Tag: Doc Watson

Hillbilly Soul: An Interview with Darren Nicholson of Balsam Range

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

How old were you when you got into bluegrass?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

End of the Road: A Conversation with Norman Blake

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Few would dispute Norman Blake’s place on the Mount Rushmore of acoustic guitarists. He’s spent 50 years defining a flat-picking style adopted by guitarists from Tony Rice to Dave Rawlings. He’s also been a translator of traditional ballads, an influential folk songwriter, and an A-list sideman for the likes of Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Kris Kristofferson.

But the bullet point version of his career misses what makes him fascinating: a stubborn integrity in his approach to making music — commercial pressures be damned — and a bizarre serendipity that’s led him right into the center of some of folk music’s most important moments of the past half-century. Now he’s capping off his long career with Brushwood (Songs & Stories), an album of beautiful, spare folk that is jarringly modern and political. The songs would sound timeless except that Blake is singing about social media and the Internet — and he often sounds righteously pissed off. It’s hard to explain Norman Blake briefly, but the back-story is worth it.

Born in 1938 on a farm near the Georgia-Alabama line, Blake grew up without electricity, learning songs from a radio jerry-rigged to an old car battery. He dropped out of school at 16 to play in bluegrass bands, made it to the Grand Ole Opry in his early 20s, then was drafted into the Army where he played mandolin in a bluegrass group voted “best band in the Caribbean Command.” Fresh out of the service, he ran into Johnny Cash at a recording session in Chattanooga. Cash asked him if he played the dobro, and 25-year-old Norman said, “Well, yeah.” Cash hired him on the spot.

Then, on the seminal, tide-turning albums of the era, he was right there. It’s hard not to notice the Forrest Gump-ian serendipity of it all.

Blake played guitar on Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline in 1968, one of the founding albums of country-rock; on John Hartford’s Aereo-Plain in 1971, which marked the beginning of Newgrass; and on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken in 1972, which sold approximately as many copies as there were college students in America and introduced old-time country and bluegrass to a longer-haired generation. Thirty years and dozens of albums later, Gillian Welch recommended Blake to producer T Bone Burnett as just the guy to help introduce classic American old-time and folk to another, slightly shorter-haired generation. The O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, in 2000, won a truckload of Grammys, sold eight million copies, and made enough money for Blake — along with his wife and frequent collaborator, Nancy — to start his retirement from the road.

Now, in true Norman Blake style, he’s adding an unexpected chapter to his idiosyncratic story. The sound of Brushwood (Songs & Stories) is classic Norman and Nancy: guitar and fiddle and voices in harmony. But its content is mostly no-holds-barred fire and brimstone of the modern, progressive variety — as well as some instrumental rags, a couple of train ballads, and a spoken word ghost story. In other words, this 79-year-old master of the craft just put out an album of traditional folk songs about climate change, old time religion, the Koch brothers, train wrecks, the NRA, and Wall Street greed. He predicts it will be his last album, and damn. What a way to tie a bow on it. God bless Norman Blake.

I know, in your music, you’ve never shied away from being political, but it seems like, on this record, there’s a lot more explicitly political songs.

Yeah, I somehow just felt like doing that. I don’t know why. It just came out that way, some of the stuff that I ended up writing.

On some of these songs, like “The Truth Will Stand (When This World’s on Fire),” you’re combining observations about modern life — climate change, the NRA, billionaires running the country — with the spiritual language you’ve been using in traditional songs for a long time. Did that feel like a new thing to do? Or did that come naturally?

Yeah, what I write is just the way it comes out. There’s nothing calculated there. It’s just how I write, yeah.

Well, maybe I’ll go back in time a little bit here. I’ve read that the success of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack allowed you and Nancy to stop touring, and you felt that was a welcome relief. I’m wondering what your feelings about performing were earlier in your career. Was there a time when you enjoyed touring, when it was an important part of making music to you? Or did you want to stop earlier?

I had considered stopping earlier, yes — 2007 is when I actually quit touring, quit the road due to age and things like that. You know, just getting tired of the actual road itself at that point. Of course, we did everything on the ground, driving. Just got to where we couldn’t stomach that part of it anymore.

I guess what I’m getting at is, do you think if money hadn’t been a part of the equation, your career would’ve been very different? Would you have traveled less, written more?

Yeah, money was a factor in why we did it. I suppose so, yeah. I had the artistic inclination to want to do it, but the money — certainly making a living … we had a family and everything and had to do something. A lot of times, when we made records through the years, the reason we’d make the record was, we had so much money from the record company — they’d give us x amount of money to make a record — and what we had leftover then that we didn’t spend, we’d usually use that to pay our income tax every year. [Laughs] So we made a record about every year, in some ways, you might say, to pay the income taxes. But it was also artistic at the same time.

So why do you make records now?

More for an artistic sense, I think. The way the world is now, the record business is nothing like it was when we started. It’s a whole different thing. My records have never been huge sellers, so they had to be artistic on one level, I guess. Now they’re more artistic, certainly.

At the end of this record, particularly with “Nameless Photograph” and “Stay Down on the Farm,” I couldn’t help but think it sounded like a goodbye.

It’s trying to be. I think maybe this might be my last one — my last full record that I’ll make. I’ll be 79 years old here in less than two months. So I’m pushing 80 years old. I had a light stroke four years ago, had artery surgery on my neck, and that kind of thing. I never was a great singer, as far as having a great voice, but that’s left my voice pretty gravelly. I just wonder, how long do you inflict yourself on the public as you grow old? [Laughs]

It’s a lot of work to make a record, and I just don’t have the inclination. I have vowed this year — like I said, we quit the road in 2007, but we’ve played a few gigs around home — but this is the first year that I have said that I will not perform this year in public. And I will say this: I may never again perform in public, if possible, unless it’s a money consideration and I have to. I may never perform in public again. That’s what I’m thinking.

Do you still enjoy making music at home?

Oh, I play all the time. I play every day. Oh yeah, yeah. I’ll never quit that. I’m totally committed to playing. But not in public. As you grow older, for me, it takes a lot more practice to keep the playing and the voice and everything to where it’s passable to make records. As far as the performing, that’s also something that’s getting to be too much for me physically. All of the getting ready for it, and all of the traveling that you may have to do, even if it’s around home. I just don’t weather up that good. And I just don’t need the performance pressure, with these medical conditions and things. And I will say this, not to belabor the point, but we — speaking of Nancy and me, both — feel very much that with the climate of the country right now, the political climate and the attitude in the country in general, I don’t feel like I want to entertain some people. I don’t want to go out and put my music before some of them.

That’s interesting. I remember your song from the early 2000s during the Bush administration, “Don’t be Afraid of the Neo-Cons.” I guess the natural follow-up would be, do you think we should be afraid of Trump?

Yeah, I suppose so. But I don’t know that I would go and do that. I feel like there are enough people — obviously, as we saw this past weekend — there are enough people speaking out. I don’t know what the outcome is going to be. The political climate we don’t agree with at all. So we maybe just as well stay home. That’s, like I said, that’s one reason I said I don’t feel like trying to entertain some folks. I don’t feel like putting myself out in front of them when I know that I disagree with them and they disagree with me so radically. The way that people are nowadays, there’s so much weird stuff going on, I feel like some — excuse my French, but I feel like some son of a bitch is liable to shoot us or any of us for being freaks or for playing hillbilly music or singing the wrong song at the wrong time. Somebody is liable to shoot you up there on a big stage in front of a big crowd at a festival. You never know what the hell’s going on now.

Well, a lot of folks have compared the current political turmoil to what happened in the late ’60s. You lived through that, and you were a musician then. So are you optimistic at all about the country now? I think a listener to the new record would hear that you’re not.

Am I optimistic about the country? No, I’m not, in some ways. In other words, considering what’s just happened, how can you be? I understand why a lot of people might have elected him, voted for him, but he took them for a ride. He’s a con man. He conned a lot of these people. And I feel like a lot of them that put him where he is today, how can they look at what he’s doing … it should be painfully obvious, just from the time he got into office, that he’s doing exactly the opposite to what he told them, in a lot of ways. So, no, I’m not optimistic about it. I feel like they really got snookered. Just a minute …

[Nancy’s voice in the background: “Democracy doesn’t come with a guarantee!”]

Nancy says that democracy doesn’t come with a guarantee.

That’s a good reminder.

Yeah, she has some good ideas. She says some good things. In fact, some of the songs on there are inspired by her. She helped write them. I get some good ideas from her!

Speaking of writing, I’m really curious about how you became a songwriter, because it seems like — and you can correct my dates, if I’m slightly off — but you became a professional musician in the late ’50s, early ’60s, but you didn’t make your first solo recording until ’72.

That’s right.

Were you writing songs all along, or were you learning along the way from the great songwriters you were playing with?

No, what singing I did then was mostly just singing harmony parts or something on the chorus in bands, things like that. When I got ready to make that first record — people were saying, “You should make a record” — when it came about that I had the wherewith to do that, with Bruce Kaplan — he was with Rounder at that point, then it became Flying Fish, but it was still Rounder at that time … I thought to myself, “Well, I won’t make a record unless I have some original material.” So I said, “Well I need to write some stuff.” So I started writing then.

Wow. Just like that. For a while after that, you toured pretty hard, and it seems like you didn’t write as much. Is that because you lost interest in it?

Too busy. Too busy driving and performing. And competing in the bluegrass world, trying to survive in the bluegrass world knowing we were playing something that was completely off the beaten track and away from what they were playing. So we just took too much time being professional and performing and driving and getting to gigs and all that. We just didn’t have time to want to be that creative.

What do you mean by competing?

When you sent me and Nancy and James Bryan [The Rising Fawn String Ensemble] out on a bluegrass festival with a fiddle and a cello and a guitar, you know, out there in five-string banjo world, so to speak, we were kind of an oddity. We were fish in a tree.

How did it feel to be so different at those festivals?

Well, we did a lot of musical crusading to survive in that world. And we managed to. But that’s something else — we grew tired of crusading musically over the years.

It seems like you’ve influenced a lot of people over the years that have become very influential in their own right. Might even say you’ve influenced people even more than the folks in strictly five-string banjo world. I’m thinking of Gillian Welch and others. Do you feel like your crusading kind of won in the long run?

Oh, I don’t know. I never knew who I really influenced in the long run. I do relate a lot to Gillian and David. They’re some of my friends, and I respect what they do. They do some great things, and I admire their grit to do it. But I never thought about who I influenced or didn’t. I was never sure about that. I guess I’m never sure of my role in any of it. I just was too busy trying to survive and make a living in the music business, and it was hard enough for any of us. Playing acoustic music has always been a hard way to make a living.

Sure. It seems like, from the outside, at least, that it must’ve taken a lot of backbone to do what you did just because you felt like it’s what you should do, rather than because it was lucrative or because there was a successful niche for it.

We always did what we felt like doing artistically. We played what we knew to play and what we could play and felt like playing. We didn’t really tailor ourselves into any particular thing. We never tried to be commercial in any sense.

Just doing what you felt like you needed to do — is that what it felt like to drop out of school at 16 to become a musician? Was that a popular decision with your family?

I was always pretty well supported by my parents in what I did musically. But they were never quite up for me leaving home at the point that I did starting off on it. I think that worried them a little bit. But they encouraged me, musically, very much in what I did …they were surprised by some of it, you know, that I’d had as much success as I’d had. They didn’t expect that! I think they always considered it as something you couldn’t make a living out of.

After growing up listening to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio in the ’40s, what did it feel like to get up on the Opry stage in your early 20s? To play on that program you grew up on.

Oh, it was a big deal. It was a big deal for us to be on it in any way back in the day. That’s back when it was down at the Ryman. It was the world. It was it. In fact, when I was real young, we couldn’t think past the Opry, hardly. That was the pinnacle, the top of the heap.

I’m wondering about your early guitar education. On the Opry, when you were growing up in the ’40s, there wouldn’t have been many lead acoustic guitar players, right?

No, no, it was not a thing you heard featured very much. It was in the bands. But Sam McGee was playing guitar. He was on there. He was playing solo-type guitar, playing with his brother Kirk. So I heard him.

Sam McGee? I’ve never heard of Sam McGee.

You’ve never heard of Sam McGee!

Well … [Laughs] I’ve heard of a good number of guitar players from back then, I think, but I don’t know of him.

Well, the McGee brothers. Sam and Kirk McGee, the boys from sunny Tennessee, they were billed. They played with Uncle Dave Macon. Sam played a lot with Uncle Dave, made records with him, and then he and his brother Kirk also made records. And then they played with Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith, band called the Dixieliners.

What was his guitar style like?

Sam was a finger-style guitar player, played guitar-banjo and played guitar, kind of a ragtime style. They were extremely good, some of my favorite people. I used to hear them on the Opry when I was a kid.

Did you study his style, learn to play like him?

I never tried to play their stuff that early on. I’m sure I play in that style, that same old finger-style playing — similar songs and stuff. They were very good performers.

Who else was an early influence on your guitar playing?

Mother Maybelle [Carter] was a big influence. Very much so. On those early records of the Carter Family, then later on when I got to know her in Nashville.

What did Doc Watson mean to you when you first heard him?

After I came out of the army in ‘63, I was giving guitar lessons in Chattanooga. One of my students asked me had I ever heard of him, and I said no. I had never heard of Doc. They brought me some records, loaned me some of his records to hear. I was doing mostly finger-playing at that point. I always had played mandolin with a flat pick. I had picked the guitar a little bit that way, too. Then I heard him, and he was getting popular, getting a lot of notice at that point, so I thought to myself, “My goodness.” I thought this was a novelty to play the guitar this way! I had learned from the old way, the thumb and finger style, but then I thought, “Well, I can do this too. This is something I know how to do.” So I started working on it more at that point …

Then, when I got to Nashville, the whole thing opened up. I realized there was a whole word of this going on, so I got right in the middle of it quick as I could. I went through a phase that played both ways. I played with a flat pick part of the time — did that with John Hartford — then I also played alternate thumb and finger style, you know, single string stuff. Ended up finally just pretty well flat-picking.

It’s interesting to think — I mean, a lot of folks listened to the Skillet Lickers back in the ’20s and must’ve known Riley Puckett’s style, and then also were familiar with Maybelle Carter’s melodic guitar playing, but then you said people thought more modern pickers like Doc Watson sounded like a novelty. Why do you think that is? What was the difference?

Well, they just weren’t used to hearing that much played on the guitar with a pick like that. The guitar was more in the bands. When it started becoming a prominent lead instrument, it created a whole new thing. And we never called it flat-picking. That’s a term that came on later. We always referred to a pick like that as a “straight pick.”

Did Doc ever teach you or give you any advice?

Well, I’ve always said I learned from anybody I ever liked. We played gigs with Doc. I’ve had the good fortune to hang out some with him, had some good conversations and things. Got along pretty good.

Compared to learning from folks you’ve played with and folks you listened to and by going on the road, nowadays a lot of young musicians — even folk and bluegrass musicians — are going to conservatory programs to study. Do you think there’s a big difference between those learning styles?

Nowadays, people do everything in a different way. They have to. There’s so much going on. They’ve got access to so much that we didn’t have. I guess any way you can learn it is what you do. We were a lot more rural in our approach. Nowadays, rural life is a lot less involved with it. It’s become more of a fad, in a lot of ways. But they just don’t come from the same world that we did. They didn’t grow up down in the country. A radio to listen at is all we had, and a handful of records on a wind-up Victrola or something. Nowadays, they can access anything that’s out there.

Do you think that access to everything, that lack of common influences, is changing the way people make music? It seems like older generations of musicians always talk about these common touchstones, like listening to the Opry on the family radio or watching the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show …

Yeah, I don’t know. I wouldn’t know. But when I first started hearing music, we just had the Opry on the radio and a few other radio programs — of course, it was live music on the radio, on our battery-powered radio. We didn’t have electricity, when I was a kid, so we had a battery radio, a phonograph, a few records, and whatever you heard people playing around the community. That’s all we had to draw on.

Why did you decide to incorporate storytelling onto this record — I mean, spoken stories?

Just stuff I’d written. I figured, “Well, if I’m not going to make another record, then these things are never going to get heard.” Whether they should or shouldn’t. They were just things I’d written that weren’t a song, so I said, “Well, I’ll put them on there.”

Do you think younger folk musicians have a responsibility to tell it like it is, like you do, to talk about the modern world or politics in their songs?

I don’t think they have a responsibility to, no. They just have to do what they feel like. It’s their own decision. If they feel like that, they should do it … I always felt that I didn’t want to overdo that aspect of things, I mean politically. If I was really trying to entertain people like years ago, out where people would expect me to play the guitar, I didn’t feel like going out and getting too political — just like a lot of performers get too religious on stage. I think it turns people off, if they didn’t go there for that. If it’s a political rally and you want to be political, then that’s a different thing. But just to go out in a general manner to entertain people, I think politics and religion are some things that should be avoided to some degree. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t sing a religious song! We always did. But I mean, you shouldn’t go out and get on the stump, if people aren’t expecting it or didn’t go there to hear that.

So now that you don’t perform live, you feel free from those considerations?

Yeah, I put it on a record. I’ve always said I’ll use a record for any kind of soapbox I decided to get on. In public, I wouldn’t want to play this latest record. If I went out to play, I wouldn’t do that stuff!

Well, let me finish with one more question for you.

Go ahead.

I haven’t really heard anyone sing about social media or the Internet in a folk song before, and it was sort of … well, refreshing, I guess.

[Laughs] Well, thank you.

It strikes me as funny that most young folk musicians seem committed to using their parents’ and grandparents’ vocabulary and, as far as using modern words, you’ve beaten us to it.

Well, I feel like it’s all there, you know. The old stuff’s there and the new stuff’s there and it’s out in the world. It just fell out that way. It was not calculated, it just came out that way.

Squared Roots: Scott Biram on the Legend of Lead Belly

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Though Lead Belly was merely a man, his story reads like the stuff of legends. He had multiple encounters with the law, was sentenced to a chain gang, escaped, killed a relative, and got thrown back in the hoosegow, earned himself a pardon because the governor was a fan. But then he stabbed someone else and got put back in prison, this time in Angola, where Alan and John Lomax found him. He was released, again, after serving his minimum and pleading with the governor, but committed a second stabbing, in the late ’30s. All the while, he so impressed everyone who heard him that he also landed himself in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Known primarily for playing 12-string guitar, Lead Belly also played the piano, mandolin, harmonica, violin, and diatonic accordion on the hundreds of songs he recorded over the course of his all-too-brief career.

Texas songwriter Scott Biram grew up on those songs and, later, learned the stories that went with them. In his own bluesy, folky, soulful Americana style, Biram hears the inevitable echoes of Lead Belly coming through, including on his latest release, The Bad Testament. The influence is there in the miscegenation of musical styles, but also in the way Biram approaches his role as raconteur.   

Why Lead Belly?

Well, Doc Watson was taken! [Laughs]

[Laughs] Fair point.

I would definitely say he’s among my biggest influences — Doc and Townes Van Zandt are my other two. Lead Belly has been in my life my whole life. My dad listened to him a lot when I was a kid. I have quite a few songs where I do a little rant in the middle, where it’s not really singing as much as it’s telling a little story or saying something. I think I got that from listening to Lead Belly.

Right. Must be nice to have parents who listened to cool music. I grew up on Barry Manilow and Dionne Warwick.

[Laughs] There was definitely a lot of Eagles and Crosby, Stills, and Nash at my house. But my dad listened to a lot of Doc Watson and Lightnin’ Hopkins and stuff like that.

I can see why he would gravitate toward that stuff. Lead Belly really did have a singular style — this mix of blues, folk, gospel, and country on a 12-string guitar. What was it that spoke to you in that mish-mosh or maybe it was the mish-mosh?

I think a lot of it had to do with just being a part of my life when I was a kid with my dad listening to it so much. We had this vinyl record that was the soundtrack to the film Lead Belly which is a pretty obscure movie, not really easy to find. I think they filmed it in ’76 or something like that. I was a little kid. They filmed it in the little town that I lived in and I was in my dad’s arms on the edge of the set while they were filming the scene where Lead Belly shot his friend and went to prison.

Well, one of the times he went to prison …

One of the times … yeah. [Laughs] So I heard that soundtrack a lot, which wasn’t actually Lead Belly playing on the soundtrack. It was Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and someone named Hi Tide Harris who I haven’t been able to find too much on, even with the Internet.

Once I got into roots music, when I was a little older and started playing bluegrass and started really playing the guitar a lot and learning blues, Lead Belly was just naturally somebody that I gravitated toward. And his story is so interesting. I read all the biographies. I read a lot of biographies on musicians that influence me so that I don’t just have a shallow knowledge of them. If I’m going to be playing some of their music, I want to definitely know as much about them as possible.

That’s awesome. I had never studied much of his life until prepping for this. But, I mean … the guy recorded hundreds of songs, worked with the Lomaxes, had a radio show on WNYC, went to Europe, and was in and out of prison multiple times — sang his way out of jail a couple times — all before dying at 50 or 51. That’s some hard living. Can you imagine spending even a couple years in his shoes?

No. [Laughs] I mean, I can imagine, but I’m probably not going to do a very good job of imagining what something like that would be like. I’m just a guitar player. [Laughs] Actually, he only sang himself out of prison once. There’s a legend about him that he sang himself out twice, but really, the second time was kind of exaggerated. I think he was in prison in Louisiana, at that time, and he got out on something called “good time” which is, I think, probably good behavior.

Right. He served his minimum and got out. Here was an interesting thing that I learned: He played at the Apollo, but the Harlem audience didn’t really resonate with him as deeply as the folkies did. He had a lot in common with Woody Guthrie, maybe more so than some of the old blues guys, but why do you think the Black audience didn’t connect?

First of all, he was a country guy. And I don’t mean country music; I mean from the rural South. So I’m not sure anyone from New York would really see it as anything but a spectacle, at that time. But, also, I wonder — and I’m just guessing here — I know that John Lomax used to kind of have him dressed up in a prison uniform and stuff like that, kind of clown him around out there and make him seem like he was just straight from the prison. I imagine that might have been a turn-off to some people in Harlem back then. I know Woody Guthrie, when he went to New York and was supposed to be on something and they wanted him to dress, as he described it, “as a clown,” he said he’d be back in a few minutes, went downstairs, and left. Didn’t even come back to the studio. [Laughs]

[Laughs] Yeah. I read that Life magazine did a three-page spread on Lead Belly and the title of the article is not something I’m going to repeat.

Yeah, I get ya.

And it was considered an honor that he was getting this prominent placement. But it makes sense that the minstrel thing wouldn’t fly.

It might’ve been a turn-off to people in Harlem. If there was anyone from the South who lived in Harlem at that time, they probably weren’t impressed by it because, to them, it was just a reminder of what they just left.

The other thing I love about listening to his stuff and pouring over his stories is that he lived through an era of history that was rife with huge moments and he documented history as it happened, writing songs about the Titanic, the Hindenburg, Jim Crow, FDR, Hitler, etc. Pete Seeger carried his style forward. Bob Dylan, to a certain extent. Who else do you hear carrying the Lead Belly torch?

You mean documenting history as it happens?

Yeah. Ani DiFranco does a bit, which she picked up from Pete Seeger.

Honestly, nobody comes to mind that is documenting current events in music so much that it’s actual historical stories in the songs. There are a lot of people saying their thoughts about the current states of everything, but I can’t think of anyone that actually sings a story about a tragedy.

Santiago Jiménez, Jr. — Flaco Jiménez’s brother — has a record called El Corrido de Esequiel Hernandez: Tragedia de Redford. The album is titled after the song about a kid in Redford, Texas, down in the desert on the border, who was walking his goats one day and the guys in the DEA or Border Patrol came and shot him because he had a rifle walking, like he did every day, with his goats. He was basically a shepherd and he got shot. That’s the only one I can think of that pops out and that’s not a popular artist or anything. [Laughs]

[Laughs] Right. I was just thinking Hurray for the Riff Raff does it a little bit. Rhiannon Giddens, a little. But no one to the same extent. I mean, if you read Lead Belly’s song titles, you can trace history.

A lot of the time you have to listen to it as “The Hindenburg Disaster, Part I” and “Part II” because they couldn’t fit the whole song on the single. They had to put it on both sides!

Nitty Gritty Dirt Band: An Unbroken Circle

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In 1971, Richard Nixon was president and the United States was divided. It was an era marked by civil rights struggles, Vietnam War demonstrations, and labor union losses. The counterculture movement that evolved in the 1960s was continuing to take shape and was intrinsically linked to the outpouring of a whole generation’s worth of musical innovation. Amidst social upheaval, at a time when your music reflected your politics, a common ground was forged among unlikely sources. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s milestone 1972 album, Will the Circle Be Unbroken, single-handedly bridged generational and cultural gaps by pairing country music veterans with young hippies from Southern California.

“I don't think we realized the sociological impact that that record would have,” says Jeff Hanna, founding singer and guitarist of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. “On the surface, it looked like, 'What the hell are they doing making music together?'”

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band formed in Long Beach, California, in 1966 and became a staple of the wave of California rock that included acts like the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and the Eagles who were all exploring old-time country sounds in their own music. By the time the recording sessions for the Circle record began, the Dirt Band was fresh off the success of their cover of Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles,” which had become a Top 10 pop single. Record executives and fans, alike, were anticipating a follow-up in the same vein. But the band’s manger and producer, Bill McEuen — brother of band member John McEuen — had another idea: to get the band in the studio with the bluegrass and country musicians that had influenced them when they were coming up.

“I have a lot of respect for [the Dirt Band] for doing it, for going out on a limb, you know, and doing that kind of thing in the middle of a career that was just really on its way up at that point,” says multi-instrumentalist and longtime Dirt Band collaborator Jerry Douglas. “They were the famous people on the record and their guests were the people that they were introducing to their audience, you see. So it was kind of going out on a limb for them. You know, the record company didn't wanna do it. Nobody wanted to do it. They just kind of pushed it through and it was a success.”

When it came time to recruit a slew of Nashville greats for the project, the generational divide ended up working in the Dirt Band’s favor. Their friendship with the Scruggs family began when Earl Scruggs brought his children, who were fans of the band, to a gig they played at Vanderbilt University in 1970. Scruggs became the first artist they invited to guest on the Circle record. They snagged Doc Watson the same way: his son, Merle, was a fan of the band.

“One of the things that was really interesting with a lot of these acts is, their kids were fans of the band. There was kind of a stamp of approval from the younger generation,” recalls Hanna. “And Merle Watson said something like, ‘Well daddy you love the way they sing and play.’ And also the invitation was, ‘We've got Earl Scruggs.’ And Doc said, ‘Yeah, that sounds like fun,’ so there it went.”

Other guests included heavyweights like Jimmy Martin, Mother Maybelle Carter, and Roy Acuff.

“I mentioned to Bill McEuen, at one point, that I'd read this article about Roy Acuff where he said he'd play real country music with anybody anywhere. And we talked about that and Bill said, ‘Well, let's see if he'll put his money where his mouth is,’” Hanna says.

But Acuff wasn’t an easy sell: His initial meeting with the band didn’t go as well as they were hoping. It turns out that the idea of West Coast hippies in their early 20s recording in Woodland Studios in Nashville was a bit of a hard pill to swallow.

“[Acuff] came in and he was just largely unimpressed with us. He was kind of like — he wasn't totally negative — it's just kind of flat and he said later, ‘Well, I don't trust a man that I can't see his face,’ and we all had like massive beards and mustaches and long hair,” Hanna remembers. “Meanwhile, we got in the studio and recorded our tracks with Merle Travis and, lo and behold, Roy Acuff comes strolling in, or sort of quietly walks in the back of the studio at the end of the day. And Bill played him — it was either ‘Nine-Pound Hammer’ or ‘Dark As a Dungeon’ — one of those. And Roy got this big smile on his face and he said, ‘Well, that ain't nothin' but country. I'll be here tomorrow. Be ready.’ So we cut those tracks, so he was in.”

The result was a monumental cross-generational album that combined genres and styles.

“Just to put it in context: You've got Merle Travis's Travis-picking; you've got Earl Scruggs' Scruggs-style banjo; you've got Maybelle Carter, Carter scratch; and Doc Watson — even though flat-picking isn't named after him, it should be,” says Hanna. “I mean, just all these guys that were just so big in our world.”

The Dirt Band’s love of country and old-time sounds goes way back, so it was a natural progression for them to want to honor and record with these musicians.

“A lot of us got into bluegrass because of the folk boom in the mid-60s. A lot of us also had older siblings and they'd bring home these records by Peter, Paul, and Mary or the the Kingston Trio,” says Hanna. “When I first started playing guitar, I bought a Pete Seeger instructional LP and book that had a section about the Carter Family and Maybelle Carter and her playing style, as well … I was a huge fan of the Everly Brothers. We all were. The Everlys, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Chuck Berry, Little Richard: that stuff killed us. But I think something we all had in common was our deep love of the sounds of Appalachia. And blues for that matter. But a lot of it was acoustic music, I've gotta say.”

Singer/songwriter Jackson Browne joined the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band when he was 17 years old, after meeting them at a gig at the Paradox club in Tustin, California, a little town in Orange County. “Getting to play with them was a huge installment in my musical education because I got to sit there and play these really intricate songs,” Browne recalls. “I mean, they were all better players than me, so I learned a lot.”

What struck him immediately about the band, he says, was their vast musical palette.

“The Dirt Band was great because they were true music fans and music aficionados. They weren't just kids that were playing folk music that they heard. They dug deep, is what I'm saying,” says Browne. “They found recordings of the Memphis Jug Band and those things were hard to find. I mean, like that wasn't just lying around. And they were kind of musicologists even then, from the very beginning.”

This year, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band celebrated their 50th anniversary as a band. In commemoration, they returned to Nashville for a star-studded concert at the famed Ryman Auditorium last September, which aired on PBS and was released on DVD. Aptly titled Circlin’ Back, the show was both a nod to the first Circle record and a career retrospective that incorporated the musicians that have impacted the band’s history. Vince Gill, Alison Krauss, Rodney Crowell, Jerry Jeff Walker, John Prine, Jerry Douglas, and Jackson Browne were among the handpicked guests.

“What was even cooler to me than playing the show that night was the rehearsals that we had before,” Douglas recalls. “The first time you do a run-through of one of those songs is so magical. It has all of this extra spark and fear and everything in it. So there were sparks flying in the rehearsal hall when we were doing these things and trying to figure out who played on what.”

Just as the Dirt Band introduced their audience to their earlier influences on the first Circle record, the Circlin’ Back anniversary show connected the next generation of artists and fans together. Musicians like Vince Gill and Jerry Douglas, who remember buying the first Circle record when it came out, are now considered “little brothers” of the Dirt Band. Although they are each musical powerhouses in their own rights, the anniversary show was an opportunity for them to play with some of their heroes.

“I think the first time I played on the song with Jackson Browne that I played lap steel on, I held my breathe through the whole thing,” Douglas says. “I'm such a fan of all of those guys and then they bring Jackson Browne in, and I'm playing on this thing with Jackson Browne and I'm just going nuts inside. So much raw emotion that's happening.”

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band has always had the ability to tap into emotion. Through their shared love of traditional music, they impacted legions of listeners by bridging generations and styles. Their legacy is littered with stories of parents and children bonding over the first Circle record, which is arguably one of the most significant releases in the history of music. At a time of cultural unrest, it showcased music’s ability to bypass divides and cross boundaries. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was Americana before Americana had a name, and their genre-bending illustrates the most important facet of music: how it connects us all.

Photo of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in the early 1970s courtesy of the artist.

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

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

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

How do you two know each other?

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

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

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

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

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

Why did you move here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bryan Sutton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strings: Do you play shredder guitar?

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

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

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

So metal and bluegrass are pretty strongly connected for you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strings: Congratulations.

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

Billy Strings

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

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

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

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

Strings: … who writes the most amazing songs ever.

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

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

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

Illustration by Abby McMillen. Photos courtesy of the artists.

A Legend Past His Prime: Reflections on Aging Artists and Seeing Ralph Stanley Live

Posted on by Editor

In September 2010, I was supposed to see banjo pioneer Earl Scruggs perform at UNC-Chapel Hill with the Red Clay Ramblers. I had a ticket, but something came up and at the last minute I couldn’t go. Scruggs couldn’t perform anyway due to illness. The show went on without him, and his performance was never rescheduled. He passed away on March 28, 2012, and I never got another opportunity to see him.

Back in May, as I left work one night, I reminded myself to buy a ticket to see Doc Watson at the North Carolina Museum of Art (scheduled for June 30th) with my next paycheck. A few nights later, I got off work to find a text informing me of the guitarist’s death. Watson passed on the 29th, three days before that paycheck came.

So it was natural that, when I heard that the legendary Dr. Ralph Stanley was supposed to play at a small venue called the ArtsCenter just down the road from my house in Carrboro, I jumped at the opportunity to be there. Fortunately, there were no illnesses or falls to get in the way, and the show went on as planned. I had expected to be awestruck and delighted, but left feeling more guilty and heartbroken instead.

Don’t get me wrong — I felt honored to be in the presence of one of the last living pioneers of bluegrass. Chills ran down my spine when he sang  “O Death,” and my heart swelled during “Will The Circle Be Unbroken” and “Angel Band.” But the same time, all I could think was “You’re having a good time, but is he?”

Though the 86-year-old Stanley seemed genuinely humbled by the audience’s turn-out and enthusiasm, he didn’t seem entirely “there” for much of the performance. Arthritis prevented him from playing the banjo for all but a few songs. When he sang, it was mostly back-up; even then, he had to be constantly reminded of what song the band was playing. He forgot many of the words of “Amazing Grace.” And on a few songs, his grandson, Nathan Stanley, had to shout lyrics to him as the song was going on.

For the songs Stanley didn’t sing on, he stood quietly with his hands clasped in front of him while the band played and Nathan sang. The audience chuckled at his forgetfulness and the couple of times he sassed Nathan. The younger Stanley is himself a talented performer, with a voice that sounded much more mature than his age might reflect. But it wasn’t quite as fulfilling as hearing Ralph’s legendary timbre.

It was less of a show in the performing sense, and more of a experience that was telling me “aren’t you glad you get to be in the presence of Ralph Stanley?’  that is to say, the whole thing felt more than a little forced. Yes, I was glad. But it’s one thing to see someone who’s glad to be “there” in every sense of the word — physically, mentally, emotionally. It’s something completely different to see someone who’s standing on a stage for two 45-minute sets, mostly doing nothing.

None of this is to say that performers must be put out to greener pastures once they hit certain ages. I’m all for musicians creating and performing long as they can. But maybe sometimes they can’t, or even don’t want to anymore. And when that’s the case, shouldn’t we respect that? Even if that means I miss seeing another genre giant, I think — I hope — it means the image of their enormous talent lives on in our collective memory a little bit longer.