. It was 1975 when bass player Marc Edelstein and I decided we wanted to try playing full time – to play and tour as much as possible to get this bluegrass bug out of our system and go back to “real” jobs/life in a couple years. The other two members decided not to join us for this ride, so we found a guitar player and a mandolin player and quit our day jobs to devote full time to playing music. Marc left the band a few years later but the plan didn’t work for me – the bluegrass “addiction” only became stronger. I just “kept on keepin’ on” with no set time limit on my musical journey and now here I am today, never dreaming I would still be going strong with no set end time.

What do you think has been the key to your spanning the decades in bluegrass – besides yourself, that is!

I have been most fortunate to have had some great musicians/people in the band over the years – and still do have wonderful bandmates. Of course I have experienced the ups and downs of playing full time – it was always worrisome when a band member left or when there were slow times but we always found side jobs and teaching opportunities to keep us moving forward. I guess I am just too stubborn to even think about not playing because I love making music so much.

There’s an energy, a drive, even in this earliest recording that you’ve continued to carry with you. Where do you think that comes from? It reminds me of classic Seldom Scene and Johnson Mountain Boys, like you’re always leaning a bit forward into the groove.

I found bluegrass music through folk music (Kingston Trio; Peter, Paul and Mary; Limelighters, etc.) and eventually Pete Seeger – whose music prompted me to buy a long-neck 5-string banjo and then a 6-string guitar and then a 12-string guitar. I played in a folk trio with friends in college, and one day I heard “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” and immediately knew I had to learn how to play the bluegrass banjo. I found the Earl Scruggs book and was obsessed with playing the banjo every free moment of my life and it was his drive and perfect tone and timing that overwhelmed me. Then I heard J.D. Crowe and he became my model and eventually my mentor of sorts, even before I ever met him. This was in the early 1970s. New Grass Revival also grabbed my ear, and I spent hours trying to learn J.D. solos but also Courtney Johnson licks, determined to not lose the drive when playing non-Scruggs/Crowe licks because at that time many folks felt that Scruggs style playing was the only “right” way to play the 5-string. It has always been about the drive for me – and I learned that from J.D. as well – he always had drive, even on slow songs that he played with superb finesse.

“The Singer” feels like that classic move of a bluegrass band playing a country song, can you talk a bit about what you remember about choosing that track and recording it?

We were city boys playing in big city pubs and venues where the general public had no idea what bluegrass music was. Although we always loved the traditional bluegrass songs and tunes, we felt we had to play some material that the general public might recognize and eventually really like our brand of bluegrass music. So we included old rock songs, country songs, and jazzy swing songs in the repertoire along with the traditional songs. I would say we actually became more traditional over the years, because we were building a local and then national and then international audience while maintaining a varied repertoire.

When I heard “The Singer” I immediately wanted to include that song in our repertoire – the song is so well written, the words are so poignant, especially knowing that Neal Allen wrote the song about his father Red Allen and also that Neal died of pneumonia while on the road. As Bill Monroe would say, “It’s a powerful number.”

Now, about the latest album, Great Blue North, what inspired you to cross the Great Lakes for this album and do Canadian bluegrass?

We are so fortunate to be on the Compass Records label and especially to have Alison Brown as our producer. When we begin preparations to record, the four of us and Alison begin our search for new material. We are basically on a bi-annual release schedule with the label and one of the songs Alison thought would be a good song for us to include on our 2020 release was “Blackbird,” written by the great Canadian songwriter/singer/guitar player J.P. Cormier. We loved the song but as we gathered material for that release the theme shifted to featuring a nod to Chicago, where the band has been based since beginning in 1975, because 2020 was the 45th band anniversary. Hence the 2020 “Chicago Barn Dance” release. We knew we would record “Blackbird” at some point, and after the pandemic shut-down we wanted to let folks know we were still alive and well and anxious to get back on the road, so we recorded “Blackbird” and Compass released it as a single. As we began the search for material for a new recording, Alison mentioned that it might be a good time to give a nod to our Canadian friends — since we have played there so much over the past three decades — and we all agreed. We then decided to include only songs written by Canadian writers and also to ask many of our Canadian musician friends to perform with us on some of the tracks.

Do you think being such a long-running Midwestern-based group informed the new album for you? And your connections to this material?

I think we may have had more opportunities to tour in Canada because of our Midwestern base. We did not play the big festivals when we first began touring there – we played shows for bluegrass associations and community centers in Toronto, Ontario (only an 8+ hour drive from Chicago), Winnipeg, Manitoba (13+ hour drive) and Calgary, Alberta (25-hour drive). We would head directly to Toronto or work our way through Minnesota to the Canadian gigs, which helped us get invited to the festivals. We also learned about the Canadian songwriters through so many of the great Canadian musicians whom we met and became friends with through this networking.

To me, a throughline between your first and latest albums is the arrangements, the way your band is always playing as a tight-knit ensemble, not just a handful of instruments sounding simultaneously. Where do you get the inspiration for the way your individual parts play off of and dialogue with each other?

I think we have always been focused on the power of tight and interesting arrangements. This again goes back to the fact that because we are from Chicago – not a bluegrass hub in the eyes of the general public – we had to make sure to keep the attention of the audience and not have songs begin to all sound alike. The arrangements give the band the opportunity to be more creative and to showcase the tight vocal and instrumental harmonies. I have always wanted an outside/non-band member producer to give us an objective opinion about the sound, the material and the performance. We have always had very good producers and I must say that Alison Brown is a phenomenal producer who has brought the band to another level. From our perspective, she basically considers each song on our recording to be unique and “special” – there are no “filler” tracks, and we spend however much time necessary to make each track stand out.

“Snowbird” will go down as one of Special C’s tastiest cover songs, do you have favorite covers from across the years? It’s kind of a hallmark of your band!

Although we try not to be seen as a cover band, we have chosen to cover some songs from artists that we feel we can make sound like a bluegrass song, and especially sound like a Special C song. We have been most fortunate to have been given some great songs by many great songwriters over the years and we have also chosen some songs from other genres that we thought we could have fun recording and that our fans would enjoy hearing. “Snowbird” was one of the first songs on our list once we decided on the Canadian theme after recording “Blackbird” – my wife had suggested that song many times and now it seemed like the perfect song to feature Greg Blake’s fabulous voice. Some of the covers we have done on past recordings include “Viva Las Vegas,” “Ramblin’ Fever,” “Dream of Me,” “I Cried Myself Awake,” “Big River,” “Sea of Heartbreak,” “Looking Out My Back Door,” “Sweet Home Chicago,” “City of New Orleans,” our entire Country Boy: A Tribute to John Denver recording, “Alberta Bound” and several other songs on the Great Blue North release.

I must say, that as the years pass so quickly and the time between the first record and the current recording becomes so long I realize how fortunate and blessed I have been to be able to keep making music with so many wonderful musicians/people/friends. At times I have felt that the first recording was below the professional level but because of this interview and going back to listen to it, I now truly understand that we can only do our best throughout this journey, be thankful that we are able to keep growing and learning and appreciate our accomplishments no matter how insignificant they may seem at any given time.

Photo Credit: Jamey Guy