Tag: duos of summer

The Small Glories Share Canadian Stories in Song

Posted on by Editor

When it’s mentioned that the word “ambassador” comes to mind when listening to the Small Glories’ new album, Cara Luft starts to cheer. Along with her singing partner JD Edwards, the Small Glories see themselves as Canadian storytellers, like troubadours going from town to town singing about the world around them.

Truly, the Manitoba-based folk duo’s latest, Assiniboine & The Red, gives special insight into their unique worldview with songs like “Alberta,” “Winnipeg,” and “Don’t Back Down.” Chatting by phone, Luft shared a few more stories with the Bluegrass Situation.

BGS: It’s been a few year since you’ve made a record. What was the vibe in the studio when you were making this one?

CL: It was interesting in that we got everybody back together again. The only thing that changed was our engineer — and he’s a friend of ours. We had the same producer (Neil Osborne) and the same rhythm section, which was great. We actually recorded it in Winnipeg, and it was nice to be in our hometown. You know what was so funny? It was April but it was freezing cold. It was one of those moments like, “Oh my God, we live in Canada.” It’s April 15 and it’s minus 15 degrees, which is ridiculous! It was freezing! So, I remember being very cold!

This is for the Bluegrass Situation, so we have to talk about the banjo.

We do! [Laughs]

Tell me what attracted you to the banjo in the first place.

I grew up in a folk-singing family. My parents were a professional folk duo and played music when they were younger, too. My dad is a wonderful clawhammer banjo player. He’s been playing for close to sixty years now. So I grew up listening to the banjo, never thinking that I’d actually want to play it, but I did love the sound of it. I think it was kind of inevitable that I would pick it up. And of course it’s not the three-finger bluegrass style, even though I love that style. I don’t really play that but I do love the sound of the banjo.

And I love writing with it. It’s such a different instrument than the guitar. I really was guitar-focused for most of my career. I picked up the banjo nine years ago and I found it really fascinating to change the way my right hand worked, because it’s a different movement than if you’re doing fingerstyle guitar. And just having that drone string, I find that it’s like no other instrument that I’ve ever attempted playing. It’s this beautiful string that just rings out. I found it a very interesting way to write. I write differently on the banjo than I do on the guitar, so it’s brought me into a wider perspective of songs to write, I would say.

How are the songs different that you’re writing on banjo?

I would say I’m writing more tune-based songs on the banjo. As a guitar play, I am a really strong rhythm player and I would do the odd lick here and there, you know, coming up with something, but I wasn’t really a lead player on guitar. I would do some fingerstyle stuff, in more of the realm of those folkie fingerstyle guys like Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, but not really tune-based. The banjo is definitely much more tune-based for me. I write melodies on the banjo, where I never really wrote melodies on guitar before. I would sing a melody but I wouldn’t necessarily play a melody, so it’s been really beautiful to explore this melodic writing on a banjo.

I read an interview about how you loved the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken as a kid. I was curious how that might have impacted your music.

Yeah! For me, growing up in a folk-singing family, there was music all the time in the house, whether it was listening to vinyl or listening to my parents rehearse, or listening to people play house concerts, or musicians who were traveling through town and rehearsing in our living room. So I was steeped in acoustic music from a very, very young age, whether it was live or recorded.

I remember listening to Will the Circle Be Unbroken, with the Carter Family and all these phenomenal people. There’s a track on there, “Soldier’s Joy,” with two banjo players, and one is playing clawhammer and one is playing three-finger, and to this day it’s still one of my favorite songs to listen to. I think it’s just the beauty of acoustic music and the history of acoustic music, whether it’s bluegrass or folk – and to me, the lines are a little blurred there. But that album in particular, I remember listening to it all through high school and even into my early 20s.

When I listen to “Don’t Back Down,” I can hear a sense of strength in there. What was on your mind when you wrote that song?

I wrote that with Bruce Guthro, who’s a great singer-songwriter, but he’s also lead singer of a group called Runrig, a great Scottish band, even though he’s from Canada. We wrote that as part of a collaboration where we were given the theme of writing around “home,” or what we would consider calling “home.” Bruce is from Cape Breton Island, which is in Nova Scotia, way out in the Maritime Provinces. It’s known for its musical history, but it’s also known for communities that are dying because either mining has stopped or fishing has stopped. So these people would be moving away from their communities, trying to find homes and work in other locations.

I was talking to him about being from the Canadian prairies, where there are quite a few areas in Saskatchewan that are full of ghost towns, where people have uprooted and moved to cities like Calgary or Edmonton, or Fort McMurray where the oil sands are. We were comparing notes about these communities that are dying, and what is it like for those who decide to stay? They don’t want to give up on all the things that hit them, right? They stick around during the dust bowl or when the fires come, when work has dried up and people are trying to find a way to make a living. So we thought, “Let’s write a song to honor those people who have decided to make it work in their home communities.”

Speaking of home, your song “Winnipeg” is such a love letter to your hometown. I noticed as that song progresses, there is another voice that comes in. Can you tell me more about that?

Yes, we have two guest vocalists on that track. Winnipeg has a huge indigenous population and a huge Métis population, which is a combination of people who have come from both an indigenous and a French background, and we also have a large French population, and then the English, and then everything else under the sun is in there, too.

We felt that in order to really honor our adopted hometown of Winnipeg, we needed to involve the French and the First Nations people in the song. We have a wonderful singer and songwriter who is Métis and she ended up writing a French portion to the song and doing a call-and-response with us on the track. And we invited a First Nations chanter and drummer to come and sing at the end of the song. We felt it wrapped up this beautiful multicultural community that we have in Winnipeg.

To me, “Sing” captures the spirit of this record. It lets people know about you and what you stand for. Is that important for you to share your own experiences with an audience?

Yes, I think it is. I think we’ve been more aware of bringing stories from other places that we’ve been, too, so it’s a combination of our experiences and also other people’s experiences. And with this record being released on an American label, we feel very privileged to be able to share about Canada with our American neighbors. It’s a very Canadian-focused album, with a strong sense of location. We want to bring stories about the people in Canada, and what things are like for us, and share that with the States, and Europe, and Australia, and the markets we get to go to.

It’s so great when people hear a song like “Winnipeg,” like, the people who come up to us in England and say, “Wow, I never thought I’d want to go to Winnipeg!” It cracks us up. We’re happy that we live in Winnipeg and we’re lucky that we live in Canada. We feel very privileged to live in Canada and we want to share some of the love, and some of the stories, of who we are and where we’re from.

Photo credit: Stefanie Atkinson

The Ever-Shifting Dance of Shovels & Rope

Posted on by Editor

On an unseasonably cool summer afternoon in Los Angeles, something very interesting happens as Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent chat with a third person at a cafe patio table, though it takes a few minutes to unfold.

The topic, at first, is how much real life is in the songs Hearst and Trent make as the sweetly rackety, Charleston, South Carolina-based duo Shovels & Rope. Does it reflect their decade’s worth of experiences as a married couple and, now, their experiences with two small kids? The material, after all, gets kind of dark at some turns.

“Yes and no,” Trent says. “I mean, we’ve always kind of been character writers. That’s just the type of writing that’s been interesting to us. And also, we’re, you know, generally happy people. We don’t need the suffering to…”

“I hate suffering,” Hearst interjects cheerfully.

“Some people feel they need to experience firsthand some kind of suffering to make art,” Trent continues. “And I’ve never really subscribed to that. We just make up the world and make up the character thing and write about it.”

Then, as it does, the subject turns to murder ballads. They’ve done a few in the course of their time together. There’s “Evil,” a song they wrote on the 2014 album Swimmin’ Time. And their new album By Blood features “Pretty Polly,” their reinterpretation of the staple of the British-Appalachian folk canon.

“We’ve got a song like ‘Evil,’ right?” Trent says. “So we didn’t have two kids at the time. And we’ve definitely never abused them. And Cary’s still alive. So that’s obviously just a made-up story.”

“And ‘Pretty Polly,’” Hearst notes. “We’ve never gotten anyone pregnant and killed her by the river.”

But then things take an intriguing turn. They get talking about the whole nature of murder ballads, the enduring place of them in music and culture. Hearst wonders about the clearly misogynistic violence of the form still having a place in our supposedly enlightened culture: “Why is it OK in this day and age that the murder ballad is this weird, sacred musical thing that we aren’t like, ‘Cancel! Hashtag cancel’?”

As they discuss this, though, they focus on each other. They lock eyes, talk only to each other, and it’s as if the rest of the world has gone away. He defends the form, noting the relationship to and appeal of crime drama and horror stories.

“You’re right,” she concedes. “I never thought of it that way. It just feels closer to home and personal because these are songs. Maybe it’s like, ‘What are you singing this song for? Did you do that? Is that what you think?’”

Trent shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“Just occurred to me that you might have the answer,” Hearst says.

“Oh, like I’ve got some dark secrets?” Trent wonders.

And so it goes for a few minutes.

If you’ve seen them in concert, you’ve seen this. In a small L.A. club the night before this conversation, it seemed they spent the first several songs hardly looking at the audience at all, just staring into each other’s eyes as they performed before later turning things more outward.

They laugh at this notion. The truth is, they say, on stage that behavior tends to be more pragmatic than romantic.

“I think we were trying to figure out what this was,” Trent says. “We check in with each other a lot. This was a bit of a weird show in a weird place. And we also do a lot of musical communication on stage, just checking in with each other. A lot of people mistake that for us, like, lovingly looking at each other. And it’s really like, ‘Oh. I know you missed your cue…’”

“‘Are you going to miss it again?’” Hearst interjects.

Their 2008 debut, self-titled album, they say, preceded them becoming a real item in life and music. Since that time, they’ve figured out the ever-shifting dance of the personal vs. the professional, art vs. life. They’ve figured out how to put them together when necessary and keep them apart when demanded. After making 2016’s Little Seeds as new parents, they added a buffer between work and family space.

“After Little Seeds, when our first kid was born, we were like, ‘This is insane,’” Trent says. “We need a place that’s not in the house. So we just built a utilitarian building in the backyard. Now we have a place that we can separate the work by at least a few feet.”

“Being parents for the first time, everything was insane,” Hearst says. “We would have somebody come over to hold the baby while we went upstairs to record, and you can hear it, the baby’s screaming downstairs. It’s just so much better now. It’s saved everything. It felt like it was a smart move to make.”

And, touring now for the first time with two kids, they’re spending part of the summer as the opening act on fairly big shows with Tedeschi Trucks Band and Blackberry Smoke.

“First of three acts at big sheds,” Hearst says. “Great catering! On early, like around 7.”

“We’ll be able to put our kids to bed at night and then have our jammies on by 8:30,” Trent adds.

Still, they allow, there are some deeply personal things that, pardon the expression, bled through on By Blood. The opening song, “I’m Coming Out,” with its very specific birth references and their second child now having been born a mere five months ago? That’s just the start.

“There’s some pretty personal things on this record for sure,” Trent says. “Like ‘Carry Me Home.’ Is it a pretty confessional song? Yeah, that’s true, like leaning on the other person.”

And there’s “The Wire,” which opens with the line, “I’ve been a disappointment at times.”

“‘The Wire’ is very much about how nobody is the perfect partner that you want to be,” Hearst says. “If you’re accountable, and they want accounts, good enough. This whole record is people who are jussssst good enough, but want to be a little bit better.”

Then there’s the title song, about the light and shadows of being in each other’s space all the time, of never having to be alone but never getting to be alone. Not only does the song close the album, but they put the lyrics of it in clear, can’t-miss type right on the front cover. That, and the whole album, per Hearst, serves as something of a marker in their lives and career.

“I think that we have many years of records in us,” she says. “But if this were to be the last stand, you know, of our creative output, there is a kind of timestamp with By Blood. We’re like this little baby that’s grown from making our first homemade record in the most rudimentary situation, and we got a little better at our instruments, a little better at record-making.”

But it goes deeper than that.

“I feel like we’ve become adults on records,” she continues. “Definitely we got adulted by Little Seeds. I mean, that time period after Swimmin’ Time and before Little Seeds was like, ‘Oh, you mean we’re growing older? We’re not gonna live forever? And our parents are getting old and babies are coming? Oh my God, we have to have life insurance and how come we can’t be just like, you know, freewheeling children for the rest of our lives?’ It kind of turned inward and now we’re kind of on the other side looking out and moving forward.”

Photo credit: Curtis Millard

LISTEN: Guy Forsyth & Jeska Bailey, “Things That Matter”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Guy Forsyth & Jeska Bailey
Hometown: Austin, Texas
Song: “Things That Matter”
Album: Conspirators
Release Date: July 26, 2019
Label: Small & Nimble Records

In Their Words: “I lived a lot of different places while I was growing up. My dad worked for the airlines while I was young and we moved around a lot. Rich or poor, lucky or unfortunate, people are the same everywhere. It has never made sense to me that some have and some don’t. I wrote “Things That Matter” after my daughter was born. She has taught me a bunch, but this more than anything: We are all we have. People are at their best when they are sharing the thing they love. In the poorest places happiness is still possible in the connection of two souls.” — Guy Forsyth

Photo credit: Josh Baker

Calexico and Iron & Wine Reunite for ‘Years to Burn’

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Sam Beam and Joey Burns are just a few feet apart, but they can hardly hear each other. Sitting in nearby booths at a café in Washington, DC, they’re on a conference call – an old-school party line that, for all our technological advances since the invention of the telephone, isn’t working very well. As they discuss their lush, lovely new collaborative album, titled Years to Burn, they speak uncertainly, tentatively, as though testing the ground for landmines. Burns, chief singer and songwriter for the band Calexico, has to repeat himself for Beam, the man behind Iron & Wine.

This is the exact opposite of how they normally work. The sessions for Years to Burn, their first album together in nearly fifteen years, was defined by its easy, fluid communication, or sometimes by the lack of any need for communication at all. Beam’s puzzle-box lyrics reveal deeper meaning with each close listen, while Calexico’s lush accompaniment is grounded in, but not constrained by Latin American traditions as well as straightforward country rock.

The result is a record that takes more risks and yields more rewards than their strong 2005 EP, In the Reins, toggling between the dusty R&B of opener “What Heaven’s Left” to the stomping country-folk of “Father Mountain” to the Spanish-language lullaby that opens the multi-part epic “The Bitter Suite.”

“The sound we made together,” says Beam, “wasn’t about planning or conceptualizing or anything like that. We tried not to get too heavy about it. I’m always interested to hear the ideas they come up with. That’s where the joy is for me.”

Both Calexico and Iron & Wine are indie lifers, each act boasting long careers and sprawling, ambitiously diverse catalogs. Perhaps the secret to their longevity is their openness to new perspectives, new voices — in short, to collaborations like Years to Burn. What follows isn’t the precise conversation they had with the Bluegrass Situation, which was prevented by faulty technology. Instead, after speaking to them separately, their responses have been edited into something like an imagined conversation, a loose oral history of their lively new album as well as an exploration of their close collaboration.

BGS: It’s been nearly fifteen years since you released In the Reins. What made this moment a good time to follow it up?

Joey Burns: It was scheduling!

Sam Beam: “Why are we doing it now?” Is that the question? I can’t speak for Joey and John [Convertino, Calexico drummer and co-founder, who is sitting in the same café], but I always wanted to work with them again. It wasn’t a matter of us not wanting to or not having a good reason. We’d just gotten busy. We’re two different working bands, so it wasn’t very often that our schedules lined up. Finally we had to say, hey, if we don’t just make the time, if we don’t put it on the calendar, it’s never going to happen.

You recorded the album in Nashville. Why there?

SB: I’ve never recorded there before, but we’ve ended up being there a lot. We have a lot of friends who live there, so it was nice to finally work there.

JB: We did a couple of songs back in 2003 with Mark Nevers, but that was it. This time we worked at Sound Emporium with Matt Ross-Spang. Matt’s the master. And he’s got some badass hair, too. The man has got serious style.

SB: The last time we recorded, we didn’t really know each other. We learned each other through that process and from touring that record for a while. I felt like this recording session was about what we learned about each other as musicians touring on the road, although it’s hard to even compare the two sessions because they were so dramatically different.

What can you tell me about “The Bitter Suite,” which is the most elaborate arrangement on the record but also the centerpiece of Years to Burn?

JB: The simple answer is, I said to Sam, why don’t we take part of a verse of “Tennessee Train,” translate it into Spanish, and let Jacob [Valenzuela, Calexico trumpeter and vocalist] have a go at it? And we just kept on experimenting, to see what kind of direction the music would take. Then we were like, why don’t we just do some kind of groove? Because at that point there was no song yet that had a groove. So why don’t we bring that back into mix and see what happens? That song just because a variation on a theme. Sam, you came up with the title…

SB: That idea came from Sebastian [Steinberg, Iron & Wine bassist], who is always saying funny things. It’s a sober-sounding track. It’s bittersweet. So we took music that was the product of serendipity of something that happened in the studio, and we gave it a silly title. But it wasn’t planned. We just went in with these songs and tried to keep an open mind. When you’re in a room with people who have good ideas, you have to keep your ears open. But it was all just something that seemed fun at that moment.

I wish I could say there was some design to “The Bitter Suite.” There’s this thing in poetry where your brain really tries hard to make connections and make sense of things in a certain way. You put two lines together and you can dismiss them, but you can put three lines together and your brain will go nuts trying to figure out how they connect. I felt like that song was something along those lines: Let’s put together different sounds and different structures, let’s vamp on different chords and different feels, and let’s see what happens when you put them all together.

How much of the album was conceived that way?

JB: It was all completely intuitive. We received some demos from Sam a week before we met in Nashville, and I knew from experience that those demos were not necessarily set in stone. They’re just reference points. I think we were all open to them being malleable and adaptable. Plus we only had four or five days max booked for studio time. That was it. Those parameters forced us to do as much homework as we could, but also it forced us to be as open to what kinds of possibilities there could be.

If we’d had another two, three days, who knows what would have happened? But I had a lot of fun working within that framework. We didn’t invite others in, and we didn’t send track out to the other members of Calexico. It was just six musicians in the studio, the six who will go on tour. The only person outside that ensemble who played on the record was Paul Niehaus on pedal steel.

SB: Since we were only in the studio for a few days, all the decisions had to be made pretty quickly. I like that. I have a tendency to overthink things, especially if I don’t put a time limit on myself. So the album is a snapshot of what we were doing on the fly rather than the ultimate example of creative expression.

JB: Everyone is pretty comfortable behind their own instrument, so we got great sounds in that short period of time. When you start adding more layers or textures, that’s where things can sound congested… or they can sound even better. It can be tricky. Most of the record was done live. Sam’s really quite a phenomenal musician, so a lot of the basic tracks are first takes, then we added some overdubs, then we were done.

Sam, were you writing songs with these guys in mind?

SB: Not really. I finished some stuff for this. You end up with so many bits and bobs laying around that don’t fit into other songs, and they’re perfect for this kind of project. Folk-rock melodies are good for this sort of pairing, so I moved the more country-ish songs to the top of the pile. The one thing I did want to do was … bring in a finished script, one that has plenty of room for interpretation, because that was the only way to get finished in the amount of time we’re talking about.

Were there any songs that changed more than others during that process?

SB: The one we worked on the longest was the opening track, “What Heaven’s Left.” It’s really the only one where I had a more specific idea of what I wanted to get at, but I didn’t know how to communicate it. That’s why it was more difficult; I had something specific that I wanted to achieve. But even that one had lots of room, especially that full-band crunch at the end. We thought it should go longer, so we just decided to play longer and see what happened. The ending became a whole separate thing, just letting the ideas take hold and not limiting yourself and capturing what you’re feeling.

JB: That was one of those things where we had recorded the song and then listened back, and it must have been Sam who said, what if we just kept on playing? It feels like the song ends too soon. Then Jacob arrived; he came on day three. So we thought, why not just add him to the outro? I really enjoyed that moment, and it’s one of my favorite songs on the record.

SB: The guys in Calexico are very sensitive listeners, not just in terms of the music but the point of the song: What’s happening here? What are we trying to communicate? That’s something you don’t always get to talk about. Also, they like to rock the fuck out as often as possible. I trust them enough that even if we get into some kind of argument, they’re going to be feeling it just as much as me, so I should at least listen to them.

Were there any disagreements?

SB: No, we didn’t really have time! Everybody was being really supportive. There was never a shortage of ideas, so it was just a matter of how to politely say we need to concentrate on this or that if we’re going to get anything done.

JB: This was one of those instances where the music really reflects your inner voice. Every turn we took just seemed to come about naturally and effortlessly. I think we all expected we’d probably walk away with another EP, like In the Reins, which would have been great, but we wound up having such a good time and getting through the songs quickly enough that we came up with something much bigger and more experimental.

Photo credit: Piper Ferguson

22 Top Bluegrass Duos

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Everyone knows that in the early days of bluegrass, before that term was even coined, all you needed to make a “band” was two people and two instruments. Fiddle and banjo? Sure. But in those days, they’d take whatever they could get. Duos are still a strong presence in the music today, in brother/sibling duos, spouse-led bands, and legendary collaborations.

Check out these twenty-two bluegrass pairings — and their accoutrement — on BGS:

Bill & Charlie Monroe

Before Bill Monroe, the Father of Bluegrass, made his indelible mark on the genre (quite literally giving it its name), he was already a popular performer with his brothers Charlie and Birch. Birch left The Monroe Brothers in the mid-1930s, and Charlie and Bill went on to enjoy success on the road, in the studio, and on the radio — until rising tensions and a fateful fight in 1938 caused them to split ways. But, without that fight, we may not have “bluegrass” at all.

Flatt & Scruggs

December 1945. The Ryman Auditorium. Nashville, Tennessee. Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys stepped on stage for the Grand Ole Opry with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs among their ranks for the very first time and bluegrass as we know it today was born. Flatt & Scruggs left Monroe in 1948 to join forces and went on to become one of the few ubiquitous, household names of bluegrass.

Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard

Undeniably trailblazers, Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard are widely regarded as the first women in bluegrass to capture the “high lonesome” sound popularized by Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, and others. They toured across the U.S., often supporting causes that benefited forgotten, downtrodden people from all backgrounds and walks of life. They were inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2017.

The Stanley Brothers

Natives of the music-rich southwest corner of Virginia, Carter and Ralph Stanley were prolific recording artists and touring musicians in bluegrass’s first generation. Countless songs written and/or popularized by the Stanley Brothers and their backing band, the Clinch Mountain Boys, are staples of the genre today. Carter passed in 1966 and Ralph continued until his death in 2016 with the Clinch Mountain Boys — who still tour today with Ralph’s son, Ralph II.

Don Reno & Red Smiley

Unsung trailblazers of the first generation of bluegrass pickers, Reno & Smiley were tireless innovators with a jovial, sometimes silly flair to their songs and instrumental prowess. Their duets are simply some of the best in all of bluegrass. The duo performed together off and on from the early 1950s to the 1970s — but both passed away much too young, Smiley in 1972 at the age of 46 and Reno in 1984 at the age of 58. Reno’s frenetic, electric and pedal steel guitar-infused licks remain unmatched in banjo picking today.

Jim & Jesse McReynolds

With matching suits and impeccable pompadours brothers Jim and Jesse McReynolds often brought rockabilly, rock ‘n’ roll, mainstream country and pop sensibilities to their take on sibling harmonies and bluegrass brother duos. Jesse’s crosspicking on the mandolin was — and continues to be — absolutely astonishing. Jim passed in 2002, Jesse continues to perform on the Grand Ole Opry to this day. At the time of this writing, he is ninety years old.

Laurie Lewis & Tom Rozum

Laurie Lewis often takes top billing — as leader of the Right Hands and before that, the Bluegrass Pals, and others — but since 1986 her musical partner Tom Rozum has almost constantly been at her side on the mandolin and harmonies. Their duo recording, The Oak and the Laurel, was nominated for a Grammy in 1995. Here is the album’s title track:

Bill Monroe & Doc Watson

What is there to say? Two of the folks who paved the way for this genre, laying a foundation so strong and far-reaching that we still can’t fully comprehend its impact. Bill and Doc collaborated on more than one occasion and we, as fans and disciples, are lucky that so many of these moments are captured in recordings and videos.

Del McCoury & David “Dawg” Grisman

At face value, an unlikely combo, but their friendship goes back to the early 1960s and their musical endeavors together began soon after. As Del slowly but surely became a bastion for traditional bluegrass aesthetics applied broadly, Dawg embraced jammy, jazzy, new acoustic sounds that sometimes only register as bluegrass-adjacent because they come from the mandolin. Opposite sides of the same coin, their duet makes total sense while at the same time challenging everything we think we know about the music. In this clip, Dawg sings tenor to Del — not many would be brave enough to try!

Ricky Skaggs & Keith Whitley

They got their start together in the Clinch Mountain Boys with Ralph Stanley, making some of the best recordings in the history of the band’s many iterations. Before they both struck out on wildly successful, mainstream careers they recorded a seminal duo album together, Second Generation. It remains one of the most important albums in the bluegrass canon — especially as far as duos/duets go.

Norman & Nancy Blake

Norman is well known for his flatpicking prowess, which has graced recordings by John Hartford, Bob Dylan, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and so many others. He and his wife, Nancy, were married in 1975 after having begun their musical forays together a year or so earlier. Nancy’s command of many instruments — cello, mandolin, and fiddle among them — balances neatly with Norman’s jaw-dropping, singular style on the flattop. Their inseparable harmonies and timeless repertoire are merely icing on the cake.

Jimmy Martin & Ralph Stanley

How their first album together, First Time Together (cough), is not more well-known is truly impossible to understand. The King of Bluegrass and the Man of Constant Sorrow twining their extraordinary voices must have been ordained by a higher power. It’s a good thing they answered the call. Be careful, Jimmy’s percussive G-runs feel like a slap in the face — in the best way.

Darrell Scott & Tim O’Brien

Their live albums together and their co-written masterpieces belong in every museum and shrine to roots music around the world. Both of these triple threat (Quadruple? Quintuple? When do we stop counting?) musicians are rampantly successful in their own right, but together they are simply transcendent. Their cut of “Brother Wind” deserves a listen right this instant and “House of Gold” gives you the harmony acrobatics gut punch you need every time. It was nearly impossible to choose just one, but here’s a hit that was recorded once by a little group called the Dixie Chicks.

Ricky Skaggs & Tony Rice

Again, words fail. Skaggs & Rice is a desert island record. Each and every time these two have graced a recording or a stage together, magic has been made, from their days with J.D. Crowe & the New South and on. We only wish that they could have done more together.

Vern & Ray

Vern Williams and Ray Park were California’s original bluegrass sons. Though they were both born and raised in Arkansas, they relocated to Stockton, California, as adults. They’re often credited with “introducing” bluegrass music to the West Coast. They disbanded in 1974 (both passed in the early 2000s), but their influence is palpable to this day, even if they’re sorely unheard of east of the Mississippi. This deserves correction! Immediately!

Eddie & Martha Adcock

Eddie is a pioneering banjo player who’s a veteran of both Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys and The Country Gentlemen, two decidedly legendary and influential acts. His style is somewhat wacky, certainly singular, but effortlessly bluegrass and traditional as well. He married Martha in the late 1970s and the pair have toured prolifically as a duo. In 2008, Eddie underwent brain surgery to correct debilitating hand tremors. He was kept awake, playing the banjo during the procedure — and there is jaw-dropping film of this online!

Dailey & Vincent

When Dailey & Vincent burst onto the scene in the mid-aughts after both having notable careers as sidemen, the bluegrass community rejoiced at the reemergence of a wavering art form within the genre — traditional duo singing. However, Jamie and Darrin, whether they knew it at the time or not, had their sights set much higher. Now more of a full-blown stage show than a bluegrass band, their recordings and concerts are a high-energy, charismatic, and downright entertaining mix of classic country, Southern gospel, quartet singing, and yes, bluegrass.

Kenny & Amanda Smith

Husband and wife Kenny and Amanda first recorded together in 2001, going on to win IBMA’s Emerging Artist of the Year award two years later. They’ve now cut eight albums together, all clean, clear, crisp modern bluegrass that centers on Amanda’s impossibly bright vocals, which maintain a personal, country hue alongside Kenny’s fantastic flatpicking. SON!

Tom T. & Dixie Hall

Two of the most recent inductees into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame, Tom T. and Dixie Hall wrote hundreds and hundreds of songs cut by country, bluegrass, and Americana artists alike. Tom T.’s reputation and chart-topping originals tend to eclipse Dixie, but he is unyielding in his efforts to point that same spotlight at his beloved wife instead, who passed away in 2015. Though she never performed — definitely not to the extent that Tom T. did — the marks she left on bluegrass, country, and her partnership with her husband are indelible. This number was co-written by the pair:

The Louvin Brothers

Recipients of IBMA’s Distinguished Achievement Award in 1992, the Louvin Brothers are another example of early bluegrassers who enjoyed the amorphous, primordial days of the genre before it became more and more sequestered from mainstream country and country radio. Their duets are iconic, with counter-intuitive contours and lines that bands and singers still have difficulty replicating to this day. Their most famous contribution to the American music zeitgeist, though, might not be their music, but the spectacular cover art for their 1959 album, Satan Is Real. If you haven’t seen it, Google it right now.

Delia Bell & Bill Grant

Natives of Texas and Oklahoma, respectively, Delia Bell and Bill Grant met through Bell’s husband, Bobby, in the late 1950s. Between their band, the Kiamichi Mountain Boys, and their duo project they recorded more than a dozen albums together through the 1980s. Famously, Emmylou Harris became a fan when she heard their cut of “Roses in the Snow,” which Harris went on to record on her eponymous bluegrass record. Bell died in 2018.

The Osborne Brothers

Though they popularized a style of three-part harmony that had never been heard before — the infamous “high lead” harmony stack — their band, no matter who it may have included over the years, was undeniably helmed and anchored by Bobby and Sonny. (Which does explain the name.) You may remember “Rocky Top” and “Ruby” first and foremost in their discography, but the hits they’ve contributed to the bluegrass songbook are innumerable. Here’s one such classic.

Bruce Robison & Kelly Willis: In Service of the Song

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Although their individual careers have been moving in different directions over the last few years, Bruce Robison and Kelly Willis have circled back closer to each other and put together a group of songs — a mix of originals, carefully selected covers, and choice vintage nuggets — for their newest project, Beautiful Lie. “We were just ready to make another album,” Willis says. “Enough time and space had passed and it felt fresh, and we had all these ideas that we wanted to work on.”

On Beautiful Lie, Willis’ crystalline vocals wind around Robison’s grizzled voice and float along a river of pedal steel, piano, and guitar, creating a pure beauty that the couple is so adept at calling forth when they work together. While it’s never easy to find time to record, the two have fun and feel the joy of their union when they can come back together for a project, even though they both love their solo work, too.

Last year Willis released her first solo album in more than a decade, Back Being Blue, and she’s just come off the road from a mini-tour with Dale Watson. In 2017, Robison released Bruce Robison & the Back Porch Band, which he recorded in his own studio, The Bunker, in Lockhart, Texas, near the couple’s home base in Austin. He’s also been producing artists for his Next Waltz record label, including future singles from William Clark Green, Carrie Rodriguez, Flatland Cavalry, Shakey Graves, Wood & Wire, and Willis Alan Ramsey. “We have this core group of musicians there now,” he says, “and it’s a place where people can come to record this kind of music that you can hear on this album. We’re still growing and developing a lot.”

“For this album, we just got the machinery up and roaring,” Willis says. “It’s funny because we make music together and then go out and play solo. When we’re playing together, we miss playing solo; when we play solo, we miss playing together. We miss making music together.”

Robison and Willis have been married since 1996, but this is only their fourth album of duets, including a holiday collection. Robison observes, “It’s always been great that we had our own careers. I’ve always seen the stuff we did together as magical stuff.”

For the new album, they collected songs along the way and they “would just sit down and start singing them,” says Willis. They know when to sing, when to pull back, when to add that special verse, and when to put a song aside for another album.

“I love his instincts for me,” Willis says. “I have a hard time communicating my musicality. We’re able to enhance and understand each other. It’s sort of a natural undertaking. I’ve always really understood his music and wanted to add something to it.”

Willis isn’t credited as a songwriter on any of the album’s ten tracks but her interpretative stamp can be heard throughout Beautiful Lie. As Robison says, “Kelly and I have creative differences in a way that is helpful. Take a song you like and stick with it and give it to her. Sometimes she loves the melody, or she gets into it and changes it all up.”

Willis points out that those creative differences can sometimes be challenging, but the choices they make are ultimately in service of the song: “When we do music together, it’s different from doing a solo album. I might bring in a song I really want to do, but if it’s not working—no matter how much I try to make it work—we’ll put it aside.”

The couple’s dynamic vocals define the project, with each singer taking lead on songs that fit their own vocal approach perfectly. “We messed around with each song to see who would sing the lead,” Willis says. “Ninety-five percent of the time it sounds better for the female to sing lead. Sometimes Bruce will say, though, that for a certain song he thinks it works better with a male lead.”

The material on Beautiful Lie ranges from the aching title track (an Amazing Rhythm Aces cut) to the rollicking Robison original “Brand New Me.” Adam Wright contributed three songs including the skittering “Can’t Tell Nobody Nothin’,” written with his wife Shannon Wright. Meanwhile, Robison and Willis deliver a stunning cover of “Lost My Best” from Uncle Walt’s Band, as well as the skate-across-the-sawdust-floor Del Reeves classic “One Dime at a Time.”

Perhaps the best getting-over-a-breakup song in either artist’s sizable repertoire, the wry “Nobody’s Perfect,” also by Adam Wright, celebrates the freedom that comes with discovering just how much better it is to be with nobody than with somebody who’s always leaving. The loneliness settles in the hollow of absence at first, but not for long. With brilliant use of a mundane phrase, which cuts several ways in the song, “Nobody’s Perfect” turns the meaning of its titular phrase on its head.

A native Texan, Robison even found a muse in the Astrodome, which he’s been going to since he was 4 years old, when the Houston landmark was still new and shiny: “It was this arena where I saw demolition derbies and circuses.” Following a recent visit, he recalls the tiles dropping from the ceiling and how the once-golden palace of his memories has fallen apart – an observation that inspired a wistful song simply called “Astrodome.”

“Jack Ingram and I wrote the song,” he says. “I had fun looking back into my past and remembering going to the Astrodome. The song’s a tribute to a lost past.” The jaunty, dancehall tune belies the sadness of the song, even as the lyrics celebrate the bittersweet nature of life: “I’m gonna go on down and sit in the Astrodome/Just me and you and all of them blue and faded memories/Yeah I’m gonna go on down and sit in the Astrodome/And wonder whatever ever became of me.”

Capturing the overwhelming power of love, “Coming Down” opens with guitars floating over a subdued steel and blossoms into a straight-ahead country love ballad. Robison carries the song with an honest, plaintive vocal that’s elevated on the chorus by Willis’ harmonies. “I don’t write love songs,” Robison says. “If you went and listened to the other 200 songs in my catalog, you wouldn’t find a love song. I was [at] the songwriters’ festival in Key West a few years ago, and I wrote this song out real quick. I can’t fake the feelings in this song.”

As Willis points out, “I love his songwriting and his songs. I think the mark of a great songwriter is the ability to turn a phrase, and he is great at it.”

Photo Credit: HAAM