Tag: Craft Recordings

The Story Behind a 1981 Masterpiece: The Bluegrass Album

Posted on by Editor

Tony Rice wanted to do a bluegrass album in 1981, but not just any bluegrass album.

It was time for another Tony Rice project for Rounder Records, though he had always made his bluegrass records along with those that featured his take on David Grisman’s genre-expanding musical experiment that Tony dubbed “Spacegrass,” such as Acoustics (1979), Mar West (1980) and Still Inside (1981).

By this time, Tony had also been part of many groundbreaking bluegrass recordings, including the legendary Rounder 0044, J.D. Crowe & The New South (1975), as well as solo albums such as Guitar (1974), California Autumn (1975), Tony Rice (1977) and the marvelous Manzanita (1979), which managed to become one of the best bluegrass recordings of all time without a banjo. In addition, he and Ricky Skaggs offered one of the best examples of early country duet styles on the inimitable Skaggs and Rice (1980).

The album Tony had in mind in 1981 would go on to be considered a masterpiece: The Bluegrass Album. It would also launch a franchise, with subsequent volumes in 1982, 1983, 1984, 1989, and 1996.

Tony didn’t yet have a name for the album but he wanted the new record to be a straight-ahead paean to the early bluegrass he was raised on, specifically the canon of Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs. The reason, to him was clear: 1

“I remember thinking back then very well that bluegrass music was really in the toilet. And it was. It was at maybe its lowest point in its history. It was a rarity to even see a good bluegrass band that used an acoustic bass back then. Bluegrass bands were spread out all over the stage, individual microphones ten feet apart and it was just like a different world. It wasn’t there anymore. And The Bluegrass Album was kind of a deliberate attempt to get back to that.

“And it worked; it hit the bluegrass music world with ten times the impact that I thought it would in terms of satisfying or pacifying any bluegrass aficionado. Even the more contemporary players liked it. The traditionalists really liked it. All of a sudden here was this sound again, and it hadn’t been done since Flatt & Scruggs and Monroe and [Jimmy] Martin and Jim & Jesse at their best, and [The Osborne Brothers’] Sonny and Bob at their best. And here was the music resurrected again in its purest form, maybe even a little more precision than the originals.”

When it came time to choose who would play on the record, he thought of course of J.D. Crowe, whose playing by this time was deeply embedded in Tony’s sense of rhythm and timing. He also thought of Doyle Lawson and Bobby Hicks “…because I thought that they could do it better than anybody that I could think of. I knew I was going to be doing a bunch of Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs stuff, and I wanted to do a bluegrass album that was just as pure as it gets.

“The banjo player was logical, but I needed a mandolin player and tenor singer that could cover both of those sectors of bluegrass and do it well. Doyle was the only guy that could have done it, who could have played mandolin like that. On a Monroe tune, he could give it a Monroe flavor, and he could give it a Monroe tenor. On a Flatt & Scruggs tune, he could give it that Everett Lilly or Curly Seckler flavor, tenor too.

“And back then, Bobby Hicks was really riding the wave of a bluegrass fiddle renaissance. I mean, there was the smoothness of Kenny Baker and the unusualness of Vassar Clements, but there was a fiddle player in Hicks that was almost like every damn bluegrass fiddle player from Howdy Forrester, Chubby Wise, all the way down through the ranks, rolled up in one. And not only that, but he could play it so hard and so deliberate. And when it came time to back up something, he knew exactly what to do. And you can hear that shit. That’s the reason his backup on those mixes, if you listen to it, it’s really loud. His backup is in your face as much as the solos are—it was too pretty not to have it out there.”

Tony recalled that “Bobby and I ended up recording on a record of Ricky’s called Sweet Temptation. I heard Bobby playing that fiddle in the studio and we became real good friends.”

J.D. Crowe remembered that it was his idea to include Lawson: “Tony was talking to me about who to get for tenor. There was [Jimmy] Gaudreau, there was Ricky, there was Doyle. I said, ‘Well, for what this project is… And we’ve played with Ricky. So I think probably Doyle.’ Now I love Gaudreau’s singing, but for this record, Doyle was the one to have, for the mandolin playing, and the timing, and tenor pull, the phrasing. And I don’t think Tony had worked with Doyle at that time.” 2

On bass, Tony turned once again to his constant musical companion in this era, Todd Phillips, a fellow alum of the David Grisman Quintet. While Todd had played second mandolin in that group, he turned out to be an amazing bassist, and he played on both Guitar and Manzanita as well as on Tony’s Spacegrass recordings.

As the band listened to the results, Tony began to rethink how the project should be branded: “The first Album Band album was slated to be a Tony Rice bluegrass album and then after I got everybody together and started hearing playbacks, I thought, no, I’m not gonna do that. This sounds too much like some sort of a band. It came out under everybody’s name. I didn’t invent the name ‘The Bluegrass Album Band.’ I’ve always detested it. Milton Harkey is the inventor of that name.

“By the time the band had decided to go on a tour, it had to call itself something. Nobody knew what to call it. I didn’t know what to call it. And by then, the buying public in the bluegrass world had been buying three volumes of this stuff, and they were calling it The Bluegrass Album. Milton’s logic, I think, was, ‘Well, this is The Bluegrass Album Band. This is not just the album, this is going to be the band.’”

The group’s early albums were recorded in Berkeley, California, at 1750 Arch Street, the studio where Tony had recorded most of the Grisman records as well as Tony Rice (his first Rounder solo record), Manzanita and his first Spacegrass recordings. The session was cut with no headphones and no overdubs.

Tony remembered: “The first three volumes there were no overdubs. The idea was that when you edit, you’ve still got the entire ensemble playing together rather than piecing it together one guy at a time or making tracks and going back to overdub vocals. No matter how much you edit, you’ve still got the band playing live.

“There were two rooms at Arch Street. There was a big, elegant room upstairs with a control room that was in this mansion of a house and the guy who owned it was the first violinist for the San Francisco symphony. He was getting old and he built this room after he retired so that he could play his violin and hear it. And that was the main room at Arch Street, but they also had an isolated, conventional studio downstairs that was adjoining the control room.

“So the first two volumes of the Album Band were done in the upstairs room, and you could hear a pin drop. When you get guys gathered around, you could just hear every little nuance working together. We were individually miked and then Billy (Wolf, the engineer) hung a Neumann quadraphonic mic over the top of the whole ensemble for the purpose of capturing the room sound.”

To Tony it was more important to capture the spirit and energy of the traditional bluegrass from the 1950s: “I will accept mistakes to be able to have it live if it’s got the spirit. Listen to those Album Band records—they’re loaded with mistakes: off-pitch harmony vocals and weird tuning discrepancies here and there; missed fiddle notes. But who gives a shit? It’s almost like the discrepancies have a value of their own.”

Although Tony had a definite idea of the kinds of material he wanted to record, he admitted, “It was kind of a collaborative thing, you know. I came up with a list of tunes before we went into the studio, a list of 20 tunes to pick from. And Doyle would bring out a couple other things, and then when we got in the studio, a lot of times we’d do just whatever came to mind.”

Doyle Lawson remembered in more detail how part of the material was chosen: “Most of the time, J.D. and I would fly out together, and we’d usually meet in Atlanta and fly from there to California. And we’d write down a list of songs. I’d say ‘What about this?’ And he’d say, ‘Yeah. What about this?’ And we’d make us a list. We’d have eight, ten or twelve, whatever. We’d have a whole slew of them. And then when we got out there, Tony would have his list. We’d go through and kind of pick ‘em out—‘Who knows this one?’ ‘Yeah, I do!’ We might run through them one time or so just to figure out what we were going to do, who was going to do what where.” 3

But these were not mechanical recreations of the originals. At various times, the players would be adamant about not playing breaks or certain signature phrases because they didn’t appear in the originals, yet they also needed to play to the strengths of this extraordinary set of musicians. For one, there were no guitar breaks in the originals, but then again, in the ‘40s and ‘50s, they didn’t have Tony Rice.

Tony remembered: “I think it was Doyle who talked me into playing any guitar solo I played on the first couple volumes. I didn’t want to do any. But it was Doyle who kept kind of prodding, ‘Well, I don’t want to play a mandolin solo there. People are going to expect you to play a little bit.’”

Tony’s break on Flatt & Scruggs’ “Blue Ridge Cabin Home” has become such a classic that you will undoubtedly hear it in jam sessions today. Blue Highway banjoist Jason Burleson remembers hearing “Blue Ridge Cabin Home” and Tony’s break for the first time: “It was the first time I ever heard Tony play a solo. I had no idea it was a guitar. I distinctly remember thinking, ‘Wow that’s a cool mandolin break,’ until it got to the end and there was a G Run, and I thought, ‘There’s no way that was a guitar.’ I must have set the needle back 50 times trying to comprehend what I just heard. I really didn’t know that was even possible to do on a guitar.

“At that point I’d been playing a couple of years and all I ever saw a guitar player do was a G Run. I became instantly obsessed with that solo and his solo on ‘Molly and Tenbrooks’ on the same album, and ended up buying every record I could find with Tony’s name on it. At every festival, I went in search of anyone who could maybe show me a little bit of how to do that. I remember being really skeptical that anyone could actually play and sing that well. I thought it surely must be some kind of studio trick. Then of course I saw the Album Band in Denton [North Carolina] and it was even better than the record.”

“Blue Ridge Cabin Home” is the obvious choice to begin this collection. The power and precision of both the playing and singing here make it a standout track, one that the group, once it began touring, kicked off almost every show with. When they performed at the very first International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) awards show in Owensboro, Kentucky, in September 1990, they became the only group in the history of the awards to earn an encore. From Crowe’s power pinch, fans knew they were in for a thrill.

Crowe recalled that the group didn’t need to spend a lot of rehearsal time on the material because they all knew it so well: “Just our phrasing, that was the only thing. And that wasn’t hard either, because we had all done ‘em so much and done ‘em together. Especially me and Tony. And of course, Hicks, he learned off the same thing we did. So it just fell together.”

To Doyle, who was busy at the time touring and building repertoire with his own new band Quicksilver, it “…was a joy just getting to be there and not have to do anything except play mandolin and sing tenor. For me, I was in seventh heaven.”

Perhaps the moment that best defines the power and drive of this record, and indeed, the whole series, is J.D. Crowe’s half break near the end of “Molly and Tenbrooks.” His slide seems impossibly long and his syncopated, bluesy phrasing syncs with Tony’s guitar to create one of the great moments in the history of the genre, even if it is only a few seconds long.

Once again, engineer Kevin Gray of Cohearant Audio has outdone himself for a new reissue on Craft Recordings with a stellar all-analog remastering with lacquers cut from the original stereo master tapes. With the album now available for the first time ever on vinyl, the first hi-res remastering is brilliant, bright and powerful—a must-have for any of the countless fans of these classic recordings as well as a new generation just discovering the magic of Tony Rice and his entourage’s Golden Age recordings.

Like so many of those other Tony Rice records, The Bluegrass Album’s versions of these classic songs became the standards that subsequent generations would learn and continue to emulate. Indeed, within a couple decades of its release in 1981, groups in parking lot and campground sessions were describing the songs from this record and subsequent BGAB projects as “old Bluegrass Album Band songs…”

And this continues today. It’s a measure of the legacy of this record and those that followed in the series. Tony certainly succeeded in bringing “the real stuff” back front and center in the music. The audience for this kind of music had never really gone away, but it was the 1980s that saw the first real neo-traditionalist flowering in the genre’s history, with groups like The Johnson Mountain Boys and Nashville Bluegrass Band hitting their stride. The first tap into that free-flowing keg of tradition was The Bluegrass Album.

1 Author interview with Tony Rice, 2006; other Rice interview material from Still Inside: The Tony Rice Story (Word of Mouth Press, 2010).

2 J.D. Crowe interview with Author, 2005.

3 Doyle Lawson interview with Author, 2008.

Jerry Douglas on Boone Creek and Their Long-Awaited Reissue

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

(Editor’s Note: This essay by Jerry Douglas tells a bit of the story of Boone Creek, a bluegrass and Americana group formed in the late ’70s that released one eponymous album. That LP has been long out of print, but in June was reissued by Craft Recordings. To mark the occasion, Douglas shares memories of the making of the album, which on its reissued edition features four never-before-heard tracks that you can also listen to below.) 

Once upon a time there was a band called Boone Creek. The name was taken from a beautiful white limestone-bottomed stream running past a house in the country just outside Lexington, Kentucky. The setting was also used as the location for what became the cover photo for Rounder 0044, JD Crowe & The New South.

The year was 1976 and my forever friend, Ricky Skaggs, and I had a dream for our own band. Our partners were Wes Golding for guitar and vocals and Terry Baucom for fiddle and vocals. A good start. We had no bass player, but soon recruited Freddy Wooten – who had never played bass, but played a mean Les Paul at the hot country bar downtown. He was soon cooking along with the boys, and our friends at Rounder Records offered a recording contract. We needed a banjo player and Terry remembered playing a little banjo when he was a kid. The “Bauc” style of playing this instrument would become an iconic mark on bluegrass music. Who would have thought of that?

We traveled together down to Nashville to the famous studio that housed Starday Records. We jumped right into recording so many songs, many penned by our guitarist Wes Golding and few old standards. Freddy made it through and even added some pedal steel to a couple tracks.

After finishing the Rounder Record, we felt as though we were just hitting our stride. We kept recording and Rounder kept paying to see what we had in us. A newly-formed record company also showed some interest. They were RSO Records and they sent A&R man Spencer Davis to Lexington to see us play, expecting to hear what we had recorded in our newly-minted ’70s soft rock band, Boone Creek. We failed miserably. We had a high-level meeting in the Pizza Hut next door.

We were playing as our bluegrass selves at a Food Town grocery store opening on a flatbed truck. Folks in the parking lot blew their car horns to show their approval. There was an old man named Jimmy Jones doing the emcee work. I kept telling him our band was called Boone Creek and he would wave his hand at me. He introduced us as The Rocky Road Boys for two days.

If only Davis could have heard us in all our soft-rock glory with horns, piano, and drums. Oh well, that’s bluegrass life. We were also offered a huge publishing deal by the Weinstein Bros. of NYC. That scared us back to Lexington and the recording stopped.

When it came time to collect the tapes, it was found that the engineer had absconded with them. We didn’t see them for another 35 years. Some of the tracks had another member, Vince Gill crooning some for-sure-in-our-minds hits. Unfortunately, these tracks did not survive.

Relentless sleuth and Rounder Records founder Ken Irwin located our tapes, but they were in terrible shape sitting on a shelf in a garage in Connecticut. After baking, de-molding, being prayed over by the local priest, and whatever else had to be done to bring them back to playable condition, we can credit the team at Craft Recordings, mixing engineer Steve Reynolds, and mastering engineer Paul Blakemore with a good bit of restoration and mixing these back to health.

We hope you again enjoy Boone Creek’s freshman effort, along with a glimpse back into the ’70s, where the personalities and young dreams of a band gone on safari were never to be completed. This effort formed who we are individually today, though unfortunately we lost Terry in December of 2023.

We thank everyone involved for their tenacity and forward thinking in bringing this remastered lost treasure back into the light. – Jerry Douglas

Image courtesy of Craft Recordings.

The Essential 1977 LP Tony Rice Gets a Reissue

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

The first time I ever heard Tony Rice play and really heard it, I was a teenager. I was listening to one of the few regular broadcast outlets for bluegrass music in the Tri-Cities region of Upper East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia that I was aware of at that time, WQUT-FM’s “Bluegrass Hour,” sometime in the late ’70s. I believe the song was “Way Downtown.” I hadn’t heard Doc Watson’s version, and all I could think was, “Who the HELL is this?” Literally.

A relative newcomer to the music, I recognized that voice as the same one I’d heard on some tunes from J.D. Crowe & the New South, the eponymous masterpiece that had come out in 1975. But the guitar seemed so different than any I’d ever heard; I could feel that and I wasn’t even a guitar player yet. The leads seemed to flow like silk and the tone was so large and woody. As a banjo player at the time, it made such an impression that I didn’t even pay much attention to the banjo break by my favorite player – Crowe.

Turns out, it was “Way Downtown” from Tony Rice, which was originally released in June 1977. ROU 0085 is an album that I, along with so many bluegrass fans, came to know and love. At the time I didn’t know that it was Tony’s first solo record for Rounder, the company with which he would spend virtually the rest of his recording career. Or that it was the first LP since he had left J.D. Crowe’s New South. He had recorded two solo records while in Crowe’s band: Guitar (Red Clay 103, King Bluegrass 529, Rebel 1582 – 1974) and California Autumn (Rebel 1549 – 1975). Now, nearly 50 years later, Craft Recordings has remastered 0085 and it will be available once again in a fresh pressing and as high-res digital audio on June 5, sounding better than ever.

Tony left the New South, one of the greatest bluegrass bands ever assembled, in 1975 to play music with mandolinist David Grisman, who soon put together a supergroup of his own in the San Francisco Bay Area that didn’t exactly play bluegrass or jazz, but something in the middle – something new. Tony had met Grisman while recording Bill Keith’s Something Auld, Something Newgrass, Something Borrowed, Something Bluegrass (Rounder 0084 – 1976).

In an interview my Still Inside co-writer Caroline Wright did with Tony in 2003, he recalled the Keith project as an “…amazing recording, I think. Stuff where Keith somehow was able to pull more out of me than I thought I had in me.”

At the same time, the musicians gathered for Keith’s record ended up recording Tony Trischka’s Banjoland (Rounder 0087 – 1977). During the session, Grisman played Rice a recording of the music he was making with the Great American Music Band featuring Richard Greene, John Carlini, Taj Mahal, Joe Carroll, and others. To say Rice was moved is an understatement: “…This music that I heard Grisman play on that tape machine, it instantly started flowing through the veins. I’d never heard a sound like that. I was in heaven.”

After moving to the Bay Area and staying in Grisman’s basement for a few months, he played on David’s first Rounder release in 1976, The David Grisman Rounder Album (Rounder 0069). Tony would also become a huge piece of the DGQ’s groundbreaking first recording, The David Grisman Quintet (Kaleidoscope F5; Pastels 2016; Rhino 71468), released the same year as Tony Rice. The bluegrass feel he added to “Dawg music” gave it much of its distinctive sound.

When he started recording Tony Rice in July 1976, it had only been three years since the great Clarence White, Tony’s mentor and hero, had been killed in a tragic accident in California. White’s influence is strong on the record, although Rice was blazing his own path by then. 0085 was the first Tony Rice record to feature “the Antique,” his 1935 Martin D-28 Herringbone serial number 58957, which had once belonged to Clarence. The distinctive power and tone of this instrument became a signature part of Tony’s sound from this point forward.

In his liner notes for the record (one of two sets of liners, the other by Philip Elwood of the San Francisco Examiner, who noted the power of “urgency” in both Tony’s guitar playing and singing), Jack Tottle called Rice “…quite probably the most important living bluegrass guitarist.”

It was hard to argue with that. But Rounder 0085 served to keep Tony – an emerging superstar even then – in front of the bluegrass audience at a time when he seemed to disappear from it back East. Ralph Stanley & the Clinch Mountain Boys lead guitarist, the late James Alan Shelton, said, “Because at that time now, nobody had seen Tony. He was like Santa Claus. He was somebody you hear about, but he didn’t make many appearances!”

Such was the mystery engendered by records like Tony Rice, as well as Manzanita (1979), Skaggs & Rice (1980), The Bluegrass Album (1981), Vol. 2 (1982), Vol. 3 (1983), Church Street Blues (1983) and Cold on the Shoulder (1984), that when Tony finally came back east and played live in front of a bluegrass audience at Denton, North Carolina, in 1984, he got a standing ovation for his soundcheck.

The musicians helping out on 0085 were a perfect mix of Tony’s most recent bands – and also mark a dividing line between them. New South alumni Larry Rice, J.D. Crowe, and Jerry Douglas meshed with with DGQ bandmates Todd Phillips (this time on bass), Darol Anger, and David Grisman, as well as violinist Richard Greene at 1750 Arch Studios in Berkeley, California, with engineer Bob Shoemaker – Grisman’s engineer and later Rice collaborator Billy Wolf was not available. Tony chose a number of standards as the bedrock for the album, but he also cast a gaze forward with experimental tunes like David Nichtern’s “Plastic Banana,” and “Rattlesnake,” the first “Dawg Jazz” tune David Grisman ever wrote in 1966.

In The Book of Dawg: Dawg Jazz Grisman says, “Although I had already written some atypical (for bluegrass) melodies in minor keys, this one utilized some chord types – minor 6th, 7ths and flat 5s – that are more commonly found in jazz, as well as four bars where the time signature changes from 4/4 to 3/4 and back.”

Even classic old-time/bluegrass numbers on Tony Rice – like “Eighth of January” – feel like Dawg tunes, with unique fiddle/mandolin harmonies and jazzy improvs. And they should, since the tune was part of the Quintet set list and was something listeners in the Bay Area heard at live gigs at the time.

The bluegrass selections ran the gamut from Jimmy Martin stalwarts “Don’t Give Your Heart to a Rambler” and “Mr. Engineer” to “Banks of the Ohio,” “Hills of Roane County,” “Way Downtown,” and “Farewell Blues,” a Crowe showpiece that Tony also wanted to do because Clarence played it a lot. In between were fiddle tunes like “Temperance Reel” and bluegrass instrumentals – one from the Monroe canon (“Big Mon”) and another from Jim & Jesse (“Stoney Creek”).

Tony described the record as “keeping a foothold” in bluegrass but admits he “didn’t know what he was doing” when he went in the studio to record it.

That may be one reason that of all the records Tony recorded in his long career, this was tied for his least favorite. In his authorized biography Still Inside – written by myself and Caroline Wright and released in 2010 – he said, “I don’t like that album. Something is missing; I can’t explain what it is… The only two albums of my own I can’t stand are the one I did for Sab Watanabe and the first one I did for Rounder. If I never hear them again, it would be too soon.”

He likened it to James Taylor getting physically sick once in a restaurant upon hearing Sweet Baby James, which many people considered his masterpiece. “He said it was literally torture…,” Tony said. “I thought, ‘Damn, I’m probably one of the few people who can appreciate that!’”

But Rice devotees all include songs from this album in their favorites list, especially numbers like “Don’t Give Your Heart to a Rambler” – where, as Philip Elwood says in the liners, “…Tony seems to vocally leap into the lyrics and in doing so generates an excitement the whole band picks up on…” This is also true on “Hills of Roane County,” another favorite.

The album was recorded at a time where Tony was near his vocal peak, showcasing his voice in all its warmth and contemporary clarity that endeared him to recent bluegrass converts – who might also be fans of, say, the Seldom Scene – as well as traditional fans who loved his renditions of the bluegrass standards here. For my generation and those to follow, Tony’s versions of these tunes became standards.

The real standout to my ear is “Hills of Roane County,” which is based on a poem Tennessean Willis Maberry finished while serving time for the 1884 murder of Thomas Galbreath. The song was first recorded in the country tradition by the Blue Sky Boys in 1941 and later by the Stanley Brothers (perhaps the ultimate bluegrass cover was by Paul Williams in Jimmy Martin’s band). Tony’s haunting, brooding version of the tune features wonderful twin fiddling from Richard Greene and Darol Anger, a great drop-D guitar break, and what was, in 1977, an utterly modern live vocal rendering of the old melody that perfectly fit the upper ranges of his baritone. Although he complained in Still Inside that “…if I could go back and do it again, I wouldn’t have used as many ornaments with the vocal. I overdid it, but in the moment, you don’t know that.”

But Rice’s wistful emotion and phrasing on lines like “Just three months later I’d taken Tom’s life…” make it sound like he absolutely knew the man and regretted it. The end of the guitar break features a flat 7 movement with jazz piano voicing similar to Tony’s kickoff to “Ten Degrees” from J.D. Crowe & The New South two years earlier. Shew…

Once again, James Alan Shelton echoed the opinions of so many guitarists: “I’ve never heard a guitar sound any… boomier and still have good tone as what he got on ‘Hills of Roane County.’ That guitar just sounds like it comes out of the depths of hell.” When I interviewed Tony in August of 2006, he said, “I don’t even remember that guitar break.”

The remastered version of the record, out via Craft Recordings on vinyl and digital platforms – and high-res audio – has more presence and power than the original by far to my ears; it’s great to finally hear this record the way Tony and the crew probably heard it in the studio going down. This is particularly important since the record was done almost completely live with very little overdubbing or editing.

Kudos to mastering engineer Kevin Gray of Cohearent Audio, who also handled the Craft Recordings re-release of Tony’s only solo project, Church Street Blues as well as Rice’s favorite of his solo records, Backwaters. The masters for all these Craft releases were made from the original analog master tapes.

Tim Stafford lives in Greeneville, Tennessee and is the co-author with Caroline Wright of Tony Rice’s authorized biography, Still Inside. He was awarded IBMA Liner Notes of the Year in 2021 for his work on Rebel Records’ reissue of Tony’s second album, California Autumn. An alumnus of Alison Krauss & Union Station, Stafford co-founded Blue Highway, which is celebrating 32 years in 2026; their most recent project is Live at ETSU! on Down the Road Records. Stafford was named IBMA Songwriter of the Year in 2014, 2017, and 2023.

50 Years of 0044: JD Crowe & The New South’s Landmark Album

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Writer Marty Godby called it “The convergence of 1975.”

The elements: a band that would only be together for 10 months, a benevolent venture capitalist who loved bluegrass, and an upstart record label from Boston. The resulting product was unprecedented and unforgettable: The New South, Rounder Records 0044. Bluegrass fans know it simply as “0044.”

The New South of this recording was J.D. Crowe on banjo; Tony Rice on guitar; Ricky Skaggs on mandolin; Bobby Slone on bass; and Jerry Douglas on Dobro. The impact of that configuration and the album were stunning. Yet, within a year of the recording, Rice would leave to become a founding member of the David Grisman Quintet. Skaggs and Douglas formed Boone Creek. Crowe and Slone continued performing together for years.

Rounder 0044 was influential enough to be preserved in the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry in 2024 and was awarded induction into the GRAMMY Hall of Fame this year. This month, Real Gone Music will re-release the album on vinyl, as will Craft Recordings later this year on compact disc.

Both the origin story and legacy of 0044 have inspired great narratives, probably more than any other bluegrass album. Bill Nowlin, one of the three founders of Rounder Records, wrote three articles for BGS on the album’s 40th anniversary. They offer a step-by-step look at what happened in 1974 and 75, plus hilarious and poignant anecdotes and quotes.

David Menconi dedicated a chapter of his excellent book, Oh, Didn’t They Ramble: Rounder Records and the Transformation of American Roots Music, to 0044. In 2016, radio host Daniel Mullins focused his college history capstone project on the album. Of course, it was 44 pages.

THE SHORT VERSION

 

J.D. Crowe, already revered for his banjo playing and baritone singing, led a band called The Kentucky Mountain Boys. From 1968, they had a six-nights-a-week gig at the Red Slipper Lounge in a Lexington, Kentucky Holiday Inn. Crowe added non-traditional bluegrass instruments and songs to the Holiday Inn repertoire. This was as much to please a diverse audience as it was to keep the musicians from getting bored. In 1971, Crowe changed the band’s name to The New South.

Of the name change, Rounder’s Marian Leighton Levy said, “It was obvious that this was a new kind of bluegrass.” From a broader view, “It was an era when the South was, in a way, trying to self-consciously reinvent itself as a new, modern place. And they [The New South] were kind of the musical representation of that wider political context.”

It was the ’70s, and change was brewing – even in the tightly controlled world of country music, Levy noted. Around the same time, Willie Nelson and his Outlaw Country compatriots were reaching out to new songwriters and moving away, physically and musically, from “the factory system of Nashville publishing companies.”

In 1974, lead singer Larry Rice left the New South and brother Tony took over singing lead. Ricky Skaggs’ pure tenor mixed with Rice’s unmistakable mid-range voice, creating a new, dynamic tension for their duets and trios. In the summer of that year, Crowe and the band toured without any product to sell. At the annual Gettysburg Blue Grass Festival, Crowe, his friend and manager, venture capitalist Hugh Sturgill, and the young founders of Rounder Records initiated “The Great Convergence” – an agreement for a studio recording. An innovative contract led to the first New South album.

THE BLUEGRASS WORLD EXPLODED

 

As soon as they heard the test pressing, the Rounder founders knew they had something remarkable on their hands. “Jack Tottle [who, along with John Hartford, wrote liner notes for the album] was stunned, and he kept saying, ‘This is one of the most amazing records ever made.’ And he was not given to exaggerating,” Levy said.

“It was clear. It was crisp … and the more you played it, the more you wanted to hear it.”

0044 came out in the spring of 1975. Levy said by festival season, other bands were playing the tunes from the record “pretty much note for note.” One observer said that at one festival, almost every band on stage played “Old Home Place.”

So, what is it about that record? Let’s start with the musicians. Skip Heller, who initiated the 0044 Real Gone Music reissue, said everyone in that group of players “would talk about it like it was high school prom and their first love … they had all been in good bands before, but this was the first time they had been in a band that was as great as anything in bluegrass music had ever been.”

Levy said, “They absolutely knocked each other out. … And I think that long before anybody heard the record, they knew the band would stand the test of time – because of all of them, not just one person.”

The record’s title was The New South. Only after the first printing sold out, three band members had moved on, and it was time to redo the cover (read about the cover photo – a great story in itself), was it retitled J.D. Crowe & the New South. Crowe, born in 1937, was the venerated elder and a banjo icon. After entering Jimmy Martin’s boot-camp-of-a-band at age 18, he developed impeccable timing, his own take on Scruggs-style banjo, and excellence as a baritone singer. And he knew how to pick his band members.

The influences of Tony Rice (age 24 at the time) on bluegrass and related music are limitless – from cementing the role of guitar as a lead bluegrass instrument, to modeling impeccable rhythm playing and singing, to excelling in so many genres outside the bluegrass boundaries. At 21, Skaggs had the instrumental chops, a stunning voice and the instincts to become successful in both country and bluegrass. Rounder’s Ken Irwin attributes much of 0044’s innovation to Skaggs, including bringing a teenaged Douglas into the mix.

Douglas is to Dobro what Rice is to lead guitar. Fifty years later, after 14 GRAMMY awards and countless other honors, he continues to inspire and encourage musicality and creativity in Dobro playing. Touring with Alison Krauss since 1998, it’s likely that he has been heard live by more people than any other resophonic guitar player. Of the veteran, Bobby Slone, Mullins said, “Everyone in the band wanted to make sure that Bobby got a lot of credit. … He was such a rock solid force on that band, not just on bass, but as far as camaraderie was concerned.”

By the time The New South entered the studio, Crowe, Slone, and Rice, later joined by Skaggs, had spent hundreds of hours performing together at the Holiday Inn. Individually, they were superb musicians. Together, they were as tight as a band could be.

THE SONGS

 

Long before 0044, Crowe had blasted out from under bluegrass constraints, incorporating songs like Fats Domino’s “I’m Walkin,” and at Larry Rice’s suggestion, The Flying Burrito Brothers’ “Sin City.” The songs on 0044 were just a small set of a huge repertoire. While the unconventional musical choices sparked controversy among traditionalists, they also sparked a flame of excitement that spread quickly and widely.

In 1975, Mullins said, Ralph Stanley & the Clinch Mountain Boys, Jimmy Martin, and Bill Monroe were still “killing it” at festivals with their first generation bluegrass sound. “On the other end of the spectrum, Seldom Scene recorded Live at the Cellar Door,” an immensely popular recording, that year. Like the Country Gentlemen, the Scene had been recording songs totally out of the bluegrass box, using bluegrass instrumentation, but with an emphasis on rich melodies and harmonies, rather than just the drive of traditional bluegrass.

Mullins said, “You go to Crowe, who’s got the street cred from all his records with Martin, but he’s also looking ahead, and so he’s able to get it all in there. A lot of bands were playing to one side or the other … but to have one that hit right in the middle, right at that time, was unreal.”

“When they saw J.D. Crowe’s name up front, and they knew that he had played banjo with Jimmy Martin on all those records they had loved for 20 years, it probably made some of those hard-edged fans pay more attention,” he said.

Whatever the dynamics of the time, The New South became synonymous with great bluegrass. And 0044 made Ian Tyson’s songs forever acceptable in bluegrass jams.

ON AND ON

 

Kristin Scott Benson, six-time IBMA Banjo Player of the Year, was born the year after 0044 came out. Benson said she was about nine the first time she saw J.D. Crowe. He was playing with the Bluegrass Album Band, “and that was a formative experience. That band was so explosive, and the crowd had an air of chaos, because everybody was so excited to hear the band. Every time Tony Rice ended a solo, you couldn’t hear any music.” (Because of the crowd noise.)

It would be four years until she picked up the banjo, and two more years until she learned about The New South album – and what it meant to a banjo player.

On 0044, she says, “If you just talk quintessential banjo solos, you’ve got ‘I’m Walkin’ and ‘You Are What I Am.’ His tone is aggressive. It’s just such confident, groovy, greasy, pristine banjo. It’s impossible to overstate how good it is and how influential it is.”

“But I think you should listen to his contributions on the less banjo-friendly songs [‘Home Sweet Home Revisited,’ ’10 Degrees’], because Crowe was great at that. He was a magical backup player.”

Billy Failing, who currently plays banjo with Billy Strings, agrees. Failing started out his banjo life drawn to more progressive players like Béla Fleck. But, he said, “As time goes on, the more I circle back to J.D. Crowe. I think of how much of a gold standard he is for bluegrass banjo, and how interesting his playing is.”

“He’s considered a traditional player,” Failing continued, “but then I’m always hearing some lick that surprises me. It’s been a gradual thing, but it becomes more meaningful as time goes on. I was just listening to The New South album, and on ‘Cryin’ Holy’ – it’s just so slamming! He’s turned it up to 11 constantly on that one.” And, like Benson, he points out what he calls Crowe’s “intricate touch” on banjo.

“It’s such a cool kind of push and pull between whether he’s out front or whether he’s playing backup … it catches your attention in such a cool way.”

Benson said, “It’s easy just to be drawn to those obvious picks [like ‘Old Home Place’] but the album is so much deeper than that. This particular band presented a tightness and a level of execution that was new – I don’t think there had been a bluegrass record up until that point that was so well done.”

“The vocals, the arrangements are so well thought out. Everybody’s playing so well together. It was just a special moment and a special group of people, and I think it raised the bar for bluegrass albums,” she said, and made an imprint on so many contemporary musicians.

Benson poses the question, “Who’s the most influential modern bluegrass guy? It would have to be Tony Rice, because he affected the genre with his rhythm guitar playing, which is phenomenal. And that type of rhythm playing affects the entire groove of the band. It became the new standard, what most people go for.”

“Never discount the importance of his rhythm,” she continued, “and then obviously his lead playing, but also his singing and his material choice … so if someone pinned me down and I could only name one, he might be the guy.”

Failing, speaking of his bandmates, said, “Everybody’s inspired by The New South. I hear Billy [Strings] constantly talking about his inspiration by Tony Rice, and Jarrod [Walker] by Ricky Skaggs.” (Walker wrote liner notes for the Real Gone Music re-release.)

Mullins noted that the Rice/Skaggs blend – a lead singer with a baritone-range voice coupled with a high tenor – established a hair-tingling blend that continues to be emulated, from Ronnie Bowman and Don Rigsby in Lonesome River Band through Alison Krauss’ duets with Dan Tyminski and Russell Moore.

Benson said, “It’s an important record for the genre as a whole, and it’s also an important record to me, personally, and really, to any banjo player who is serious about learning. It’s one of those essential albums.”

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

 

First, how did it come to be widely known as 0044? Well, nobody’s sure. Irwin and Levy remember being in the very early stages of their operations at the time – with both a new label and a new distribution company. All three Rounders had been totally immersed in music, but they were learning the business as they went, developing it on their own terms.

Levy speculated, “It is possible that it went back to when we were just calling records by their numbers,” when there just weren’t that many products. “So, it may have been something we started when we were talking, and other people picked up on it, not intentionally. And we thought it was sort of humorous.”

And how did members of Emmylou Harris’ Angel Band get left off the credits, as well as the fact that J.D. played guitar on it? John Lawless goes into depth in his fascinating Bluegrass Today article.

HAPPY 50TH BIRTHDAY

 

As the liner notes to the Real Gone Music re-release say, “Virtually no other album anywhere in history is known to its audience by its label number. Not Kind of Blue, nor Pet Sounds, Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations, none.”

That says quite a bit about the recording’s importance. So does the fact that two labels are issuing re-releases this year.

The Real Gone Music edition is pressed on gold-colored vinyl for its golden anniversary. Both re-releases contain two cuts not included on the original product: “Why Don’t You Tell Me So?” and a version of “Cryin Holy” with Emmylou’s voice in the mix.

Failing sums up what 0044, J.D. Crowe, and the musicians he surrounded himself with mean to him and to many of the pickers making the best music today.

“Every time I circle back to the Bluegrass Album Band, The New South, and J.D. Crowe, I’m reminded, ‘that’s how it’s done!’”

Photo Credit: Phil Zimmerman

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