Tag: Earl Scruggs

That Ain’t Bluegrass: Rob Ickes & Trey Hensley

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Artist: Rob Ickes & Trey Hensley
Song: “Friend of the Devil” (Originally by Grateful Dead)
Album: The Country Blues

Where did you guys first find this song? From the Grateful Dead or from a secondary source?

Trey Hensley: I picked it up from the Dead. The first — maybe the second — record that I bought by the Dead was American Beauty. It felt pretty natural, the original is somewhat bluegrassy. It has [David] Grisman on it, so it felt like it would be a cool tune to cover. I took it to Rob one of the times we were rehearsing and it just fell in — it was perfect.

What else about the song made you feel like it would fit solidly within bluegrass, not just on the fringes?

TH: I liked the subject matter; it’s just a well-written song. It already had the melody of a bluegrass tune, and I know that the Dead got a lot of people into bluegrass, from Jerry [Garcia’s] banjo playing and Old and in the Way. That slightly outlaw-ish subject matter just fell right in with what I think of when I think of traditional bluegrass tunes.

What was the process for you guys putting together this song?

Rob Ickes: I felt kind of ignorant because it’s such a huge song and everybody knows it, but I had never heard it before! I love that. I think my ignorance helped my enthusiasm for the song. I had never heard it before, but when Trey brought the song, I just loved it. I loved the subject matter, also, and it sounded like a cool bluegrass thing. We came up with that little hook on the top of the song — it kind of reminds me of “Blackberry Blossom,” the way the chords go. We came up with that melodic figure, that’s like a fiddle tune, with a bluegrass feel to pull it more toward ‘grass than the original version. Also, I heard that the Dead never performed the song at that tempo (on the record) again. They would perform it pretty slow.

I think because it’s a Dead song, it lends itself to a sort of space jam in the middle of the tune. When we play it live, we really pick it out. It’s a showcase for both of us, but especially Trey on the guitar. He really takes it to the moon and back. We just did a bunch of shows with Tommy Emmanuel and David Grisman, and we closed with that song every night and would send it out to David, because he played on the original, of course. People went nuts over that instrumental section.

Is the jam section your favorite part of playing it live? What else do you love about performing it out?

RI: For me, it’s just hearing what Trey does with it every night. [Laughs] It’s always totally different. He’s just a great improviser. It’s fun to hear all the different stuff that comes out of him every night.

TH: I would say the improvisation part. It puts me in that Dead state of mind. You want to come up with something different. Being into bluegrass and jazz and all kinds of different stuff, improvising is my favorite part of music, in general. Especially on that one. There are no rules. It has a shape, but within that there are no rules. It’s pretty much a free-for-all. And I like that it can be as loose as we want it to be. It feels great and it’s always fun.

Ever since the beginning of bluegrass as a genre, there’s always been this tradition of covering songs from outside of bluegrass. Why do you think that’s something that still continues to this day?

TH: That first Bill [Monroe] record has so much on it that, by today’s standards, would not be considered bluegrass — like organ and other stuff that’s kind of outside the driving thing that bluegrass has become. I think that’s the beauty of bluegrass: It can work within whatever you want it to be.

RI: You know, Earl Scruggs was listening to Benny Goodman, and he was really into this clarinet player named Pete Fountain. Bill Monroe was listening to Jimmie Rodgers. Arnold Schultz, a great blues guitarist from Kentucky was, of course, a big influence on Bill. That’s what I like about what Trey and I are doing. It’s kind of rooted in bluegrass, it has that energy, but we’re exploring other music forms. When we play live, we’re usually playing acoustics, but we have some pedals. We’re playing through pickups. I’ll use a phase-shifter at certain points on that song and Trey will use a wah pedal, kind of tipping his hat to Jerry Garcia — even musically, he’ll quote some Jerry Garcia licks in his solo. We’re using this bluegrass background, but we don’t live in that shell. I’m a big fan of John Scofield and some other electric guitarists, and those guys have a lot of effects pedals that they use in a very musical way. It’s not just some BS. It’s fun to explore that with these acoustic instruments. It allows us to try new things sonically that are very exciting. We love mixing it up.

I grew up listening to Tony Rice. I always think of that late ‘70s/early ‘80s period when he was in the studio so much, doing the David Grisman stuff. And his solo albums were very jazz- and improvisation-oriented. At the same time, he was doing the Bluegrass Album Band. It was all killer. Really, really top-notch. I’ve always been inspired by musicians like that, who always continue to seek inspiration. You have to go out and look at new things to get inspiration. You can’t just look at the same four walls every day.

You know that ain’t bluegrass, right?

[Both laugh]

TH: I’ve heard that for years now! [Laughs] I like to take it with a badge of honor. I love bluegrass, but I love to expand on bluegrass. I think anything that I’m ever going to do is going to have that core of bluegrass. It’s never going to go away, because I love it so much. But if everybody wants to be like Bill, they’d expand upon the music.

RI: The sentiment you’re talking about … who knows? But I think it’s usually more of a fan thing. Those people like the tradition that bluegrass encapsulates. There are definitely some musicians that feel that way, too. I’ve always listened to musicians who are exploring and trying new things. That’s what Bill and Earl were doing. It’s ironic, because I think what people love about bluegrass is that exploring. So, to want to shut it down is kind of contradictory to what made it great in the first place. I also get that people like it because it represents something, whether it’s the “good ol’ days” or whatever. And I get that, when people started adding drums to country, it drove a lot of people away from country music. The same happens with bluegrass fans today. I guess I just listen to music that makes me feel something and I don’t really care about the instrumentation. I’m listening for what people are putting into it.

Steve Martin: Making the Same Sound Different

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The sound of a five-string banjo has a cosmic pull. When Earl Scruggs first took to the Grand Ole Opry stage with Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys in 1945, his rapid-fire, three-finger picking style shocked and stunned the Ryman Auditorium audience and radio listeners across the country. The standing ovation he received shook the entire building to its rafters with hands clapping, boots stomping, and hootin’ and hollerin’. It was the Big Bang of bluegrass banjo.

Almost every banjo player could tell you the first time they heard the instrument, the first time they encountered its cosmic pull — a personal, introspective banjo Big Bang unique to each person who is struck by its irresistible, joyful, magnetic sound. Steve Martin describes the first time he heard a banjo as his “What’s that!?” moment. “I kind of pin it on the Kingston Trio,” he remembers. “But I know there were earlier things. I fell in love with the four-string banjo, too. When I was 11, I would go to Disneyland to see the Golden Horseshoe Revue, and there was a four-string banjo player. When I worked at Knott’s Berry Farm, there was a four-string banjo player there, too.” His voice shifts to a whisper, as he adds, “But, we all know that five is better.”

He continues, “I do believe it was kind of the Kingston Trio or folk music, in general, that really made the sound like, ‘Wow, what a happy, wonderful sound!’”

He picked up the banjo as a teenager, taking on three-finger, Scruggs-style picking with the help and influence of his friend John McEuen. But, unlike most banjo pickers, who choose one style — Scruggs’ namesake method, or jazz and ragtime on tenor and plectrum banjos, or any of several types of frailing — Martin also had a “What’s that!?” moment with the old-time form, clawhammer: “It was a record called 5-String Banjo Greats and another record called the Old-Time Banjo Project. They were both compilations. So I don’t know who introduced me to clawhammer. When I was learning three-finger and I was into it about three years, I started to really notice clawhammer, and I go, ‘Oh, no. I have to learn that, too.’”

He is a master of both three-finger and clawhammer to this day and, on his brand new record, The Long-Awaited Album, he shifts effortlessly between the two — sometimes within one song.

Through his career as a comedian and actor, the banjo was ever at Martin’s side. It was a part of his stand-up act, it was peppered into his comedy albums, and it made cameos on his TV appearances. It would be cliché to assume that the banjo and bluegrass were a byproduct of Martin’s comedy career, but the instrument was never an afterthought, an addendum, or a prop. In fact, bluegrass and folk music showed him from his early show biz days working at theme parks that humor was an integral part of these musical traditions.

“When I first started hearing live music, like the Dillards or folk music of some kind, they all did jokes,” he says. “They all did funny intros to songs. They did riffs. They did bits. And then they did their music. That’s essentially what we’re doing now.” The silly, whimsical, comedic elements of the music Martin makes with his collaborators, friends, and backing band — the Steep Canyon Rangers — are just as much a testament to Martin’s history with bluegrass as they are a testament to his extraordinary comedy career.

During the seven years that elapsed between their last bluegrass album, Rare Bird Alert, and The Long-Awaited Album, Martin and the Rangers wrote, developed, and arranged the project’s material during soundchecks, band rehearsals, and downtime on the bus. Barn-burning, Scruggs-style tunes and contemplative, frailing instrumentals are sprinkled amidst love songs and story songs, silly and earnest, all steeped in quirky, humorous inventiveness. The album is centered on a solidly bluegrass aesthetic — but bluegrass is not a default setting.

Musical and production choices for each song were pointed and deliberate, with producer Peter Asher, Martin, and the Rangers keeping each song central and building out the sound around any given track’s core idea. “I love the sound of the five, six instruments that are traditionally bluegrass,” Martin clarifies. “That’s all we need. The Rangers, they say bluegrass is five musicians playing all the time. Other music is five musicians not playing all the time. In bluegrass, they have breaks, but there’s always the backup going. There’s always everybody chopping. So I thought, ‘What if we left out some of the instruments? What if we were not playing all the time?’ It really made a different sound.”

By leaving out an instrument here or there, adding in a cello or, in the case of the lead track, “Santa Fe,” an entire Mariachi band, the album’s sound registers immediately as bluegrass, but refuses to be lazily or automatically categorized as such. First and foremost, it sounds like Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers. “I’ve always loved the idea of the sound of the banjo against the cello, or viola, or violin, because you have the staccato notes against the long notes. The cello or viola contribute to the melancholy and mood of the banjo. But mostly, it’s just us, the seven musicians, including myself. We can reproduce it on stage … except for the mariachi. But the song called for a mariachi band, you know?” He laughs and adds, “There’s almost no way to avoid it.”

Where many bluegrass and folk writers eschew modern vernacular, places, and topics, Martin leans in, embracing contemporary scenarios and themes that don’t necessarily fit the stereotypes of train-hopping, moonshine-running, field-plowing folk music. The Olive Garden, nights in a biology laboratory, a gate at an airport, “Angeline the Barista” … the timelessness of roots and folk music isn’t lost in these themes and settings; it’s enhanced, it’s relatable, and it’s damn funny.

“I’ve written a song about a train, and I’ve written a song about Paul Revere. I think it’s got to be specific for people. They’ve got to go, ‘I know that!’ If I’m writing about a train, I know that 99 percent of people that the song will be heard by won’t really have that experience. But if I write about the Olive Garden and a girl busting up with you, I think a lot of people can relate to that, even if they don’t have that exact experience.”

The relatability and visibility of Martin’s music have brought bluegrass — and the banjo — to countless ears that may have never heard it otherwise. In 2015, the International Bluegrass Music Association awarded Martin a Distinguished Achievement Award with this visibility and outreach in mind. With The Long-Awaited Album; the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass that he awards annually; a national tour of his banjo-forward, Tony-nominated Broadway musical, Bright Star; and a heavy touring schedule criss-crossing the country with the Steep Canyon Rangers and his longtime comedy partner, Martin Short, Martin is poised to continue bringing the banjo to many first-time listeners.

But when faced with the idea that he, himself, could very well be the “What’s that?!” moment for an entire generation of brand new banjo players, he is unfalteringly modest. “What I try to express with the banjo is the sound of the banjo. When I first heard Earl Scruggs, I loved his skill, his timing, and his musicianship. I regard myself as someone who’s expressing the sound of the banjo rather than being a superior, technical player like Béla Fleck. So, if anyone picks up the banjo from hearing me, it’s because they fell in love with the sound of the banjo. What I do is get the sound of the banjo out there to a broader world, I guess.”

Lede illustration by Cat Ferraz.

LISTEN: Ragged Union, ‘Cross Country Chimes’

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Artist: Ragged Union
Hometown: Boulder, CO
Song: “Cross Country Chimes”
Album: Time Captain
Release Date: October 27, 2017

In Their Words: “‘Cross Country Chimes’ is an original banjo tune penned by Chris Elliott, in the tradition of Earl Scruggs’ ‘Foggy Mountain Chimes,’ with a melody that combines a blues touch and a modern chord progression.” — Geoff Union

Photo credit: Josh Elioseff

My First IBMA

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Ahead of this year’s annual gathering of bluegrass lovers at the IBMA’s World of Bluegrass festival in Raleigh, North Carolina, we asked some of our favorite players to recount a memory of their first time attending the illustrious event. Here’s what they told us:

Chris Pandolfi (Infamous Stringdusters)

“While my first IBMA was certainly exciting, driving roundtrip by myself from Boston for several days of nothing but jams and live music, it was my second IBMA that will always be my most memorable. It was a more formative, purposeful mission — my first trip there as an aspiring ‘professional musician,’ even though I wouldn’t necessarily describe my agenda as ‘professional.’ I had no formal engagements, no hotel reservation, no tickets, no real money to spare, and no worries about any of it. We were there to make music, meet new people, and tap into that magical, living art form that we all know as bluegrass.

The seeds of the Stringdusters had been planted, but we needed to find a few more players, and IBMA was the universal meeting place for anyone serious about the music. So when Travis Book sauntered off the elevator, no shoes and a backpack full of beer, we knew we had a good candidate on our hands. I also met Jeremy for the first time that year at IBMA, and it was definitely the first time that we five jammed together as a group, which was memorable, to say the least. That trip was a key part of the advent of the Infamous Stringdusters, which has become my passion and my life’s work.

Though our main purpose was to get a band going, we were also there as fans. I loved the sound. I was there to chase that passion, and just as important as meeting my bandmates was the ability to get that much closer to the music. I didn’t need a plan to know that making the pilgrimage to IBMA would be worth it, and it most certainly was, as there is no better place to connect with bluegrass.”

Casey Campbell

“I’ve been lucky enough to attend IBMA’s World of Bluegrass all my life. There are so many pictures of me as a baby and little kid running around Owensboro and Louisville. However, I didn’t really start making memories until the event came to Nashville in 2005. At that point, I was starting to get into playing music and discovering that there was more to WOB than just the hotel hallway jams. Thanks to Deanie Richardson and Kim Fox, I joined the Kids on Bluegrass program the following year, and my world opened up as I met these incredible young musicians like Molly Tuttle, AJ Lee, Cory & Jarrod Walker, Seth Taylor, Tyler White, and more. In fact, the majority of the folks I met during my Kids on Bluegrass tenure are still kicking ass across the bluegrass and acoustic music scenes today.

It has been such a joy over the past 10 years to watch so many other great musicians come through that program and find their groove in the musical world. I look at kids like Presley Barker and Giri Peters (who are way better than I ever thought of being at their age) and think that, without Kids on Bluegrass, those two might not have crossed paths for another decade. Of course, there will always be plenty of hallway jamming, exhibit hall perusing, and more hallway jamming, but one of my favorite World of Bluegrass memories will always be in the rehearsal rooms with those other musicians my age and thinking 1) I’ve found my people, and 2) Shit, I need to go home and practice!”

Michael Stockton (Flatt Lonesome)

“The very first year I attended IBMA was in 2008. I believe it was called Fan Fest at the time, and it was still at the convention center in Nashville, Tennessee. I had been hanging out with a few friends through the day on the Friday of that weekend. I worked up an appetite from all of the jamming I had been doing, so I went up to the Quizno’s that was on the top floor of the convention center and got myself a sandwich. Lucky enough for me, as I was walking into the grand ballroom, the Lonesome River band was taking the stage. Being that I was very new to bluegrass, I had no idea what I was in for. I can vividly remember sitting in the very back row of the hall, enjoying my sandwich and the music.

The part of the story that stands out the most, though, is from the last song on their set. They ended with the song ‘Them Blues’ (still one of my favorite LRB songs to this day), and they were getting after it! The song got around to the second banjo break where Sammy hangs on the seven note for the first few measures, and I came unglued! I completely forgot that I had a sandwich sitting in my lap and, when I heard that break for what was the first time in my life, I couldn’t help but jump up out of my seat and holler as loud as a I could! I spilled my sandwich, chips, and coke all over the floor, and I don’t regret it one bit. That was one of the first times I really pictured myself on stage. I put myself in Sammy’s shoes and told myself that I wanted to make someone spill their sandwich one day.

Fast forward to 2017: Flatt Lonesome has won four IBMA awards, and we are nominated again for Vocal Group of the Year and Entertainer of the Year. I never would have dreamed, back in the days of spilling sandwiches, that I would share the stage with my heroes. IBMA has been invaluable for me as a young musician. IBMA is where my dream to play professionally was cultivated, and it’s where that very dream has come true.”

Bronwyn Keith-Hynes (Mile Twelve)

“My first IBMA was wonderful and bizarre and totally exciting and, at one point, I found myself playing a set with two of my biggest heroes. I ran into Peter Rowan at the breakfast of the Super 8 I was staying in, and he recognized me because I’d played fiddle for him once before up in Boston. He told me to come to his set later that day and play fiddle, and I thought it was odd that he hadn’t found a fiddler yet, but I was happy to show up and play, so I didn’t ask any questions. Then I got there and realized he did already have a fiddler and it was Michael Cleveland — one of my biggest fiddle heroes. That was my first time meeting Michael and, once I got over my initial terror of playing in front of him, playing fiddle on stage with him and Peter was one of the coolest moments I can remember from any IBMA I’ve been to.”

Sierra Hull

“I went to my first IBMA when I was nine years old, when I was invited to be part of the Kids on Bluegrass showcase. I had never been to a bluegrass festival of that size before — anything I had ever been to had been very small, local festivals. Seeing a crowd of 1,000 people would have seemed like more than 10,000 to me. I was so excited to see IIIrd Tyme Out; they were my favorite band at the time — they’re still one of my favorites — and Steve Dilling took me under his wing the whole week.

One night, he brought me up to a hotel suite to meet Earl Scruggs. I couldn’t believe I was getting to meet him! Earl wasn’t picking while I was up there, he was just hanging, but they had me get out my mandolin to play some for him. I had only been playing for about a year and I didn’t know a whole lot yet; I just knew a few fiddle tunes. At one point, I remember Earl asking me, ‘Can you play “Pike County Breakdown?”‘ And I said to him, ‘I don’t believe I’ve ever heard that one.’ I couldn’t believe Earl Scruggs had asked me to play a song I didn’t know so the first thing I did when I went back to my mandolin teacher was tell him the story. I said, ‘You’ve gotta teach it to me! Next time I see Earl I need to know this song.’ My teacher just said, ‘You know he wrote that, right?’ Needless to say, I was super embarrassed, but I learned it! That definitely got me into learning more and more fiddle tunes. I had to be ready the next time Earl asked what I knew!”

Photo credit: Joerg Neuner via Foter.com / CC BY-ND

Art Achieved and Abandoned: Charlie Parr in Conversation with Gina Clowes

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Charlie Parr and Gina Clowes both have a thing for banjos and dogs.

Parr’s new album is actually called Dog, and the title track argues that even man’s best friend has a complex inner life: “A soul is a soul is a soul is a soul,” insists the furry one as the Minnesota human picks out an acrobatic acoustic blues riff. Parr is an especially deft and intuitive player who jumps from old-time to bluegrass to blues to folk faster than a greyhound, but Dog is first and foremost a songwriter’s album. Parr inhabits various points of view — a dog, a hobo, another dog, a hoarder — as useful projections of his own depression.

Clowes’ new solo album, titled True Colors, isn’t canine-themed, but it similarly presents her as an exceptionally well-rounded artist. After dominating banjo competitions for 20 years, the Virginia native (perhaps better known under her birth name, Gina Furtado) joined the ace bluegrass outfit Chris Jones & the Nightdrivers last year, so it’s no surprise that her songs would showcase her swift and graceful picking. But songs like “Good Old-Fashioned Heartbreak” and “The Wayward Kite” reveal a graceful singer and an insightful songwriter.

And she has farm animals.

Gina Clowes: I’m battling my frisky little goat. She’s been jumping all over the place and following me around as we talk. Charlie, I think with that song “Dog,” you’re asking the question we all have in our hearts. I grew up with a border collie by my side all the time. Now I have a boxer mix. It’s actually my son’s dog.

Charlie Parr: Reuben is a miniature schnauzer, so she’s not a very big dog, but she’s an enthusiastic walker. One of our cats died, and we ended up getting this little dog, and she’s just an amazing addition to the family. She’s very dedicated to the notion of not taking walks that have much to do with where you, the human, want to go, but with what she’s interested in and the smells she smells. My idea of a walk is very different, and I used to make her take the routes I wanted to take. Suddenly it occurred to me that it’s cruel if the only time you get to go for a walk is when somebody else lets you and then they make you do what they want to do. I felt like, “Oh my God, that’s so terrifying.”

What did you do?

CP: I started following her around town and letting her stop and do whatever she wanted to do. And the walks took on this epic strangeness where I would find myself in parts of town that I had no idea existed. She would take me to these odd places that I’d never seen before. I live on the shore of Lake Superior, and she would take me to new parts of the shore I had never seen before. You think you have a handle on where you live, but you don’t at all. I felt like I owed her a debt of gratitude for reminding me that it’s not about me. It’s not even really about her. It’s about something else. We did this together, not to sound too crunchy about it.

GC: Growing up with my border collie, Maggie, I feel like I came across so many more adventures than I ever would have without her. We spent all of our time out in the woods. She would find these injured animals. She had a very different view of the world that we don’t have.

Is the time you spend with these animals good for writing?

CP: The way I write songs is weird, because I end up writing stories and distilling them into songs. Those walks with Reuben are always good for that. Some weird story will come out of them, and I jot down stuff when I get home. Three-quarters of the time I throw it away, but that last little bit of time, it will turn into something that I think is not too bad.

GC: Part of it, too, is getting away from listening to music. You get out in nature and your brain has a chance to put together whatever influences it’s been absorbing when you’ve been in the car or in the kitchen listening to music. It’s a quiet time, and that’s when I come up with some of my better ideas.

CP: I listen to a lot of music. Obviously you do, too. But I have to spend a certain amount of time each day deliberately not listening to music. When I’m walking with Reuben, I never listen to music, partly because I don’t like things in my ears. When I do long drives, I listen to music. I’m a child of the ‘70s. We’re album-oriented people, so I will listen to a record and then I will stop for about the length of a record. I listen to music and then not listen to music about as much time.

That seems like an interesting idea. It gives you time to absorb and think about what you’ve heard, rather than just cramming even more notes into your ears.

CP: When I was growing up, I had my father in the front of the house. He grew up in the ‘30s, so his primary listening was around songs. He was interested in songs. His record collection was weird and shambolic, and he had a lot of 78s and old LPs from the ‘50s. He wasn’t into album-oriented anything. My sister, on the other hand, was listening to album-oriented rock from the ‘60s and ‘70s. The Grateful Dead and Captain Beefheart were playing in the back of the house. So I got interested in both of those things. But I find it hard to stop listening to an album after I’ve started. I have to let them play through, because you feel like you haven’t finished it somehow.

GC. It’s like an opera. You miss part of the story. I’m the same way. I’m just behind the times, and I would rather just pop in a CD rather than listen to Spotify.

CP: I’m part of that generation that was not raised with that technology. We had just enough technology to be spoiled, but not enough to be weird about it. I hate to be that way. I end up being that way around my son a lot, starting a lot of sentences with, “In my day …”

GC: So, Charlie, I noticed you’re using a slide on your left hand. Are you doing that with the banjo, too?

CP: Sometimes I do. I play a fretless banjo, so it can be hard to tell. But I do like using a slide. When I started playing, I had an interest in slide guitar, so the very first thing I did, when I was eight years old, was try to play slide guitar. I’m completely self-taught, so I’m doing everything upside-down and backwards. The slide adds something like two tones to every fret space, so it becomes really interesting. I’ve played a lot of slide on the banjo. Lately I haven’t been playing much banjo, but I’m trying to get back into it.

GC: I love the slide on the banjo. You don’t hear it very often, but one of my favorite players, Tony Furtado, does that sometimes. Last week, I went to the music store to pick up something really small, just a button for the guitar strap. When I tried to pay, they said, “Sorry, we can only accept a credit card if it’s over five bucks.” So I grabbed one of the bottle slides because it was sitting on the counter there. Might as well. Somehow that makes me more inspired to give it a try.

CP: It’s a unique sound. Banjos are a lot like resonator guitars: The attack isreal swift and the delay is real swift. So you have to do some stuff to keep your tones going, and bottleneck is a really an answer to that. I borrowed a friend of mine’s banjo that had a magnetic pickup installed in it. I wasn’t really into the sound of the pickup, but what I was into was the fact that I could take an E-bow and play it on the banjo. It works on the magnetic pickup, and the tones I got out of that were otherworldly. I was completely fascinated. I really like a lot of experimental music. Paul Metzger plays a 23-string banjo and used a lot of electric manipulations with it.

GC: I feel like the banjo has been boxed in, maybe because it’s relatively new to be doing it three-finger style.

CP: I think you’re right. It has been boxed in. People have decided that there’s only one tuning that’s associated with the banjo. I asked Dock Boggs about that. He would re-tune his banjo for almost every song, and I asked him about it. He said something to the effect of, “The song comes out of the tuning.” I thought that was fascinating.

GC: Yes. If you listen to a lot of old-time banjo playing, they change their tuning so much more, and it really does open up the spectrum of moods you can get out of it.

CP: I use a lot of open C, except I end up pitching the D string all the way up to E. I really like that a lot. It’s a little tight, but it’s a cool chord.

GC: Just make sure you point it away from your eyeball when you tune that one!

Is that something you’re actively pursuing? Are you always looking for new ways to play this instrument?

GC: For me, it’s not so much about trying to find a new sound. It’s more about just trying to find a better way to evoke a particular feeling. I like Scruggs-style banjo playing. Earl was awesome and he created this super-cool style that was him expressing something. It works out as a great template for players to use now, but I’m looking more at trying to figure out different methods of explaining the mood that I’m going for. There are many more ways to do that.

CP: It’s a bit of a mixture, sometimes, between manipulating the mechanics of the instrument and manipulating the technique. In 2006, I developed a brain disorder called focal dystonia, which completely destroyed my picking hand. I had to re-learn everything from scratch because I could only use my index finger. I used to use my middle finger a lot, but now it’s like a trigger finger — it just sucks up into my palm. I spent about a year looking at players like the Reverend Gary Davis and Elizabeth Cotton and Roscoe Holcomb to get some inspiration for how to do everything with just thumb and index finger. I had never had to do anything like that in my whole life, but at the end of the day, it turned into … well, it had to turn into a good thing or it was going to turn into a truly bad thing. It forced me really rapidly to change things about the way I played, even the way I sit and the way I hold the instrument. I found some places that I didn’t think I would ever find, and I had a little more power in my picking than I had before. Some of the frilly stuff had to go away, but I found other things to replace it and developed some self-confidence I didn’t have before.

GC: I can’t even imagine going through that. Is it physical or psychological?

CP: It’s repetitive stress syndrome in your brain. That’s what I’ve been told. I started playing guitar when I was eight and became very quickly obsessed with it. I tried to play all the time, but I didn’t have any lessons. No one every told me, “Don’t do that or you’ll end up with a problem in your future.” I did everything wrong for a long, long time. Now I’m 50 years old and I’m playing a little catch-up to get things to sound right. But it’s made me develop some different ways to look at things. When I want to get certain sounds, I have to work within the parameters of what I have. Sometimes that means manipulating instruments. I’ve added strings to guitars or taken strings away. I’ve put snares on the banjo head to get that buzzy sustain out of it. I try to do whatever I think needs to happen to get where I want to go. Half the time, I don’t even know what I want, and then something will come out that I like and I’ll amplify that a little bit more.

You’re both playing in traditions that can be very conservative, very restrictive. But on these new records, it sounds like you’re very consciously trying to find new ways to play.

GC: I love bluegrass. I was raised on it. I’ll always love it. But it does put you in a small box. There’s a specific form to every song — two A parts and two B parts and so on. That’s part of what makes it so great. It’s easy to get up on stage and jam. There’s a big repertoire that everybody knows, so you can all play together. But I don’t like the idea of genre, because it’s always going to be too small for all the ideas you want to use. You can’t use them all, if you’re trying to stick them all into a very small box.

CP: Musicians didn’t make up genres, anyway. It was record companies and radio stations and furniture stores that decided what the genres were. I don’t like them, either. All of the most exciting music that I’ve heard — including bluegrass music — has come from that weird in-between space where somebody did something slightly different, like Bill Monroe or Captain Beefheart. It’s happening now with a lot of groups, like Megafaun, for example. They blended a lot of electronic sounds with accordion and clawhammer banjo and came up with a couple of brilliant records before they stopped. It’s hard to say what genre they’re in because they’ve added so much stuff. I think that’s brilliant.

It gets back to an idea we were discussing earlier of how you listen to music. You don’t just listen to one style of music. You listen to a lot of different stuff. So why would you play just one narrow kind of music.

GC: Something I latched onto early: When I was learning to play the banjo, I was told I should imitate my banjo heroes. But someone else told me, “Why don’t you imitate other instruments? Why not imitate the guitar or the saxophone or whatever? Try different forms of imitation.” That opened the door for me to try new ideas and come up with new things.

CP: I had a conversation with Dakota Dave Hull, a player in Minneapolis who told me, “Don’t listen to so much guitar music. Listen to piano music. Listen to horns. Listen to jazz. Listen to a lot of different stuff.” You end up taking those voices back to the instrument you’re playing, and it adds a lot. I was also inspired by Spider John Koerner, who was constantly messing with his own songs and with other people’s songs. At one point, I was talking to him about an older song, and he pointed out that we wouldn’t be talking about that song if people had messed it and forced it through that folk process. Without that, it would have died. We’re only talking about it because people loved it enough to screw with it.

GC: Everything I put on True Colors turned out to be so very personal that it was a little uncomfortable. I had this idea that I could blame it on a friend: “Oh, a friend of mine went through that experience, not me!” But those songs are based on real feelings that I had, real experiences, and it was therapeutic for me to write about them. It helps to process everything that I go through. It’s what we talked about earlier — spending some time in quiet and working things out. Last summer, when I was writing everything for the album and getting ready to record, I stopped writing in my journal and I stopped listening to music. I just stopped cold turkey. My husband was worried, but I was just processing things and writing about them. And there they are now.

CP: That sounds familiar. I had a lot of bad internal stuff that kept getting recycled and regurgitated and, after a while, I needed to write the songs and get them away from me. I only really broke loose of them when I got other people involved. I was going to make this a completely solo record, but then I thought that would be devastating. The songs are already horrifying and way too personal, so I need to bring in other people and let them become an influence on the music. It changed stuff a little, but it also didn’t sound so dark anymore, I guess.

GC: I know what you mean about bringing people in. I was nervous showing my songs to people, but they came in and they’re happy and they played the living daylights out of the songs. Everybody just got the mood. It helps to get out of that space in your mind.

CP: There’s a certain amount of lightness that’s created by playing with other people. I’ve played mostly by myself, but when I play with friends, it’s a massive relief, just the amount of joy it creates. It’s hard to explain that kind of lightness that comes into even the darkest music, when you have other people there.

You both talk about getting these songs out of you and away from you, but then you record them and take them out on tour. You have to live with them every night. Is that difficult?

CP: I don’t ever regard songs as being finished. I’m not writing a book or painting a picture. I’m creating something new every time I sit down to play a song. In a weird way, I’m rewriting the song, which is now influenced by the audience and their energy. It’s not the same song as it was when I first came up with it. Now it’s something different. It’s not a song about A or B. It’s a song that includes something else. It becomes easier to deal with, because it’s no longer my burden alone. I’m sharing it with a lot of people who have all these different interpretations.

GC: That hits the nail on the head, Charlie. I write to distance myself from something. I write to let it be free and do whatever it will, so it doesn’t feel very personal when I share the song with somebody. It doesn’t have the same sense of being a deep, dark secret anymore. Now it’s out in the world. I’m free from it.

CP: Exactly. For me, it’s all about process. When a song feels finished, I just quit playing it. It’s not interesting to me anymore. You can’t work on it anymore. It reminds me of Simon Rodia, a folk artist from Los Angeles. He created the Watts Towers out of cement and junk, broken pieces of porcelain. He took 34 years to build them. He would come home every day from his job and he would cement little bits of pottery on these weird sculptures. Then, one day, he came home and there was no more room to add anything else. So he went next door to his neighbors and gave them the keys to his house and then he left and never came back. You can go and visit those towers, and there’s a sign out front that reads, “Art achieved and abandoned.” His art was all in the process. It’s not the finished product. That’s what the song is. It’s a process. When a song is finished, I have a tendency to just leave them behind. Even if I’m just learning a song, I usually won’t ever play it again because the process of learning is over.

Charlie Parr photo credit: Nate Ryan

Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn to Host the 2017 IBMA Awards

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Banjoists Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn are set to the host the International Bluegrass Music Association awards in September. Their presence on stage signals the genre’s expansive growth in recent years, reaching toward the edges in order to better understand the center. It also preempts their second full-length album, Echo in the Valley, due out October 6 on Rounder Records. The follow-up to their 2014 self-titled debut finds the husband-and-wife duo exploring new territory by restricting their creative path: They only used banjos on their latest set of songs, and ensured all recordings could be reproduced live. The resulting conversations they have — a mix of original songs (all co-written for the first time in their career as a duo) and covers of Clarence Ashley and Sarah Ogan Gunning — reveal a quiet muscularity. The limitations, rather than stripping away their imaginative prowess, instead lay fecund ground. If 2017 really is the “Year of the Banjo,” then Béla and Abby are its exciting exemplars, showcasing just how much fun can be had on the edge.

The IBMAs are part of the International Bluegrass Music Association, and will take place in Raleigh, North Carolina, on September 28. Tickets can be purchased through the IBMA website.

As a superstar banjo couple, do you have a conjoined nickname like Brangelina?

Béla Fleck: Abba.

I think that one’s already taken.

Abigail Washburn: I don’t think we create those ourselves. You’re going to have to create them.

Leave it to the people — that’s fair. What does it mean to you both that you’re hosting the IBMAs together?

Béla: I’m quite proud. I’ve had a long association with the IBMAs — from the first year when I won the banjo award, then a couple of years ago I did the keynote. For me, as a long-time bluegrass player and a person in that world, I’ve been a little disassociated, and this means I’m not anymore. I’m right in the center of it.

Abby: And for me, it’s an extreme honor. I’ve played music that’s certainly got a lot of bluegrass elements to it — the old-time Appalachian music that I’ve been playing with Uncle Earl for a long time, and the work that Béla and I do — so just to be so deeply included in the community, but also to be on stage in front of those wonderful people who are preserving and passing along this really bright and beautiful piece of American culture and tradition. I’m excited, too, because Béla and I and the folks that are heading up the awards presentation, are brainstorming lots of ideas to be playful and have fun. We’re excited to get to share the playfulness of our couplehood on stage.

Béla: I think we both look for ways to be creative with any situation that we’re involved in. We’re trying to figure out, “Okay, what could we do that would really be fun and really feel good to everybody?” We’ll see what we come with.

It seems like a crowd that appreciates laughter.

Béla: I think part of that is they’re all together. It’s very safe for bluegrass people. Out in life, we can sometimes feel we’re very unusual and odd, but at IBMA, everyone’s together and so everyone understands these subtle jokes about old-time bluegrass people we all love … or Sam Bush’s hair. I think that’s really special.

I know, like any genre, there are some players who get mired down in tradition and don’t want to see things change, but you’ve both pushed those boundaries in really exciting ways.

Béla: I would just say the very fact that we’ve been invited to do it … because I’ve spent a lot of my life outside of the bluegrass world playing other kinds of music, but I always take bluegrass with me. And Abby, you wouldn’t call her a bluegrass artist at her core, but she’s very associated with it. It’s showing that we’re all part of that family. We’re very respectful of the tradition; we just happen to live on the edge of it. But bluegrass is a very wide musical genre these days. We only lose by chopping off the edges. Even Earl Scruggs was excited about swing. I’m hopeful that this is just part of appreciating the fact that you need some outside blood every once in a while. Where would we be without “Polka on the Banjo”?

That’s what makes for such exciting growth. Well, BGS has dubbed 2017 “The Year of the Banjo” because there are so many projects that are either banjo-focused or banjo-inspired. What would you pin to that explosion?

Béla: I’m a little skeptical of those kinds of things. I think people are doing great work every year and, a lot of times, the great strides come gradually along the whole scope of the curve, but then, every once in a while, there’s a moment when everybody shows up at the same time with new stuff and we do make a big jump. In the past, some pretty wonderful things were happening in the dark that might not even be covered, and might be ignored by the world at large, but now there’s enough interest in the banjo that we can really talk about it and build some energy around it.

Going back to your keynote address from 2014, you mentioned how the banjo was almost a hindrance to your early career because of the way people viewed it. It’s gone through its own sea change in terms of popularity.

Béla: I think part of it is we aged away from Deliverance. It’s an old movie and you have to go find it now. When it came out, it was everywhere and the song “Dueling Banjos” was such a huge hit. It sort of cemented that image of what happened in the movie with how people thought about the banjo, which was an unfortunate piece of that whole phenomenon. I saw very gradually a shift from “Squeal like a pig” to “The banjo? That’s cool.”

Abby: I think there have been a lot of people working really hard for a long time, including yourself. I will compliment my husband, at this point. He’s been working for decades trying to show another side of the banjo to people. Now there are a lot of younger groups who have really taken to it because of Béla.

Béla: Well, a lot of other people, too.

Abby: The list goes on. It’s having an impact. The things that younger people see isn’t Deliverance, but the Bill Keiths and the Rhiannon Giddens, and, gosh, Mumford and Sons. Different kinds of people playing the banjo. There’s the most wonderful representation of banjo that’s come from the edges. It’s very cool.

Very much so. Turning to your forthcoming album, you set out limitations about what instruments you could use and recorded songs that could be recreated exactly on stage. Why set such staunch parameters around creating?

Abby: Limitations are actually extremely freeing, when you set the right ones. We really like being able to create a record that can be experienced live by people. And it’s created these new kinds of challenges for us, because we want to learn and grow and spread our wings as a duo, and working on the eccentricities and complexities to develop the nuance of duo performance means that we incorporated some new ideas into what we’re doing.

Béla: My only addition to what Abby said is that it’s awkward when you make a record that you can’t perform live. We wanted the honesty of the music to be very clear. It’s really very sparse duet music, but we’re finding a way to make it sound as big and powerful as we can with just our two instruments. It’s an art of recording that we aspire to do well at, because I love that part of the process myself. I’m a nerd recording-type guy.

I would say that this latest LP is quieter than your debut and yet it’s no less powerful. I kept thinking of musical conversations that ebb and flow so naturally. Has your playing bolstered other forms of communication between you two?

Béla: I would say we have suffered times on this record because we have a lot of stuff to figure out.

Abby: Suffered times, in terms of the fact that we had an infant. This time, we had higher expectations for ourselves, musically, so we took on new challenges that made for a lot of conflict at times.

Béla: Someone would have an idea, and rather than the other person going, “Yes, that’s perfect,” they’d say, “That’s cool, what if we tried this?” You might get your feelings hurt a little bit, but a little time would go by and we’d come back and go, “Okay, how can this be both of us contributing equally to the song?” I think we’re really good in our relationship at taking each other into account, but in the creative process, things are never exactly equal. You gotta fight for your ideas and then you have to find a way to change them to fit what the other person wants.

Abby: We decided we wanted to write the lyrics together, and that was different from the last record.

Béla: So that was hard for both of us, but we got to a place where we’re both very pleased, and that made our relationship stronger.

Photo credit: Jim McGuire 

Singing Like He Feels: A Conversation with Bobby Osborne

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I’d be willing to bet that, if you spent a day in New York City asking strangers to name a bluegrass song, seven out of 10 would look at you funny and walk away. The other three would say “Rocky Top.” It may be a mystery how any song permeates the popular consciousness to that depth, but my theory is that “Rocky Top” had one very unmysterious special ingredient: Bobby Osborne’s voice.

In a genre synonymous with “high, lonesome” tenor singing (See Monroe, Bill; Stanley, Ralph; Flatt, Lester; and McCoury, Del) the fact that Bobby Osborne’s high notes can turn heads and drop jaws is, itself, impressive. Even better, his bio skims like a Marvel comic origin story for the ultimate bluegrass musician. Born in rural Kentucky, he grew up helping his dad stock his granddad’s general store and absorbing the songs on the Grand Ole Opry, eventually dropping out of high school to form a band with his brother, Sonny. Within a few years, he had played in bands with the Stanley Brothers and Jimmy Martin, and on bills with Flatt & Scruggs and Bill Monroe. At age 16, his voice changed: It got higher.

By 1964, the Osborne Brothers were members of the Grand Ole Opry, shorthand for country music royalty. Their calling cards were Sonny’s banjo playing, Bobby’s mandolin playing, and a slight adjustment to Bill Monroe’s formula for bluegrass trio harmony: Instead of jumping up to the tenor harmony for choruses and giving someone else in the band the melody, as Monroe did, Bobby sang the melody on top in tenor range. Monroe’s high tenor gave his bands’ harmonies a magnetic intensity and rawness — but the melody had to be traded to another singer. Bobby’s version allowed the audience to follow him on melody, from verse to chorus, right up to the stratosphere. His high tenor gave choruses a sense of lift-off.

No one can be better than Bill Monroe at bluegrass harmony. He invented the sound. It’s more like Michael Jordan and LeBron James: a new generation with a fresh, slightly higher-octane version of the formula.

Take “Rocky Top,” for example. (Please, take it.) There may be better examples, but I think it’s instructive to confront the cliché case in point. Despite its borderline parody lyrics and the kitschy associations it’s gathered in the intervening decades, it’s still a great example of the recipe that made the Osborne Brothers — and bluegrass, as a whole — exciting.

On first listen, “Rocky Top” sounds like the record player is on the wrong speed. Blazing fast banjo, a mandolin break that almost goes off the rails, and a voice — very high, so high you have to squint your eyes and turn your head to take it all in, but also effortlessly high, beautifully high, somehow competing with the banjo for the status of most impressively piercing element of the song — a voice that makes your brain search the animal kingdom for comparisions, because those notes shouldn’t be possible for a human, certainly not a human male.

Here, it’s important to stop and consider the historical trajectory of bluegrass: When “Rocky Top” hit the country charts in the late ’60s, what we now call “bluegrass” music was still really young. Hardly 25 years had passed since 1945, when Earl Scruggs joined Bill Monroe on the Opry and kids around the South gathered around their radios to hear the Blue Grass Boys. Their sound was new and wild and intense, and it made perfect sense in those heady post-WW II days of new technology and American optimism. Scruggs’ banjo was a musical hot rod, fast and loud and metallic. Bluegrass had a moment of pop culture enthusiasm. Then rock ‘n’ roll stole its thunder. Louder, brasher, groovier — the same recipe, to be sure, but a better vehicle for the energy and anxieties of the era. (Still, listen to Chuck Berry’s guitar intro to “Jonny B. Goode” or Elvis’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” Would any of it have been possible without Monroe?)

The 1950s were the lean years for bluegrass. In the shadow of rock and electric country music, acoustic bands inspired by Bill Monroe chugged along, barely making ends meet. Then, thankfully, a new musical movement swept cities and college campuses across America. The Folk Revival considered bluegrass, if not exactly old, at least a sort of stepbrother to the blues and ballads and fiddle music that was unassailably, organically American. It passed the authenticity test. In other words, 1945’s hot rod of high-flying testosterone had become, by the 1970s, traditional and worth preserving. Bluegrass, thereby, gained a capital B and became its own community, its own brand. It wasn’t just a branch on the country tree anymore; it had become its own genre with its own heroes and hierarchies and rules. Point being: By the time the Osborne Brothers got famous — not just Opry famous, but “Rocky Top” famous — bluegrass had done a lot of growing up and settling down. So, when they added drums and pedal steel and string sections to their recordings, there were plenty of folks ready to offer a cold shoulder or a brisk “tsk tsk.”

To their eternal credit, Bobby and Sonny just kept doing their thing, as they had been doing all along, like when they performed a new Elvis song on a country program in West Virginia … in 1951. To them, music was music, whether bluegrass, rock, or country. Bobby heeded the example of older musicians (see Monroe, Bill) who made recordings they wanted to make and sang what suited their voice, no matter whether their peers sounded different.

Which brings me back to “Rocky Top.” Just as it’s a shame for any musician’s multi-faceted, decades-long career to be reduced to one song, it’s a shame for the praise of a remarkable singer to be reduced to genre-specific superlatives. Bobby Osborne isn’t just a great bluegrass singer. He’s a singer — like Roy Orbison or Freddy Mercury or Robert Plant — who can, at his best, make you stop what you’re doing, turn up the radio, and wonder how the hell someone can make that sound.

Would you tell me a little bit about Alison Brown and how she put the record together?

I’ve known of her a long time as a banjo player. The first time I ever seen her was out in Telluride, Colorado. How I got acquainted with her was through Pete Rowan — I’m sure you’re familiar with him. He approached me out there in Colorado and asked me to do a song with him on a CD [The Old School, produced by Brown]. I said that would be fine. I went down there and did that, got acquainted with her for the first time. I know she was familiar with my singing for a long time before I ever met her. Time went on and I got to wondering if she would want to do a CD on me. So I just wrote to her and asked her and she said, “Yeah, I’d be interested.” Everything just sort of worked out from there.

How did you choose what songs to record? It’s an eclectic batch, from Elvis to the Bee Gees …

Well, I hadn’t recorded for a while. First of all, she said, “You start picking out some songs you’d like to sing.” I really didn’t know what to put down. So I just put down some country songs of Merle Haggard and George Jones and Don Gibson. Then I went down to that meeting, and she started pulling out brand new songs I hadn’t ever heard before. And I liked every one of them! That was the thing about it. She figured out, with the way that I sing, that those songs would suit me. Being a producer, I guess, that’s the sort of thing you learn how to do when you’re going to produce a CD on somebody. I just liked every one of them. “Kentucky Morning” and “Eight More Miles,” practically every one of them.

There are a lot of great young players on the record. Sierra Hull and Trey Hensley. Were you introduced to them for the first time? There are also some folks who’ve been around a long time like Rob Ickes and Stuart Duncan.

Well, I knew Rob. I’d never met Trey Hensley. Or I might’ve met him and forgot about him. Most of them I knew just from knowing them, not by being around them. Buddy Spicher, I knew him as well as I knew anybody, because he’d been on a lot of sessions I’d been on. Sierra [Hull], I met her once on the Opry. She’s turned out to be such a great player and singer.

Another young player taking the mandolin into great territory.

She plays what I think of as today’s style of mandolin playing. She plays it and she plays it good. My style of mandolin playing, it isn’t over the hill or anything, but it’s not like they play today. So Alison got her to play the mandolin. She was on “Kentucky Morning” and “Got to Get a Message” and we did some harmony on “Country Boy.” Then she got Del McCoury and his two boys, Ronnie and Rob. I played some harmony with Ronnie on “Goodbye Wheeling.” Then Sam Bush came in and played mandolin on “Eight More Miles.” So Alison had mandolin players and guitar players … and when we were getting songs together, I remembered way back in 1951 when my brother and I were playing up in Wheeling, West Virginia, on that jamboree, Elvis came out with “Don’t Be Cruel.” At that time, we hadn’t thought about bluegrass being different from anything else. We were just singing any kind of song. So we started singing “Don’t Be Cruel.”

You mean even back in the ’50s you were singing bluegrass versions of Elvis?

That’s right. Then right out of the clear blue sky, I told Alison, I said, “You may not believe this, but my brother and me were singing ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ back when it first came out.” She wrote me right back and said, “That’s the one I want you to do!” That suited me because I’ve always liked that one. She said, “I’ve got an idea on that.” She said, “All I’m going to use on that one is bass, mandolin, and guitar.” I thought, “What can you get out of just three instruments on a song like ‘Don’t Be Cruel?'” But that’s what she used. Sam Bush played mandolin on that, Jim Hurst played guitar, and Todd Phillips played the bass. I don’t know how she knew to do that, but she knew more about sound than I did to think of that. And she got the same sound, with a little echo in it, that they used back then with Elvis Presley.

I’ve heard Sam Bush say that in the late ’60s and early ’70s, you were his hero and that the Osborne Brothers were the kings of progressive bluegrass. There’s that great video of the Camp Springs festival in 1971 when the Osborne Brothers played alongside young Sam Bush and Tony Rice in the Bluegrass Alliance. What did you think of those young kids playing bluegrass? Did you have a sense they’d be important musicians?

Of course, back then in the ’70s — it’s a different bluegrass we have today than we had then, for sure — Sam Bush and Bluegrass Alliance had kind of a rock beat with bluegrass. But since they were programmed as bluegrass, well, Carlton would have just about anybody on that festival. They were different from anybody else. Sam played just about the same style he plays now, I guess. I met him then, but I never did get acquainted with him until the years went by, worked on a lot of shows with him, talked to him at the Opry. He’s a guy who can play like Bill Monroe or he can play like me or like Jethro Burns. Whatever type of mandolin is called for, whatever anybody wants, he can play it.

Before Sam Bush, you were one of the first mandolin players to expand the style outside of what Bill Monroe was doing. You mentioned playing Elvis songs in the early ’50s. How did you go about becoming an original player and forming your own sound?

Back when I first started trying to learn how to play, the guitar was the main thing I learned first. I always liked fiddle tunes for some reason — “Sally Goodin” and “Fire on the Mountain,” things like that. I wanted to be a fiddle player to start with, but never could do it. I’ve got about six of them here at the house. I’ve got one good fiddle — one that Kenny Baker gave me, that black fiddle he played all the time — I’ve got it. I pull it out all the time. I take it on the road and play it sometimes. But the fiddle players today, they make me look sick. I got tired of looking sick and quit playing one. [Laughs] Anyway, since I always liked fiddle tunes and the mandolin is tuned like a fiddle — and I was good with a flat pick from guitar — I got completely wrapped up playing the fiddle tunes with the mandolin. I got to following Howdy Forrester, playing hornpipes and things. I finally got into learning some of those on the mandolin, so when it came to taking breaks on songs, I kind of transferred that over.

And your guitar playing influenced your mandolin, too?

You remember a guy named Hank Garland who played the guitar? I patterned my guitar playing on his, because he was such a good player back in those days. Boy, he could play those fiddle tunes on electric guitar. I learned to do that, then I transferred that over to the mandolin. It made me different from other players. Back in those days, there was only Jethro Burns and Bill Monroe. There wasn’t anybody else to try and learn from on the mandolin. So I learned those fiddle tunes and it helped me with the mandolin. The breaks I’ve took on songs throughout the years I’ve played like a guy would take on a fiddle. And I learned a long time ago that there was only one Bill Monroe.

I read that you shared a dressing room on the Opry with Bill Monroe for a long time. What was that like?

I enjoyed it. Bill was hard to get to know. But once he got to know you — and he was another guy who figured out if he liked you or not, and if he didn’t, well, he didn’t hang around with you at all. But I got to be good friends with Bill. Been on stage with him many times. I’d have to sing the lead, of course, because he had to sing tenor. And you had to do his songs. He wouldn’t do nobody else’s songs but his. I got along with him real good. The last 15 years he lived, I shared the same dressing room with him, got to know him real good. People like him, Ernest Tubb, and Hank Snow — all of them. I really feel so thankful, the way I see it nowadays, that I was able to live in the premier day of country music and bluegrass. Bluegrass has changed so much today. But of course everything has to change. If the world didn’t change, there wouldn’t be no world after a while. But I’ve just sort of stuck to my style. I appreciate what Sierra Hull plays and the other new players do. I appreciate what they’re doing because that’s what they were brought up to do. I was brought up to do traditional.

You played with almost all of the early bluegrass players. You played with the Stanley Brothers for a while when you were young, right?

That’s right. Just before I went into the Marine Corps, for about three months, I got to play with Carter and Ralph. I loved that time. I planned on going back with them when I got out of the Marine Corps, but by that time, Sonny had learned how to play the banjo. I thought to myself, “You know, maybe we ought to start all over again.”

And that’s when you started playing with Jimmy Martin, right?

Yeah, that’s right.

I’ve heard — I mean, he was a pretty difficult guy to work with, wasn’t he?

He was a real character. As long as things were going his way, he was okay; but when it wasn’t, he wasn’t. There’s got be a bend in the river somewhere, you know? [Laughs] But Bill was kind of like that, too. But he did it — of course, Bill never did use alcohol or drugs or anything like that. He was a different type of a person. Just about all of those people — Hank Snow, too. But Hank was from another country — Canada. I mean I never did hold that against him or anything. But he was a little bit peculiar. He’d learned his way of doing things, but he was a good guy.

Who else from the Opry did you learn from?

Well, Ernest Tubb was the first guy I ever tried to sing like. And I got to know him real well. I saw Uncle Dave Macon on stage once, but I never got to know him. Uncle Dave played the clawhammer banjo. He was a show within himself. He never got on the Opry until he was about 60 years old. The Opry started in ’25, and Uncle Dave lived in those days there, when the Opry started. He wouldn’t never have no kind of band with him. And he carried about five different banjos with him at all time. He’d throw them up in the air and catch them. He was a good showman. A great showman.

So did you grow up listening to the Opry?

Yeah, that was one of the first things I ever remember hearing on the radio growing up.

So that must have been an incredible feeling, when you became a member of the Opry. What was that like?

That’s hard to explain. I dreamed about it before I even saw a guitar or anything. I dreamed about what kind of people that those guys were, back in those days — the food they ate, how they lived. I thought about all of that, all about them.

They were really the rock stars of the day back then.

Sure was. And where I come from, back in Kentucky — you know, that song “Kentucky Morning,” that’s one of the main reasons why I did that song because it tells a true story of how I grew up. I think about my dad and mom, how the times have changed. Where we lived, there was no electricity, no inside bathrooms, no running water. We had a well back then for fresh water. Nothing to wash clothes. My mom would take the clothes to the creek and pat the dirt out of them with a rock. That was the thing that really got me in the lyrics to that “Kentucky Morning.” It just brought back so much of the early days of my life. My dad and my mom, they saw times that I didn’t ever see. My dad finally wised up and moved away from Kentucky, when I was about 10 years old.

You moved to Ohio, is that right?

That’s right. He went to Dayton, Ohio. First time I saw a loaf of bread or an ice box you put ice in — see, there weren’t no refrigerators back then and very little electricity used. So we had a big old icebox. You could get a 25-pound block of ice or 50-pound or 100, depending on the size of your icebox. That was the first time I ever saw anybody put food in there to keep it cold.

So what did your father do for work?

In the Kentucky days, he taught school. He was a school teacher. And he taught school in the building I’m in right now teaching the mandolin.

Wow. Full circle.

He sure did. We lived four miles out in the country, in a place called Thousand Sticks, Kentucky. My granddad had a little store. Very few people lived in that area back there. Only way you could get anywhere was walk or ride a mule. And when the creeks were up — the roads back then went right through the creeks — if it rained, why, it was so muddy you couldn’t get over. A lot of times you just couldn’t go nowhere …

So my dad helped my granddad at his store quite a bit. It was four miles from Thousand Sticks to Hyden, Kentucky, and about once a month, he would take a wagon and mule and go across that mountain to get dry goods from a dealer in Hyden. I would go with him. I was about seven or eight years old then. But finally he got tired of that. He heard there was work in Ohio, so he borrowed 50 bucks off of his sister and went to Dayton, Ohio. First place he came to was a place called Nashville Cash Register. They gave him a job. So he came and got the family and we moved away from Thousand Sticks and never lived there again. When we went to Dayton, the big city, everything was so different then. We learned how to live in the big city. But I never did forget where I came from. I still like the country.

That must’ve taken some guts for your dad to start over and move somewhere totally different. How did you feel about it as a 10-year-old?

It hurt me in my schooling. I started going to school — they did have a school over there in Thousand Sticks. I will tell you this, too: Back during the second World War, there was work in Radford, Virginia, in a powder plant where they made powder for the weapons we were using in the war. So my dad went there and worked in that powder plant and took the family. But every time we moved, they’d put me back a grade. I was supposed to be in the fourth grade when we moved to Virginia, but they put me in the third grade. He worked there seven or eight months, and when we came back I should’ve been in the fifth grade, and had to go back in the fourth grade again there. Then when we went to Dayton, Ohio, I was supposed to be up in the sixth grade, but they sent me back in the fifth grade. So I had a tough time trying to get any education moving around like that.

Were you playing music during that time?

I was trying to play the guitar, yeah. It was about fifth or sixth grade when I got my hand on a guitar. By the time I got to the 10th grade, most people I should’ve been in class with had already graduated. So I finished my sophomore year and, by that time, I was into this music. I made up my mind right there, wasn’t no more school for me. I wasn’t going to waste my time. I wanted to put all my time into this right here, and I guess I just got lucky. So I never got any kind of education to do anything up to the 10th grade, the way I bounced around. But I will say this: I learned a lot by traveling. I’ve been in all 50 states playing bluegrass music. I’ve been in foreign countries. I’ve been in Japan two or three times, Germany, and Sweden. You get an education when you travel, if you travel enough. You learn all about different types of people, how they talk. Even starting in Kentucky, when you get to Dayton, Ohio, they have another lingo — then the Carolinas and Georgia, too. So I got a pretty good education traveling.

That might be even better than a textbook education.

I guess moving around, you learn more about the world than you would sitting still.

How did you develop your own singing style? Who did you learn from?

If you wanted to sing bluegrass, if you didn’t have a voice like Bill Monroe or Lester Flatt, you just couldn’t sing bluegrass. I lived by the Grand Ole Opry — I listened to it all the time in those days — and I noticed that one guy sounded different from the other guy. Ernest Tubb or Eddie Arnold, how different they sounded. I got tied into Ernest Tubb. I liked his songs and his singing. When I first started singing, my voice was kind of low. I could sing Ernest Tubb songs in the same key. And I had never heard anything in the world about bluegrass. The only thing I knew about bluegrass was that they called Kentucky bluegrass country. So, in listening to Ernest Tubb, I got to know all his songs.

Anyway, one day I was singing and I noticed my voice couldn’t go that low. About 16 years old, my voice just went up. And I thought, “Man, what’s happened here?” I could sing the songs, but had to put them in a higher pitch. So that put me right out of singing Ernest Tubb songs like him. Then one day I was listening to the Opry and I heard something that jumped out at me. Boy, I thought I had it on the wrong station. I heard something come through that radio and I asked my dad, “What is that?” He said, “That’s the banjo.” I had never heard of a banjo. And I couldn’t figure out how they were doing that. I kept listening every Saturday night, over and over, and didn’t hear that sound again. Finally, one night, I heard it, playing that same song, same melody as the one I had heard some weeks before that. And the announcer said, “That was Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys with Earl Scruggs playing the banjo.” That was the first sign of the word “bluegrass” connected with music I had ever heard. Then I got to singing Bill Monroe songs and I figured out I could sing them in the same key he did.

So my voice changed and went high like that. By the time I got out of the Marine Corps — I had already been playing with the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers in Bluefield, West Virginia, and Carter and Ralph Stanley before the military — so when I came back, I started with my brother singing Bill Monroe songs again. Flatt and Scruggs came along, and I got started singing their songs, too. But I never stopped singing country songs, either. I still sing Ernest Tubb songs today. On this new CD, I did Eddie Arnold’s “Make the World Go Away,” so I still sing country songs; I just sing them the way I feel like singing them and in my key. I guess that put me in a bluegrass class and a country class. My voice, once it got to where it was going, when I was 18 or 19 years old, it just stayed high pitch and hasn’t changed yet.

You were talking about how, even in your early days, you were playing Elvis songs and learning from electric guitar players like Hank Snow. One thing I appreciate about your music is how you always tried new sounds in the studio and new types of songs. You added drums to bluegrass early on. What did people think when you were experimenting and not trying to be traditional?

I never did try and sound like anyone else. I tried to sound like Bill Monroe at one time, and Ernest Tubb, but I found I couldn’t do that. I had a fiddle player come up to me one time and say, “Son, if I had a voice like you, I wouldn’t sing a Bill Monroe tune or Flatt and Scruggs, either one. Just sing like you feel.”

Who was it that told you that?

His name was Benny Sims. He was a fiddle player with Flatt and Scruggs, at that time. If you’re familiar with their Mercury cuts, that’s him. Yeah, we played a show with Lester and Earl, and he heard me sing. Back then, if we did a show with Bill Monroe, well, we’d sing Lester and Earl’s songs. We wouldn’t do Bill in front of him, cause that would make him mad. And if we sang with Lester and Earl, we’d sing Bill’s songs. But we worked a couple shows with Flatt and Scruggs, and of course we sang all Bill’s songs. Well, Benny heard me sing and he called me over by myself and said, “I’d like to tell you something.” He told me, he said, “If I had a voice like yours, I’d never be caught singing a Bill Monroe song or a Flatt and Scruggs song. I’d be you.” He said, “Just sing like you feel.” So I got to singing Jimmie Dickens and relying more on Ernest Tubb songs, Eddie Arnold. That’s what got me going — country songs. I’d always liked country songs. I never programmed myself to be all bluegrass or all country or all rock, or whatever. I just never did program myself any one thing, cause I could sing anything. If I wanted to sing it, I’d find the way I’d want to do it, and I’d do it.

Photo credit: Stacie Huckeba

Hillbilly Soul: An Interview with Darren Nicholson of Balsam Range

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

How old were you when you got into bluegrass?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nitty Gritty Dirt Band: An Unbroken Circle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

STREAM: Blue Highway, ‘Original Traditional’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Blue Highway
Hometown: Nashville, TN
Album: Original Traditional
Release Date: September 9
Label: Rounder Records

In Their Words: "This is a very special record for us. It's our first with Gaven Largent, and our first 'concept' record, in a way. It's all original material in the traditional style. That might sound like a contradiction in terms to some folks, but the 'founding fathers' of the music who created what we know as 'traditional bluegrass' wrote original music. Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt, Carter Stanley, Don Reno … so many great writers from that era. So, in one way, we feel like we are sort of carrying on the tradition even more by doing an all-original set of tunes that haven't been done before." — Tim Stafford

"My favorite part about this album is that it's simply rock-hard, straight bluegrass! Three out of the four songs that I co-wrote on this album were written while in a Stanley Brothers frame of mind, and I love that kind of music. There are other great traditional flavors on here, too. I hope you enjoy." — Shawn Lane

"After 22 years of creating some great music with my brothers in Blue Highway, I am so proud to be a part of yet another wonderful album. So thankful that God has seen fit to allow me to continue to do what I love so much. So glad that we have gotten back to the roots of what makes this music real to so many people." — Wayne Taylor