Willie Nelson’s ‘Bluegrass’ Underlines His Lifelong Relationship with the Genre

“He was exceedingly cool and easy,” long-time Bill Monroe bassist Mark Hembree remembers about Willie Nelson’s presence at a 1983 recording session where Nelson sang and played with Monroe. “I never had a say in Bill’s mixes, but they had Willie’s guitar way up and as we listened to playback he mentioned it, then turned and asked what I thought,” Hembree wrote in a recent exchange of messages. “I agreed, a little surprised he would ask me.”

People who hear about Willie Nelson’s latest album, Bluegrass, before hearing the music might ask, “Wait, what? What does Willie Nelson have to do with bluegrass music?”

Upon listening, at least two answers come to mind: 1) Much more than you might think. 2) Don’t worry so much.

With tunes by Nelson, one of the best American songwriters, played by notable pickers, the record contains strong music that should sound welcome to fans of Nelson, of bluegrass, and of the field with the loose label, “Americana.”

It’s a given that in more than 60 years of major-label recording, Nelson, 90, has been better known for presenting his own songs, enduring tunes such as “Crazy,” “Hello Walls,” and “On the Road Again,” the last of which is heard here in a new version. But he’s also made his name with notable covers – like “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” “Seven Spanish Angels,” “Blue Skies,” and others – in a welter of styles, including blues, pop standards, and even reggae. Nelson’s core music enfolds ‘40s and ‘50s country, traditional fiddle tunes, four-square gospel, ragtime, some swing flavorings, and definitely a heap of blues. The mix also includes more contemporary pop. Subtract some of that last bit of material, throw in some lonesome mountain banjo and ballads, and you’ll find, in different proportions, foundational bluegrass as designed by chief architects like Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs.

Legacy Records, the Sony division putting out Nelson’s Bluegrass disc, says the style “was given a name by Kentucky songwriter/performer/recording artist Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys, whose post-war recordings profoundly influenced Willie’s songwriting sensibilities and the direction of American country music in general.” They go on to say, “Willie chose songs combining the kind of strong melodies, memorable storylines and tight ensemble-interplay found in traditional bluegrass interpretations of the roots (from European melodies to African rhythms) of American folk songs.”

And it’s pretty much on target. But what else speaks to Nelson’s involvement with bluegrass?

Let’s return to the early ‘70s, when he famously abandoned a Nashville scene where he had achieved songwriting fame and a recording career. But Music Row had flagged in creativity and opportunity, he and others thought. And yes, at the end of 1969, his house had burned down. By 1972, Nelson’s persona was changing as his new approach revisited his Texas roots. The year saw new-breed stars like Kris Kristofferson showing up at the first Dripping Springs Reunion, a Texas country music festival. The show, which was to morph int0 a string of outdoor throwdowns known as Willie’s Fourth of July Picnic, presented a bluegrass contingent led by Monroe, with foundational figures Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt leading their post-breakup bands, as
well as additional notables including Jimmy Martin.

Jo Walker, executive director of the Country Music Association, told the Austin-American Statesman that the trade group was delighted to hear about the Dripping Springs Reunion. “So many of the rock festivals and similar events have reflected so unfavorably on the music industry that we are particularly happy that your reunion will be a Country Music show.” But with Nelson embracing a new, youth-driven fan base and a long-haired, bandana-ed look, what did country music even mean?

There was a growing correlation, it seemed, between the increased popularity of bluegrass and the emergent outlaw (read: long hair, free-thinking, whiskey-drinking, dope smoking, etc.) movement in country music, led by Nelson and Waylon Jennings. Its bluegrass surge was sparked in part by the Earl Scruggs Revue’s broad acceptance in non-traditional venues like college campuses and hot sales for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken. Back in Nashville, in 1973, wider acceptance of bluegrass also meant that Monroe, his former Blue Grass Boy Flatt, the brilliant wildman Jimmy Martin, and the great brother team of Jim & Jesse McReynolds would join Nelson amid the crowd of stars at CMA’s second annual Fan Fair celebration.

In 1974, both Scruggs and Monroe, as well as Grand Ole Opry stars Ernest Tubb, Jeanne Pruitt, and Roy Acuff appeared on stage singing with another wildman, country-blues rocker Leon Russell. That’s documented in a photograph of this period, likely from a Willie’s Picnic. Quite a lineup.

A version of the picture found on the web says the shot is from A Poem is a Naked Person, a documentary on Russell by esteemed filmmaker Les Blank shot between 1972 and 1974, but not released until 2015. Nelson appears in the movie to sing “Good Hearted Woman” – also on this new album – playing guitar bass runs that would work fine in bluegrass. He also backs up fiddler Mary Egan, of the Austin “progressive-country” band Greezy Wheels, on an energetic version of the bluegrass-country perennial “Orange Blossom Special.”

In 1974, Nelson went to work in the soul-music capital of Muscle Shoal, Alabama, to record a milestone disc on his road to making records his own way. The album, Phases and Stages, which won over both fans and critics, contains prominent five-string played Scruggs-style on the hit “Bloody Mary Morning,” which also returns on Bluegrass.

The 1983 Bill Monroe session referenced above came after a last minute February 22 phone call from Nelson to let Monroe know he was available to appear on the in-progress Bill Monroe and Friends album for MCA Records. That’s according to a passage in the indispensable book, The Music of Bill Monroe, by bluegrass scholars Neil Rosenberg and Charles Wolfe.

“[Engineer, Vic) Gabany recalls that on February, 22, 1983, Monroe called the studio and asked if it was free that afternoon,” Rosenberg and Wolfe write. “Willie Nelson was in town, and he wanted to rush in and cut the duet with him. Fortunately, it was. Moreover, the Blue Grass Boys were all available, and Haynes was able to round up studio musicians Charlie Collins and Buddy Spicher.”

Monroe’s original tune with Nelson, “The Sunset Trail,” shows the impact of another style, cowboy music, that both men favored. Nelson reaches into his upper range to sing below Monroe, who’s going way up there, as was his wont. “It’s a thrill of my life to be here with you,” Monroe says as he and Nelson exchange praise in the track’s introduction.

In 1990, Monroe accepted Nelson’s invitation to perform at the April 7 Farm Aid IV concert in Indianapolis. “We’re glad to be here with Willie Nelson!” he said to kick off a set marked by powerful singing, crisp mandolin picking, and a little crowd-pleasing buck dancing. The show placed Monroe, 79, in a lineup that included stars such as Elton John and Lou Reid. The Indianapolis Star estimated the crowd at 45,000.

During Monroe’s last years — he died in 1996 — he often spoke to Nelson on the phone, according to a person who didn’t want to be identified, but often spent time at Monroe’s home on the farm outside Nashville during that period. “He valued their friendship immensely,” the person said.

Bluegrass‘s 12 songs contain several Nelson compositions that became standards of his repertoire, along with less familiar tunes that also fit in the recording approach overseen by Music Row’s Buddy Cannon. A songwriter and producer, Cannon is known for delivering big songs, like “Set ‘Em Up Joe” for Vern Gosdin, and chart hits for more recent mainstream acts such as Kenny Chesney, John Michael Montgomery, and Reba McEntire. A frequent Nelson collaborator, Cannon assembled a list of Nashville co-conspirators: Union Station members Barry Bales, on bass, and Ron Block, on banjo; former Union Station member and current rising star Dan Tyminski on mandolin; fiddler Aubrey Haynie; Dobro man Rob Ickes; Seth Taylor also on mandolin; as well as harmonica player Mickey Raphael, who’s worked for decades in Nelson’s band.

The music mostly doesn’t come off as hard-core bluegrass in the mode of, say, the Stanley Brothers. But it leans on the elements that Nelson has in common with the style — lonesome melodies, classic country, swing and blues.

The mournful “You Left Me a Long, Long Time Ago,” from 1964, reflects the straight-country songwriting to which Nelson and others brought a terse, modern beauty in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. It was a time when bluegrass enjoyed a closer co-existence with mainstream country, as opposed to straining against the tight format borders that limit today’s music business. Among the many artists who crossed back and forth freely were guitarist-songwriter, Carl Butler, fiddler Tommy Jackson, and Cajun star Doug Kershaw. They all worked with Monroe.

A new version of “Sad Songs and Waltzes” mourns in tones not too different from Monroe favorites ranging from “Kentucky Waltz” to “Sitting Alone in the Moonlight.” The song also recalls the 3/4 time Lone Star tunes that Nelson might have heard at the Texas Fiddlers Contest and Reunion.

That show got going in 1934 in Athens, Texas, just one year before Nelson arrived on the scene in Abbott, less than 90 miles away.

The fiddle contests that influenced so much of Texas music beginning in the 19th century, had parallels in the 18th century Southeast, where contests featured both the fiddle and the banjo, with its African roots. This music went around, and it still comes around.

The sock-rhythm backing of “Ain’t No Love Around” recalls early Blue Grass Boys recordings such as “Heavy Traffic Ahead,” recorded September 16, 1946, and featuring Earl Scruggs’ first recorded banjo solo. Elsewhere, the laidback favorite, “On the Road Again,” gets a more intense reading from Nelson, with some vocal and instrumental improvisation to spice it up. The mystical “Still is Still Moving to Me” leaves plenty of room for pickers to range far and wide on banjo, mandolin, fiddle and Dobro.

“You give the appearance of one widely traveled,” Nelson sings in “Yesterday’s Wine.” He’s singing from a faraway spot in time, in myth, in history. It’s a stance that’s earned a place on bluegrass playlists for more recent songwriters such as Guy Clark, David Olney, and Gillian Welch.

“Bloody Mary Morning,” from Phases and Stages gets the most recent of several revivals from Nelson, who led a jam-grassy version in the 1980 film Honeysuckle Rose and later sang it in a duet with Wynonna Judd. The song’s forthright tale of fighting the blues by having a highball on a plane seems somehow classier than the constant tales of beer and pickups that populate country radio.

In the end it seems clear that for decades, both Willie Nelson and bluegrass music have served, in different ways, as a conscience of country music. Just as the Solemn Old Judge, WSM radio announcer George D. Hay, commanded, they “Keep her close to the ground, boys,” although their paths have diverged, at times.

In any case, this new collection brings Nelson together with bluegrass pickers for music that might even work to serve that same worthy purpose.


Photo Credit: Pamela Springsteen

PHOTOS: Earl Scruggs Music Festival Shows Broad Influence of Earl Scruggs

The 2nd Annual Earl Scruggs Music Festival was held over Labor Day weekend at the Tryon International Equestrian Center just outside of Tryon, North Carolina, in Mill Spring. The gorgeous festival grounds, nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, were the perfect setting for the sunny and warm event, featuring glamorous cabins, manicured campsites, brick-and-mortar restaurants and shops, horse-jumping demonstrations, workshops and two stages chocked full of bluegrass, old-time and roots music. The festival is a partnership between Tryon International, roots radio station WNCW and the Earl Scruggs Center just down the road in Shelby, North Carolina, the county seat of Cleveland County – Scruggs’ ancestral home. Over four days, the event showcased the broad, varied and lasting influence Scruggs and his playing have had on American roots music as a whole, especially in North Carolina.

BGS returned to ESMF for its second year, once again sponsoring the very special, fan favorite Earl Scruggs Revue tribute set, hosted by Tony Trischka – and his band, Michael Daves and Jared Engel. Listeners and fans packed the plaza surrounding the Foggy Mountain gazebo stage to hear Trischka and many special guests – such as Della Mae, Michael Cleveland, I Draw Slow, Twisted Pine, Tray Wellington, Greensky Bluegrass, Jerry Douglas and more – pay tribute to Earl’s and his son’s groundbreaking and innovative group, the Earl Scruggs Revue, and their Live! From Austin City Limits album.

Enjoy a collection of photos from the Earl Scruggs Music Festival below and make plans to attend the 3rd Annual edition of this first-class event in 2024 – the dates are set and tickets are already on sale for the August 30 to September 1, 2024 edition of ESMF!


Photos courtesy of Earl Scruggs Music Festival.
Lead image credit: Devon Fails
All other photos:
 Reagan Ibach, Eli Johnson, Rette Solomon, and Cora Wagoner. 

Preview: What to See & Hear at This Weekend’s Earl Scruggs Music Festival

The BGS Team is excited to return to Western North Carolina for the second year of the Earl Scruggs Music Festival at the Tryon International Equestrian Center in Mill Spring. Held September 1, 2, and 3, the event will be hosted by Jerry Douglas and will include headline sets by the Infamous Stringdusters (Friday), Greensky Bluegrass (Saturday), and Emmylou Harris (Sunday) plus, on Saturday at 3:30 p.m., don’t miss the Earl Scruggs Revue Album Tribute hosted by Tony Trischka and sponsored by BGS. The showcase will spotlight an album by Earl Scruggs’ iconic late-’60s to ’80s group featuring his sons, the Earl Scruggs Revue, and will include appearances and performances by many special guests pulled from the festival’s expansive bluegrass and roots lineup.

In preparation for the festival this weekend and our trek to beautiful Western NC, check out a few of our preview picks for each day of the event:

Thursday, August 31, 2023

It’s the day before the real fun begins at the Tryon International Equestrian Center, but you’ve already pulled into town and you’re rearin’ and ready to go – what to do? Travel down the road about 30 minutes and visit Shelby, North Carolina, Earl Scruggs’ hometown, and the incredible Earl Scruggs Center. It’s open every day of the festival until 4 p.m., but hours vary some so check before you visit.

Not only does the Center co-present the festival, but it’s housed in the former Cleveland County Courthouse in the center of the Shelby town square. It’s an adorable small town with an outsized impact on American roots music – Don Gibson is from Shelby, as well; Nina Simone is from Tryon, just down the road. (Visit her homeplace on your way back to Mill Spring.) We focused on Shelby for an episode of our podcast made with Come Hear NC titled Carolina Calling. Listen to our Shelby episode while you drive!

Ready to head to the Equestrian Center to check out the festival footprint and do some reconnaissance? You’re in luck! The official festival events don’t commence until Friday, but on Thursday there will be a FREE concert on-site and restaurants and vendors will be open from 6 to 9 p.m.

Friday, September 1, 2023

The day is finally here! Gates open at 8 a.m. and the fun begins at 10 a.m. with restaurants, vendors, experiences, workshops, performances, and so much more.

Don’t miss “Secrets of Scruggs-Style” on the Legends Workshop Stage at 11 a.m. featuring Tony Trischka, Charlie Cushman and Pete Wernick – arguably three of the best living scholars and emulators of Scruggs – a perfect way to kick off his namesake festival. At 3 p.m. on the main stage, affectionately dubbed “Flint Hill Stage,” J.T. Scruggs and Jerry Douglas will do an official festival welcome leading directly into a Banjo Kickoff by Gena Britt, Charlie Cushman, Rob McCoury, Pete Wernick, Tony Trischka and Ben Wright.

We’ll also be making a point to catch Foggy Mountain Stage sets by Jake Blount (5:30 to 6:30 p.m.) and Shawn Camp (8:30 to 9:30 p.m.) plus Flint Hill Stage appearances by Sister Sadie (4 to 5 p.m.), Del McCoury Band (7:30 to 9 p.m.), and the Stringdusters closing out the night at 9:30 p.m.

Don’t go back to your campsite or your hotel yet, though! Foggy Late Night begins at 10:30 p.m. with Armchair Boogie.

Saturday, September 2, 2023

If your schedule is too-tight and you can only make one day of ESMF 2023, Saturday is the day not-to-miss. It’s wall-to-wall, superlative programming across all of the stages at the event.

On the Legends Workshop Stage we’re eyeing “High Lonesome Songs: Then & Now” at 11:30 a.m., a songwriting workshop featuring Louisa Branscomb, Celia Woodsmith and Jon Weisberger. But you may have to split your time between Legends Workshop and Flint Hill, because Tony Trischka’s tribute to Earl Scruggs – EarlJam! EarlJam! – begins on the main stage at 12 p.m. Stick around, because banjo phenom and innovator Tray Wellington brings his tight and tidy band to the main stage directly after EarlJam. Wellington’s languid drawl is only one of many traits of Scruggs’ he carries on with his innovative sound and truly traditional right hand approach.

We’re super excited to see our friends Della Mae (Flint Hill Stage, 8 p.m.) and Twisted Pine (Foggy Mountain Stage, 8:45 p.m.), but the highlight of day two for us will certainly be the Earl Scruggs Revue Album Tribute show on the Foggy Mountain Stage at 3:30 p.m. It will feature a star-studded lineup hosted by Trischka and his band and featuring songs from a classic Earl Scruggs Revue performance. (Hint above.) Our own managing editor Justin Hiltner will be emceeing and updating y’all on the event on our socials, so be sure to follow along.

At Foggy Late Night we’ll be dancing along to Della Mae past midnight! See you there?

Sunday, September 3, 2023

When Sunday morning rolls around, we, too, will be wondering where the weekend went so fast. But don’t worry, there’s still a full day of music and fun before the post-festival depression starts to creep back in.

Sunday begins, appropriately, with Gospel Brunch hosted by Darin & Brooke Aldridge and immediately following, singer-songwriter and host of Apple Music’s Color Me Country, Rissi Palmer will “take us to church” on the Flint Hill Stage, too. If you’ve never had the chance to experience Palmer’s heartfelt, modern, and soulful country stylings you won’t want to miss her set. For an infusion of a faith tradition less prominent in roots music, check out Zoe & Cloyd on the Foggy Mountain Stage at 4:30 p.m. Their latest album, Songs of Our Grandfathers, combines bluegrass, fiddle music, old-time and Jewish folk and klezmer.

On the Legends Workshop Stage at 1 p.m., get up close and personal with festival host and the worlds premier resophonic guitarist Jerry Douglas before his main stage set with his band at 3:45 p.m.

Then, to close out your weekend full of amazing music, excellent hangs, and so much fun, settle in for Emmylou Harris’s headline set on the Flint Hill Stage at 5:30 p.m. As her final notes fade into the Western North Carolina air, cheer up – you don’t have to go home yet! Reedy River String Band will give us one last hoorah for their Foggy Mountain Stage performance from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m.

As you drive back home after the second annual Earl Scruggs Music Festival we hope, like ourselves, you’ll be making plans to return next year (perhaps as you listen to Carolina Calling).

Find more information on Earl Scruggs Music Festival and purchase tickets here.


Graphic courtesy of Earl Scruggs Music Festival.
Photo Credit: Eli Johnson

Listen to an Exclusive Excerpt From Steve Martin’s Pushkin Audiobook

It’s hard to ascribe a single title to Steve Martin. Throughout his nearly 50-year career in entertainment, Martin has been a stand-up comedian, leading man, art collector, TV star, bestselling author, and writer of a Tony-nominated Broadway musical. And then, of course, there’s his love affair with the banjo. Since childhood, Martin has been deeply connected to the instrument, and over the years he’s performed with everyone from Earl Scruggs to the Steep Canyon Rangers to Kermit the Frog.

Adding to that multi-hyphenate lineup, Martin has now released a new audio-only autobiography detailing his lengthy career with friend and co-author Adam Gopnik (longtime contributor to the New Yorker). So Many Steves: Afternoons With Steve Martin, New Yorker contains a year’s worth of conversations between Martin and Gopnik and was published in May of this year by Pushkin, a podcast and audio production company.

In ten chapters, the two men dive into a wide set of life experiences with the kind of vulnerability and humor reserved for old friends, with chapters ranging from Martin’s teenage years working in Merlin’s Magic Shop at Disneyland to selling out arenas on his stand-up tours. But perhaps most exciting to bluegrass fans will, of course, be the chapter in which Martin details playing “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” In the early 2000s, Scruggs himself asked Martin to perform on a 75th anniversary album. When Martin showed up at the studio of his idol, however, he was at a loss. “It was so fast,” Martin proclaims, “I couldn’t believe it.”  Practicing for the record kickstarted the second chapter of his musical life, at a time when he’d almost completely walked away from the instrument. 

As a special exclusive, BGS readers can stream the an audio excerpt from So Many Steves (below) for a limited time. The full audiobook is available to download via Pushkin or stream on Audible, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Discover more here.


Lonnie Lee Hood and Amy Reitnouer Jacobs contributed to this writing.

Bluegrass & Roots Songs to Strike To

Hot. Strike. Summer!!

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

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

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

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

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

“In Tall Buildings” – John Hartford

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

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

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

“Lazy John” – Bruce Molsky

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

“Cotton Mill Man” – Jim & Jesse

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

“Black Waters” – Jean Ritchie

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

“Carpal Tunnel” – Tristan Scroggins

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

“Tear Down the Fences” – Ola Belle Reed

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

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

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

“Dark as a Dungeon” – The Country Gentlemen

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

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


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

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

First & Latest: Special Consensus’ 40+ Year Career

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Photo Credit: Jamey Guy

Zoe & Cloyd Made a Traditional Album – But Not the Way You Think

If you were to try to typify bluegrass as being about any one singular thing, that one thing might be family. Not just biological family, but musical family, chosen family, and the way the music survives generation to generation, passed down as a folkway and aural tradition. Often, though not always, this music is a family tradition, passed along family trees like an heirloom or like more typical family businesses.

John Cloyd Miller and Natalya Zoe Weinstein, bluegrass duo and band leaders of Zoe & Cloyd, have made a brand new album that, on the surface, might just seem like a standard bluegrass album paying homage to the folks who came before them, their forefathers. But Songs of Our Grandfathers is so much more complicated and nuanced, wrinkling a format that’s as old as these genres themselves: the tribute album. 

On the new record, released in May on Organic Records, John and Natalya pull songs from the catalogs of their musician grandfathers. Miller’s grandpa, Jim Shumate, was a renowned Western North Carolina fiddler who played a stint in Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys and can be accurately credited with helping get Earl Scruggs the banjo gig that made him famous. Natalya’s grandfather, David Weinstein, was a working klezmer musician who fled unrest in Russia, moving to the U.S. 

The artful way this pair of musicians and life partners combine the styles of their families, of their youths, and of their present lives together, as touring, professional musicians, feels expansive, rich, and bold, like newgrass that’s never been newgrassed before. But, there’s a timelessness here, a patina, that speaks to the greater tradition this record can lay claim to perpetuating. (Thank goodness.) 

Songs of Our Grandfathers isn’t just nostalgia, heritage, lineage, legacy- and canon-building. It’s not just carrying on tradition for tradition’s sake. It’s effortlessly and wholly bluegrass because it innovates, it complicates, and it challenges its listeners to think outside of preconceived notions of what bluegrass, string band, and old-time music are. Because that’s exactly what bluegrass’s grandfathers, grandmothers, and grandparents were doing as they invented this music. 

We began our phone chat about the new album discussing each of their grandparents and their musical idiosyncrasies.

Can we start by talking about Jim Shumate? His presence is throughout the record and he’s influenced you both, can you tell us a bit about him and his music making? 

John Cloyd Miller: He was born in 1921 in Wilkes County, North Carolina, on a mountain called Chestnut Mountain. He started playing fiddle as a young boy, as a teenager. His older brother Mac, who was 10 years older – the same age as Bill Monroe – got him his first fiddle, which is a fiddle he kept his entire life and we actually have, now. It’s an old Sears & Roebuck Strad copy, but he played some tone into it! His Uncle Erby played fiddle so he heard him a lot growing up and then he got into Arthur Smith and all that kind of stuff. He moved to Hickory when he got older, when he was a young man, and was playing on the radio down there when Bill Monroe heard him and asked him to be in the Blue Grass Boys. That was the time that Stringbean was in the band and Sally Ann Forrester, too.

When Stringbean decided to leave the band and go off with Lew Childre, Bill needed a banjo player and it’s now a pretty well known story that Jim knew a banjo player – he knew Earl Scruggs – and really pushed, begged him really, to audition for Bill. Earl was pretty reluctant to do it, but he did, and the rest is history. Later on, when Flatt & Scruggs broke off [from the Blue Grass Boys], Jim was their first fiddler, as you know. He recorded on their Mercury sessions. But he didn’t like touring, he wasn’t a touring kinda guy at all. He had four kids at home – three at the time, when he was younger, and one later. 

Natalya Zoe Weinstein: He liked Mama’s cookin’. 

[both laugh]

Jim Shumate, L (John Cloyd Miller’s grandfather); David Weinstein, R (Natalya Zoe Weinstein’s grandfather)

JCM: He did! He liked his own bed and grandma’s cooking, for sure. He liked to go up on the mountain. He worked in the furniture industry pretty much his whole life, but he also had his hand in the music. He ran a place called “Cat Square,” kind of a small town sort of Hickory Opry, a music show. He was always playing. I have photos of him through the late ‘40s and through the ‘50s with all sorts of people, Don Reno – all those guys. He made records and he had his own band called Sons of the Carolinas, which had George Shuffler in it and some other guys. He was always playing. He played with Dwight Barker and the Melody Boys; he did some sides with Don Walker, who he played with before he met Bill Monroe. He was always making music. 

After Flatt & Scruggs it was largely regionally, because he wasn’t out touring, but he said people would always come by. Any time guys like Lester and them were in town they would always drive the bus and park it right in the yard. He was always in the music, but his influence was not felt as widely later on, I think because he wasn’t out [touring]. He did come back to recording in the ‘90s and made five cassettes for Heritage Records and those got disseminated kind of regionally. Michael Cleveland cut one of the songs that was on one of those tapes a year or so ago. People know his music, but we enjoy getting his legacy out there a bit more. He’s got such a unique style and certainly was influential. 

He was a great songwriter, too! He was my main musical influence. I heard him play a ton growing up. He was so bluesy and slidey, he was a real master of syncopation, which is something that got ingrained in me. People always forget about his songwriting, but the way I grew up, I always thought that being a musician meant that you sing stuff, you write songs. You pick, too, but you do all of it. It was just part of being musical and I think that came from him as well. 

It makes me think of, well, I talk a lot about how the most “bluegrass” someone can be is being innovative and being themselves, whether that comes across as “traditional bluegrass,” genre-wise or not. 

JCM: That’s really insightful and it’s so true, when you look at those early players – everybody always looks at the first generation and, that’s good, that can be very grounding, but those guys were all unique! They were all unique artists, they had their own styles – sure, they were listening to one another, but Lester Flatt doesn’t sound like Bill Monroe who doesn’t sound like Carter Stanley. They don’t sound like each other!

Natalya, I wanted to ask you about your grandfather, too. If you could tell us a bit about the musical influences that represent him on this record, as well. 

NZW: He passed away when I was fairly young, my dad had me when he was fifty-one, so my grandfather was quite older than me – I think I was eleven when he passed away. [My father and he] had an interesting relationship; he wasn’t always a well-liked man. He escaped a lot of violence and poverty in Russia, so he wasn’t a very kind man and my dad didn’t have a very close relationship with him. I don’t have any audio recordings of his music, I have a couple of audio interviews that my dad and uncle did with him, but I don’t have any recordings of his music. 

My dad was moving a few years back and found all these old music notebooks from my grandfather. He asked me, “Do you want these old, handwritten, junky notebooks?” And I was like, “Yes!! Please give those to me!” [Laughs] That was the source, for me, for my grandfather’s music. I didn’t have one-on-one experiences with him, I didn’t have recordings of him, so these notebooks are really the only link to his music that I have. We have about five or six notebooks that have songs in them – they’re pretty hard to decipher, they’re forty or fifty years old. They have all different kinds of material in them, from klezmer to mambos and tangos even to “Tennessee Waltz,” which shows up in one of them as a jazz standard. He also played some classical music, he didn’t do just one singular thing. Klezmer players were like the wedding band musician of their time, where they had to play a bunch of different styles based on who their audience was. 

JCM: We definitely got a little bit of a sense of who he was from these audio interviews that her uncle and dad had made with him. We got to hear his voice, you know he didn’t speak English very well so it’s mostly in Russian and Yiddish. You get a sense of some of the stuff he saw, in these interviews. You can tell it hardened him. 

NZW: He had a tough life for sure, he struggled a lot and music was really the only thing [he did]. He wasn’t really educated. He talked about how when he came here [to the U.S.] he tried to be a plumber and he tried to be an electrician, but he kept making mistakes. He said, “I couldn’t do anything except play music.” He felt almost like he was stuck with it. He loved it and he was passionate about it, but I got the sense that it was his only option. 

There’s a similar energy from both grandfathers around being musicians, but not just in a traditional touring, “road dog,” sort of lifestyle. 

NZW: You’re right, and they were both kind of skeptical of the past. 

JCM: They both came from very humble beginnings. My grandfather didn’t have any education, either. Natalya’s grandfather, apparently, escaped the Bolshevik revolution on a hay wagon. He was a teenager and they were trying to conscript him into the army to fight – it’s crazy stuff! 

Bluegrass is always considering lineage and tradition and how those things are passed along. One of the things that I think is really interesting about it is there aren’t a lot of marginalized identities represented in the historical record of bluegrass, but there are Jewish identities represented. There’s not a whole lot of representation as you go back through the years, but it’s there. How do you connect the music you’re making, that’s infused with Jewish influences and has that cultural identity, to past Jewish music makers in bluegrass and string bands? You’re clearly thinking about lineage and family with this record, and that’s so bluegrass, but through a different lens with your Jewish identity and the other cultural music styles on the album, too. 

NZW: David Grisman was one of my biggest musical influences early on, he was a big bridge, for me, between my dad – who plays jazz – and the bluegrass connection as well as the Jewish connection. We talk about how this album was inspired by Songs of Our Fathers, the 1995 album by David Grisman and Andy Statman. Andy Statman, who played on the record, is another one – one of the first shows that John and I went to see when we met in Asheville in 2005 or 2006 was to see Andy Statman at the Black Mountain Center for the Arts, which is this tiny little listening room. It was an incredible show, I remember just being blown away. I remember thinking, “Wow! What a cool fusion.”

JCM: That was the first time we heard that fusion with klezmer music. He was also playing clarinet, he was playing mandolin. He is the bridge between these kinds of music. David doesn’t do as much klezmer, but those two guys together for sure. 

NZW: John and I both came into bluegrass through the Grisman/Garcia connection then I kind of worked my way back from there. Someone gave me a burned CD of Bill Monroe and I was like, “Oh my God, what is this!?” [Laughs]

JCM: So many people have stories like that. That Old & In The Way album was such an influential record, it was like the number one selling bluegrass record for a long time. 

NZW: Yeah, the way I got into bluegrass, I was out in Tacoma, Washington, for an anthropology conference in college and somebody at my hotel was like, “I’ve got an extra ticket for Wintergrass, which is happening right next door.” I said, “Okay, cool!” So we go and I saw Old & In The Gray there [Peter Rowan, Vassar Clements, Grisman], it was an incredible experience. I didn’t really know what I was seeing at the time, because I was so new to bluegrass, but that was my “Ah ha!” moment. Someone handed me a fiddle and I dunno, I played “Angeline the Baker” and that was it! [Laughs]

JCM: When I first heard Grisman play mandolin, his tone and everything, that was like sinking a hook into me. That’s why I even wanted to play mandolin. I wanted to work on getting tone like that! He was a huge influence on so many of us.

Going back home one time, when I had been living out West or whatever, I was listening to Old & In the Way or something and I asked, “Grandpa, do you know this stuff, like ‘Pig in a Pen,’ and all this?” And he was like, “Oh yeah! I know everything on this record!” And he would play them, and that was so cool to me. I hadn’t quite made the connection before. He asked me, “Who’s playing fiddle on that record?” And I said, “Vassar Clements!” He says, “Oh yeah, that’s a good friend of mine!” I was like, “WHAT!?” 

[both laugh]

JCM: I was just this stupid, deadhead college kid – I mean, I’m still a deadhead – but it really clicked. This is a bridge between grandpa’s world, which had always seemed like something in the past, to my world as a young, coming-of-age musician, realizing, “Oh, it’s all the same stuff!” 

To an uninitiated listener, they might hear your record and they might hear the influences that aren’t “traditional bluegrass” as modern cross-pollinations, as something that’s coming from you both and your generation and your own creativity. But, I really wanted to unpack the lineage of the music, because I can sense even in the playing on this album that colors “outside the lines,” it’s clearly part of this bigger tradition in bluegrass of being a bridge between these kinds of disparate parts. Even this “nontraditional” album you’ve made is based on so much tradition – familial tradition, cultural tradition, musical tradition. 

NZW: I think we wanted to honor those traditions and where these songs came from, but we also wanted to put our own spin on it. We hope our grandfathers would have liked that! 

JCM: [Jim Shumate] was very much a traditional musician, but he was always innovative at the same time. Some of the things he did in the ‘50s were very jazzy, with electric guitars playing with him. And he always loved Natalya’s playing. You know, Natalya came from a classical background and anytime she would play something classical for him– 

NZW: Or a waltz. 

JCM: He just loved to hear her play. They didn’t sound like each other, they had very different styles, but he was always very open and he loved everything. 

NZW: I think he would like [the album]. John’s mom texted us yesterday as she was listening to it and said, “I think grandpa would’ve enjoyed that!” So hopefully our grandparents aren’t rolling over in their graves. 

[Both laugh]


Photo Credit: Sarah Johnston

Alison Brown: Record Label Founder and Bluegrass “Lifer”

When a craftsman pauses to reflect, students of all skill levels benefit from the lesson. Alison Brown’s latest album, On Banjo, released May 5 on Compass Records and is a masterclass; it’s also a study on where the instrument has been and where it’s going.

Brown is a Compass co-founder and a GRAMMY Award-winning artist and producer. A self-described “lifer” in the bluegrass community and an IBMA “First Lady of Bluegrass,” she eagerly explores what the five-stringed instrument can do outside typical genre parameters. The new record is packed with star-studded duets with comedian Steve Martin, mandolin player and fellow First Lady of Bluegrass Sierra Hull, and fiddle legend Stuart Duncan.

The result is a varied, rich track list we couldn’t wait to ask Brown about.

BGS: Let’s walk through some of the tracks and collaborations on On Banjo. What kind of music inspired the duet with Anat Cohen?

AB: Anat Cohen is a clarinetist; she was born in Israel and lives in New York, but she’s well-known in jazz circles for Brazilian choro. I actually watched lots of videos of Anat on YouTube.

I reached out. I said “I know we don’t know each other, but would you consider doing this?”

What’s it like working with a famous comedian like Steve Martin in a musical context?

I’ve had the good fortune to go out and do some shows with him and Martin Short. There’s inevitably some time to jam in the dressing room, so it’s fun to play with Steve in that context, too.

Steve’s a great banjo player with a really beautiful touch and a delicate, sweet tone. He loves playing in double C tuning. Banjo players usually tune to a G, but you can drop the fourth string to a C and tune the second [string] up to a C. It’s an old tuning that clawhammer guys use a lot.

The way “Foggy Mountain Breaking,” came about is I wrote the A section. It was during the pandemic. I asked Steve, “Do you wanna write a B part?” He sent me a perfect B section 24 hours later. We figured out a bridge together. It’s named after a lyric in a John Hartford song and is obviously a riff on “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.”

How does it feel to work with younger bluegrass talents like Sierra Hull? Is it gratifying to have a feminine duo on that track?

I wrote that tune hoping Sierra would be up for learning and recording it with me. I’m a huge fan of her mandolin playing; she’s another one with such a delicate touch. Her fingers just really dance over the fingerboard.

It required her to play every fret on the first string of the mandolin and she did it flawlessly. She said she’d never had a chance to work on such complicated music with another woman. So it’s a really special thing. It’s always a delight to play with Sierra, but to do a duet with her was like chocolate and more chocolate.

How do you balance two strong, independent main instruments like banjo and fiddle together, such as with Stuart Duncan?

Banjo and fiddle are just so complementary. They say a banjo and fiddle make a band, and they do.

I’ve known Stuart since he was 11 and I was 12. We go way back. And on this tune I want to give a tip of the hat to Byron Berline and John Hickman. Growing up in Southern California when we did in the ’70s, those two were the guys that everybody worshiped at the feet of. I wanted to try and capture some of that spirit, and I wanted to do it with Stuart.

Who is this album for, and what do you hope listeners take away from it?

That’s the existential question of the banjo player. And it is a bit of a challenge when you take the five-string banjo and go somewhere else with it. Earl Scruggs perpetuated a style and brought it to the masses that was just so electric. Most people think that’s all the banjo does and they don’t worry about its history before that. There’s a lot of voices inside the instrument; the bluegrass one has become the loudest one most recently.

It’s so interesting because at the beginning of the 1800s the banjo was found on plantations. Then white people appropriated that music in minstrel shows, performing in blackface. It’s deep in terms of what it says about our history and America’s original sin.
It went from being a Black instrument to being a white lady’s instrument. The Black voice of the instrument and the female voice of the instrument were both disenfranchised. There are gorgeous old photos of women in the 1890s holding banjos, and there were female banjo orchestras. I’m excited to see that re-emerging.

You started Compass Records with Garry West almost three decades ago. What’s on the horizon, and what are your goals?

All the labels were run by business people, not musicians. We said, “Why can’t musicians run a label for other artists?”

The other part is really wanting to build a label that can have a cultural impact and Garry and I are both invested in roots music. I’ve been a member of the bluegrass community since about 10 years old. I’m a lifer. The whole economy of the record business has been turned upside down and stirred and shaken eight times. We want to make sure this music not only survives but thrives into the future.

You mentioned growing up in SoCal. How is bluegrass there different from Appalachia?

There would be Eagles’ songs in set lists. It was wide open. When I first came east with Stuart and his dad, we drove around and did the festivals in 1978 or so, but it was rooted in the first generation bands’ repertoire.

On that trip we entered a band contest in Oklahoma and we played something we learned from a Richard Green record. It was a funky fiddle thing in E. I remember somebody coming up afterwards and saying “We don’t appreciate you knocking the music.”

What did you learn while making On Banjo?

The deep dive to find new melodies, and that process of discovery of the instrument, is the process of self-discovery. You get to the end and it teaches you something new about yourself.


Photo Credit: Russ Harrington

Bluegrass Memoirs: Lexington, Kentucky and J.D. Crowe, 1972

[Editor’s note: All photos by Carl Fleischhauer, except publicity shot of Esco Hankins]

On the afternoon of Sunday, August 13, 1972, Carl Fleischhauer and I were in Jackson, Kentucky, at the finale of Bill Monroe’s Kentucky Bluegrass festival where we’d been since Friday. In my notes, I wrote:

We left after talking briefly with Monroe (I bought his new LP [Bill Monroe’s Uncle Pen] and latest single [“My Old Kentucky and You”] from him) and drove [85 miles northwest] to Lexington where we got a motel — the Flora — run by an 85-year-old lady who liked Bill Monroe and told us that Uncle Dave Macon stayed in the Flora whenever he visited Lexington. Dinner late on the [U of KY] campus or near at an Italian restaurant — snuck in leftover wine and had ravioli. Sure was good to bathe and sleep in an air-conditioned room.

Monday morning after breakfast downtown and some cursory hunting in record cut-out bins, we headed to the Esco Hankins Record Shop. Tennessean Hankins, a Roy Acuff-style singer, began his recording career in 1947. He settled in Lexington in 1949 and performed for years on WLAP with his wife Jackie and his band, which included Dobro player Buck Graves. He also performed weekly on The Kentucky Mountain Barn Dance, which started in Lexington in 1949 and was broadcast on WVLK. 

Jackie and Esco Hankins publicity photo, original date unknown.

Flatt & Scruggs joined the Kentucky Mountain Barn Dance cast that year, influencing both Graves – to whom Earl taught his right hand, three-finger roll – and young J.D. Crowe, who was a regular in the audience and often went with his dad to observe Scruggs rehearsing with Flatt for their radio shows at WVLK. In 1950, at age 13, inspired and informally tutored by Earl, J.D. got his first banjo and began practicing what he’d seen watching Earl in action.

Esco Hankins Record Shop, Lexington, KY, April 1972.

Hankins held amateur country music contests, and at one he discovered teenager Crowe, who soon became part of his band. Marty Godbey’s Crowe On The Banjo: The Music Life of J.D. Crowe (2011) is a fascinating biography that narrates in great detail much of the story I would hear in my interview with Crowe that day in 1972. Early on, Godbey quotes from one of her interviews with J.D.: “I played for him quite a bit, it was my first paying job.” 

Esco Hankins in his record shop in Lexington, KY, August 1972.

I knew nothing of Crowe’s connection with Hankins on that morning when we walked into Esco’s shop. We browsed, bought some records, and then got into a conversation with him about country music history. He generously gave me a number of old songbooks and then, when we mentioned our interest in interviewing Crowe, he phoned Lemco, the Lexington record company with whom Crowe had recently made three albums and several singles, to get J.D.’s number. My notes:

…he ended up calling first Lemco and then J.D. Crowe and then handing the phone over to me to talk with J.D. — I thought it was still Lemco and went into a long rap about my project and what I was doing and how I would appreciate if they could put me in touch with J.D. — and the voice said, “This is J.D.” and I was embarrassed but maybe it was a good thing…anyhow we made an appt. for 3:00…

Esco Hankins in his record shop in Lexington, KY, August 1972.

Today, Crowe is best remembered as the banjo picking leader of the progressive New South, whose 1975 Rounder 0044 album with Skaggs, Rice, Douglas and Slone has become a modern bluegrass icon. He also was, in 1980, a founding member of the bluegrass supergroup The Bluegrass Album band, playing solid, perfectly timed, and driving banjo based on the style of Earl Scruggs and singing the harmony parts he’d learned with Jimmy Martin. He died on Christmas Eve, 2021. 

When I interviewed him in 1972, he’d been living in Lexington, his birthplace, since returning in 1961 after a five-year stint with Jimmy Martin and the Sunny Mountain Boys. For the next seven years he’d worked day jobs (with a couple of brief stints back with Martin) while playing in local taverns with his group, The Kentucky Mountain Boys. 

In 1968 they began appearing six nights a week at the Red Slipper Lounge in the Lexington Holiday Inn. It was a change from his former blue-collar tavern milieu – lots of young college students in the crowds. This gig was going strong when Carl and I visited him.

The Holiday Inn, Lexington, KY, April 1972. Featured at the Red Slipper Lounge at the motel that night was J.D. Crowe and Kentucky Mountain Boys.
The Holiday Inn, Lexington, KY, April 1972. Featured at the Red Slipper Lounge at the hotel that night was J.D. Crowe and the Kentucky Mountain Boys. Left to right: Larry Rice, Bobby Slone, Tony Rice, J.D. Crowe, and Donnie Combs.

J.D. was now working full-time at his music. A number of notable musicians had worked for him in The Kentucky Mountain Boys, like Doyle Lawson and Red Allen. At this point, in 1972, his band consisted of Larry Rice, mandolin, Tony Rice, guitar, Donnie combs, drums, and Bobby Slone, bass. He had just changed the name of the group to the New South

I had first seen Crowe in April 1960 when I went to Wheeling, West Virginia, with a couple of college friends. A month earlier we had opened for the Osborne Brothers at Antioch College. Bobby Osborne had urged the audience to come see them at the Wheeling Jamboree at WWVA. We took him up on it at spring vacation.

We drove down from Ohio and took a cheap room in a hotel close to the Virginia theater where the Jamboree was held. That evening we saw the Osborne Brothers as expected, but just the two of them were there. Bobby played guitar and sang “Down The Road” while Sonny picked the five. Good music, but no band! We enjoyed some of the country acts like Rusty and Doug and the fiddling of Buddy Durham. But we weren’t expecting any more bluegrass when Jimmy Martin and the Sunny Mountain Boys were introduced. It was the most memorable moment of the evening for us.

The four-piece band – Jimmy Martin, Crowe, mandolinist Paul Williams, and fiddler Johnny Dacus – bounded up to the mic from backstage and opened with Crowe’s the up-the-neck single-string banjo intro to “Hold Whatcha Got,” Martin’s latest single. 

The audience, which included a bunch of young women seated up front who had cowbells and knew how to use them, went bananas. It was a tight band, thought by many to be Martin’s best, and we were very impressed. Crowe’s banjo break was amazing. It marked him as a unique stylist.

Thereafter, when talking with fellow banjo pickers, I identified this single-string work as “J.D. Crowe style.” The success of “Hold Whatcha Got” led Martin to record several more using the same rhythm and banjo break style. 

Following our experience in Wheeling, we began listening to Martin’s late Saturday night show, after the Jamboree, on WWVA. The live sound of new songs like “My Walking Shoes” – driving, up-tempo stuff with Crowe’s banjo out front – caught our ear. 

J.D. told Marty Godbey about watching Earl rehearse: “I was more interested in trying to learn the breaks to songs and backup than instrumentals.” His work on Martin’s Decca recordings was definitive; Martin’s banjoists were told to play it like J.D. 

He began to record on Lemco with the Kentucky Mountain Boys in 1969 when the band included Doyle Lawson and Red Allen. This was the most recent Crowe recording I’d heard at the time of our August 1972 interview. 

That afternoon Carl and I drove to his trailer park home. We set up my cassette recorder and mic, and I began the interview with a few ethnographic questions: “Let me ask you just some of the basic things, like how old you are and where you were born and so on.”

J.D. Crowe home, Lexington, KY, April 1972.

He was 34 and told of childhood with country music on a farm six miles outside of Lexington. Then he described how his musical calling emerged in the fall of 1949 after Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs came to town. 

I saw them in person before I ever heard their records. Cause, the first record I heard of them was one called “Down The Road.”

“Down The Road” was Lester and Earl’s newest record release in October 1949.

His family were regulars in the audience at the Kentucky Mountain Barn Dance. 

And I saw, they came here — fact, I never heard of ‘em!

They was there one night, and they was so well received that they was hired.

His first banjo was a 39-dollar Kay, but within a year he’d moved up to a Gibson. Scruggs was his informal mentor. At fifteen he was playing dances and at sixteen Jimmy Martin hired him after hearing him playing on the radio with Hankins. “Hankins?” I asked.

Yeah, I guess that was the first person I worked with professionally.

J.D. Crowe at home in Lexington, KY, August 1972, during a visit and interview with Neil V. Rosenberg (left).

After five years working full-time in Martin’s band – in Detroit, Shreveport, and Wheeling – J.D. quit. It was 1961, he was twenty-four.

I think I just, a, kindly got tired, I mean, you know, wanted to try something different. 

This was a phrase he used several times in the interview: I just wanted to try something a little different, he said later, speaking of the band he started. Moving back to Lexington, he got a day job, and formed The Kentucky Mountain Boys, who played five nights a week in local clubs until 1968. Then the Holiday Inn gig came along:

I give up my job and I’ve been doing it full-time ever since.

As a bandleader, he stressed the hard work involved in building a career:

…you know how the music goes, unsure, you know. Which anything is, really when you get down to it. It’s just what you want to make out of it, and how hard you want to work… And a, believe me, it’s, it’s rough. A lot of people, you know, think it’s a lot of, a bowl of cherries, you know, just have a good time, but it’s not like that.

I suppose the picking is only the small part,” I said.

That’s just the smallest part of it, really.

J.D. explained how his full-time band operated – fall, winter, and spring they played six nights a week at the Holiday Inn. Then they took the summers off: 

Work road shows

He told me about his band members — mandolinist Larry Rice, his brother Tony, and Bobby Slone — and explained about the Rices’ California connection:

They were born in Danville, Virginia, but … they went to California when they were just little shavers and they lived out there I guess ten or twelve years in Los Angeles. And that’s where Larry came from, he was living there at the time… Bobby Slone, our bass player, he’s been with me I guess about six years. Well, he used to live in California also, and he had worked with them when they was growing up and so he told me about them. And of course, Tony I met after Larry joined me. He moved back to North Carolina and he came up. 

His band were all veterans of the late ’60s LA scene where folk-rock and country-rock had blended with bluegrass. That musical mindset had a kind of creative vision that Crowe could empathize with. 

I used to be, if it didn’t have a banjo in it, then I’d cut it off. But now, with the exception of rock and roll and blues. I’ve always liked it. I used to listen to blues, just all the time. I like the style of B.B. King, of course he’s still going, you know, and, a Fats Domino, Little Richard, you know … they was in the fifties. And there’s just a lot of ‘em, and of course the rock changed you know, course what they call country rock, which is good, I like that. In fact, we do quite a few numbers of that ourself.

I asked: “When you were leaving Jimmy Martin, were you thinking of putting some of that into your music?” He explained:

That wasn’t out yet … I didn’t have too much choice. You (could) only do country, do bluegrass, or you just do hard rock. But now there’s so much new stuff’s out that it’s just endless, to what you can do, and take over songs and adapt them over, your own little thing, in style.

You can take with what you had and combine it with a couple other forms of music and come up with a little different gimmick, a little different style. That’s the whole thing, that’s what you got to have. 

Perhaps the most novel aspect of the New South sound at this time was the fact that since the prior September – almost a year before – they had been playing electrified instruments.

I had the idea, you know a, maybe that might be the answer, because, like I say, like we couldn’t get any records played on country stations. 

The Osborne Brothers had gone electric in 1969; J.D. said their example had influenced him “a little bit.” Also in 1969, Earl Scruggs had begun playing an electrified banjo with his sons in the Earl Scruggs Revue. Jim & Jesse had done an electric album in 1971. I asked J.D. if he’d recorded with his electric group.

The latest single is. Course I use a steel and a piano and a drummer, the whole works on that. In fact I didn’t play too much banjo, on account, if there’s a lot of banjo, some things, they won’t even, some stations won’t play it.

At J.D. Crowe’s home in Lexington KY, August 1972, during a visit and interview with Neil V. Rosenberg (right) as reflected in a mirror that also caught photographer Carl Fleischhauer.

We’d just been at a festival; I wanted to know what he thought about festivals. Had they helped his music?

The festivals have helped to a certain extent. You know. Right now, they’re trying, they’re getting too many of them, in my opinion. Cause you can over do a good thing, you know and, which I know we worked some of ‘em that didn’t turn out so good … most of ‘em, though, we’ve worked this year have all been great big ones, I mean a lot of people. And I figure they will probably continue having that kind of a crowd. And I think that it’s, it’s helped.

“Is it a different kind of crowd than the country music crowd?” I asked.

A, not really, I’d say a people that go to bluegrass festivals would also go to see Porter Wagoner and Conway Twitty and Merle Haggard — Nashville, you know. They like it, course they like bluegrass too. A lot of your country people, you know, like other types. There’s — they like it, but they won’t come out to see it, you know, they don’t like it that good. They can take it or leave it, in other words. That’s what you got to get to, those people, the general public. You know, cause there’s a lot of people come to the festivals and — but you know if you figure, the population of the world and you know, don’t look, it’s not too good a’ odds, so…

An experienced observer of the ongoing bluegrass scene, J.D. was keenly involved in his music business. He spoke of recording studio dynamics, record company practices, broadcasting politics, fan magazine reviews, and other factors in running a band. 

At that point I turned off the recorder and asked if he would show me his electrified banjo. When I turned the recorder on again, he was giving me the history of his banjo, starting with the neck:

This, this is original here, this part as you can see was pieced from a tenor, you turn it over and it’s a great job — see, that’s been pieced.

(N:) Oh, yeah.

(J.D.:) From there up. They matched it perfect, see, you can tell, right there, it starts up on the neck, go right in there, or right here, you can see its smaller up the neck.

(N:) It’s a splendid job.

J.D. Crowe at home in Lexington KY, August 1972.

J.D. had seen a lot of old Gibson Mastertones over the years. He knew chapter and verse about wood types and design details. But I wanted to know about his electric setup. I knew nothing about electric instruments, which were anathema to the ’50s folk revival I’d grown up in. He spent some time showing and explaining the details of his still-experimental pickup system (Godbey describes it well, p. 110). Carl asked if he could take a picture, J.D. politely told him no.

He told me what it was like to be playing electric, with the strings closer to the fretboard (“low action”) than on an acoustic:

(N:) Can you do licks that you wouldn’t otherwise do?

(J.D.:) Yeah. You can do a lot of stuff that holds, you know, you can get a sustain. That’s what nice about it. 

Then he announced what he was hoping on for the future:

I’ve got a six-string ordered.

In 1970 Sonny Osborne had added a sixth bass string to his five-string; it was part of a lush sound – string sections, twin steels, etc. – on their latest recordings. J.D. liked the possibilities the added string would enable, especially because he, like Sonny, was playing an electrified instrument. He’d even had to cancel a contract for a bluegrass festival that didn’t allow electric instruments. He told them:

Hell no! We’re gonna play electric…. We played up here electric for nine month and [then] we played acoustical; I sounded like I was playing a two-dollar Kay. Cause your hearing gets accustomed to that volume. And it’d take me three or four months to get back on the acoustical route.

Our interview ended there. Afterward I evaluated it in my notes:

Interview with J.D. Crowe — nothing spectacular, your hr.’s worth of history, but attitudes and early learning gone into pretty carefully. Very friendly but reserved in a reassuring way. Carl busy snapping away.

J.D. Crowe at home in Lexington, KY, August 1972.

We left Lexington immediately, heading for Louisville, where we were to stay with friends of Carl’s. Consequently, I didn’t get a chance to see J.D. and his New South in action at the Red Slipper Lounge. 

In 1973, the electric edition of the New South recorded an album in Nashville for Starday. Titled J.D. Crowe and the New South, it was issued on CD in 1997 under the title Bluegrass Evolution. Crowe played his 6-string on two of its ten cuts. Here’s one, “You Can Have Her.

The album wasn’t released until 1977, two years after they stopped playing electric. In 1975 when Larry Rice left the group, J.D’s new mandolin player, Ricky Skaggs, had insisted on “acoustical.” By then J.D.’s vision of “something a little different” was working just fine without the extra electricity; Rounder 0044 came soon after. 

The Holiday Inn, Lexington, KY, April 1972. The Red Slipper Lounge featured J.D. Crowe and Kentucky Mountain Boys; including Tony Rice (back to camera), Larry Rice (barely visible behind Tony Rice), J.D. Crowe, Bobby Slone (hidden), and Donnie Combs, drums.
The Holiday Inn, Lexington, KY, April 1972. J.D. Crowe and the Kentucky Mountain Boys; Tony Rice (back to camera), Larry Rice, J.D. Crowe, Bobby Slone (partly hidden), and Donnie Combs, drums.

That day I wished we’d taken the time to catch the band in action, but we had only five more days for our bluegrass field trip. Kentucky was just the start; our next planned stops would take us to Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Recently, a recording of an evening at the Red Slipper was uploaded to YouTube. Here’s the 1972 sound of the electrified New South (with drums): 


Thanks to Tim Stafford and Carl Fleischhauer.

Neil V. Rosenberg is an author, scholar, historian, banjo player, Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame inductee, and co-chair of the IBMA Foundation’s Arnold Shultz Fund.

Photo of Rosenberg by Terri Thomson Rosenberg.

Edited by Justin Hiltner

LISTEN: Water Tower, “My Little Girl in Tennessee” (Flatt & Scruggs Cover)

Artist: Water Tower
Hometown: Los Angeles, California
Song: “My Little Girl in Tennessee”
Album: Live From Los Angeles
Label: Water Tower Records

In Their Words: “We love traditional bluegrass with all of our heart. That is part of the reason we chose to release this Lester Flatt/Earl Scruggs song. When we met our second banjo player Jesse Blue Eads (we have two on stage with us usually; Tommy Drinkard plays the other banjo) we were busking and this was a tune that we all knew. We recorded this version in one take after a 55-date tour. On the way to the Palomino Recording Studio our van broke down, so we got the car towed. Then when we arrived at the studio, the bridge on the bass had fallen off and cracked. It was ‘one of those days.’ This all contributed to the raw feeling in the room as we recorded.” — Kenny Feinstein, Water Tower


Photo Credit: David K. Cupp