Tag: Grand Ole Opry

When Harmonies Run Deep: An Essential Roots Music Tradition

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Since Jamie Dailey and Darrin Vincent began singing together as Dailey & Vincent in 2007, they have awed fans in many ways: through their musicality, their sincerity, and their professionalism. But most of all, it’s about their duet singing.

It’s the way their voices blend and weave, so closely it can be hard to distinguish one from another. It’s the way their so-tight harmonies set up a vibration that makes the world tilt a little bit when they reach the high notes. It’s the way we sigh after they stop singing, because all’s right with the world.

Although they aren’t related, Dailey & Vincent do the bluegrass phenomenon of a “brother duet” like nobody’s business. They capture the familial force that Grammy-winning bluegrass artist Laurie Lewis describes as delightfully “making the hair on our arms and legs stand up.”

With Dailey & Vincent as our Artist of the Month, we thought we would peek into the history and tradition of brother duets and other harmony-driven duos that led to this great contemporary partnership.

Two Brothers and Two Instruments

For bluegrass journalist, songwriter, performer, and teacher Jon Weisberger, the term “brother duet” refers to something very specific: “A brother duet is basically a guitar and a mandolin and two guys, and they could be brothers, like the Monroe Brothers or the Blue Sky Boys [Bill and Earl Bolick] or even the Delmore Brothers.”

But many of the early duos later added more musicians. “They became something else, in this sort of organic process … because they wanted to have a fuller sound and they wanted to be competitive on the radio…”

“This brother duet thing existed before bluegrass,” Weisberger continues, “and then it became part of bluegrass. Such that modern folks like Michael Daves and Chris Thile … are doing a lot of the original-style singing, with just two instruments. It says something about the vitality and the attractiveness of that style.”

Weisberger notes that Dailey & Vincent recorded Gillian Welch’s “By the Mark” with just their voices, a guitar, and a mandolin. There are many other similar examples in country, old-time, and other folk formats, but the style is still beloved – and common, thankfully! – in bluegrass today.

Brothers in Tone and Timing

For many, a brother duet has to do with the spine-tingling effect of very tight harmonies, in which every note matches up in every way. Laurie Lewis, who has taught harmony singing extensively and is known for her many duet recordings and performances, talks about it this way.

“It’s easy for brother duets or sisters to blend, because they grew up pronouncing all their words the same way, because they’re from the same place and the same family,” Lewis explains. “So, they’ve got a big leg up that way.

“The shape of a vowel is the most important thing to get right when you’re trying to blend with somebody. And consonants, you know, when you start or end the note. It’s placement, as well – where you place the tone: is it forward in your face? Is it back in your throat, or somewhere in between?”

Members of family bands and sibling duets often have the same vocal timbre – “high and lonesome,” in some cases, or deeper and more mellow in others. But, Lewis said, the brother effect can work even with singers whose voices have different qualities.

“Take Carter and Ralph Stanley, who sang so beautifully together and had really different voices. Carter’s was smooth,” she points out, while Ralph always had that rougher mountain quality.

Insights From Singing Brothers

Eric Gibson remembers when he and his brother Leigh first got the harmony buzz as teenagers. “We were working in the calf barn and I’d been listening to Jim & Jesse sing ‘Are You Missing Me?’ … I started singing it, and Leigh was maybe 10 or 15 feet away from me, when he hits the tenor. And I looked at him, and I just felt it, like, ‘What did we just do?’”

The Gibson Brothers have won national awards for vocal recordings, for songwriting, and for gospel albums. They both love using a horse racing analogy to achieve the brother duet sound. Leigh notes that in many duets and other harmony forms, the lead singer is out front, in volume and style. In contrast, Eric quotes Tim Austin as saying, “Your brother duet is like two racehorses. There’s not a lead horse out there with the harmony back here. They’re both fighting for position.”

Like horse racing, it takes discipline, and keeping the harmonies tight. “You have to stay on the straight and narrow.” The tenor singer has to follow the lead singer, and neither can add too much individual style.

Leigh adds, “You have to give some of yourself. If I wanted to throw our vocal thing into chaos, I’d start singing for myself rather than for the two of us.”

“It’s about really listening and even watching your duet partner,” he says, “how they’re shaping words, how they’re closing off a vocal sound, if it’s happening quickly or it’s a slow close off of that vowel sound.

“Listen and pay attention. I think that’s the best advice I could give anybody.”

Brothers by Birth

For a beautiful collection of brother duets drawn from some of the best and least-known brothers, visit the Gibsons Brothers’ 2015 album, Brotherhood. The liner notes are an engaging mini-history of brother harmonies.

Here are just a few of the other brothers who set the stage for the duets we hear today – and popularized or debuted many of the songs we still sing and love.

The Monroe Brothers

Let’s start with the Monroe Brothers. Bill, the father of bluegrass, began performing with his brothers Birch and Charlie (the uncles of bluegrass?) in the 1920s. Birch left the group when the other two accepted an offer to host their own radio show. The very popular partnership of Charlie on guitar and Bill on mandolin only lasted four years, because they both wanted to be the boss. Charlie continued assembling bands with musicians like Lester Flatt, Ira Louvin, and Curly Seckler. As for Bill, he launched a new genre of music that bears the name of his home state and his band, the Blue Grass Boys.

The Delmore Brothers

Alton and Rabon, the Delmore Brothers, grew up in a tenant farming family in Alabama. Grounded in church music, the Delmores distinguished themselves with their versatile songwriting, leading to membership in the Grand Ole Opry in 1933, extensive touring with Arthur Fiddlin’ Smith, and later with Grandpa Jones and Merle Travis. They are acknowledged as pioneers across country, bluegrass, and rockabilly circles. Songs like “Blues, Stay Away From Me” and “Gonna Lay Down My Old Guitar” remain standard bluegrass fare. Alton’s autobiography, Truth is Stranger Than Publicity, is a hoot and a half.

Blue Sky Boys

Bill and Earl Bolick first appeared on radio in 1935, when still in their early 20s. They later chose the name the Blue Sky Boys after Western North Carolina, Land of the Blue Skies. Steeped in gospel, their first recording, “Sunny Side of Life”/”Where the Soul Never Dies,” was such a big hit they earned the name “the New Hillbilly Kings.” They recorded 100 songs, both religious and secular, before joining the service. After the war they found they disliked newer music trends and they stopped playing entirely for a time when their label asked them to add electric guitar. The brothers played on and off, particularly at folk venues, until the late ’60s. Rounder Records pulled them out of retirement in 1975 for a bluegrass and folk tour.

The Lilly Brothers

Bea and Everett Lilly, the Lilly Brothers, performed on mandolin and guitar, influenced by the mountain music they heard in their home state of West Virginia. Their first local radio appearance was in 1938, and they later earned a spot on the venerated WWVA Jamboree. With Tex Logan and Don Stover – a configuration that would last 18 years – they moved to Boston, where they were welcomed in the folk scene. They are credited with bringing bluegrass to the Northeast, influencing musicians like Peter Rowan and Bill Keith. In Country Music: The Rough Guide, author Kurt Wolff quoted Bluegrass Hall of Fame inductee Joe Val as saying, “Those guys hit on like a bombshell. Nobody’d ever heard anything like that before.”

The Louvin Brothers

For many, the Louvin Brothers set the standard for brother duets. They began their duet career in the 1940s, continuing until 1963, when Charlie broke off from Ira for a solo career. Their harmonies were stunning, influenced by the shape note singing they grew up with, and their prolific writing and recordings left us with so many of the songs commonly heard in today’s bluegrass world. Their old-time religion permeated their work, as well as the life of the tormented Ira, who professed devotion while battling his demons. Emmylou Harris said, “There was something scary and washed in the blood about the sound of the Louvin Brothers.” The cover of their album Satan is Real is an apt visual representation of that thought. It is also the name of Charlie’s autobiography. Another great source is the Cocaine & Rhinestones episode on the Louvins.

Jim & Jesse

Jim & Jesse McReynolds from Colfax, Virginia are lauded as much for Jesse’s mandolin style as for their duet singing. Many of bluegrass’s most accomplished musicians passed through their band, the Virginia Boys, including Vassar Clements, Allen Shelton, Vic Jordon, Carl Jackson, and Glen Duncan. Their versions of songs like “Are You Missing Me” are mainstays of bluegrass jams, while they ventured into the folk rock world with “Paradise.” Jesse would later host a tribute to Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, too. Jim died in 2002 at age 75, ending what Wikipedia calls their 55 years performing together “the longest active professional brother duet in country music history.”

The Everly Brothers

Contemporary musicians from Graham Nash to Paul Simon have cited Don and Phil Everly’s duets as inspirational. Their harmonies were intricate, tight, and gorgeous. Coming from a country music background, they became hit pop stars, with “Bye Bye Love” in 1957. While many of their most popular songs were written by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, the brothers were also prolific songwriters. They have been widely recognized by the music industry, from membership in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to a #33 ranking in Rolling Stone’s list of 100 greatest artists of all time. For an excellent review of their often tumultuous careers and relationships, pick up Blood Harmony: The Everly Brothers Story by Barry Mazor.

Sisters, Mothers and Daughters

Family bands featuring female singers have been popular for decades, even before the Carter Family blasted from radio stations in the 1930s. But sister duets have been less prominent than their brotherly counterparts. We can speculate that’s because, historically, women were less likely to venture out on their own, and because they were less welcome at the front and center of bluegrass and country.

But when these women stepped up, they truly shined.

The Whites

Sisters Sharon and Cheryl performed for decades with their father, Buck White, as the Whites. But it is their duet singing that ranks with the tightest and tingliest of any brother duo. Buck, a mandolinist and piano player, encouraged his daughters to take up music. The three recorded extensively beginning in 1972 and recorded “Keep on the Sunny Side” for the Grammy Award-winning O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. After Buck’s death in 2025, Sharon and Cheryl continue to perform, sometimes with Rosie, another sister, adding a high harmony. They have received highest honors in both the country and bluegrass fields, with more than 40 years as members of the Grand Ole Opry.

Kate & Anna McGarrigle

Kate and Anna McGarrigle were acclaimed Canadian folk singers and songwriters. Often passing the melody back and forth, it could be difficult to tell when one voice ended and the other began. Their harmonies were delicious. Linda Ronstadt had a big hit with the McGarrigles’ song “Heart Like a Wheel,” and Maria Muldaur, Emmylou Harris, and Judy Collins also covered their songs. Kate died in 2010.

The Judds

This mother/daughter duo certainly had the blood-harmony duet thing going big time with perfectly executed, soaring vocals. In a Cinderella-like story line, Naomi and her daughter Wynonna went from living on welfare to auditioning (in terror, as they described it) before a room full of recording executives – who signed them immediately. Within two years of the 1983 audition, they recorded the first of eight consecutive number one singles and received their first of five Grammys. Their family story is both fractious and inspiring.

More Essential Duets

Nowadays, it often seems the most common examples of high quality duet singing come from non-siblings, from chosen family, from lifelong musical partners. Turns out “blood harmony” is possible without the biological ties. (But of course it is.) Some of the best examples of the form are singers unrelated to each other.

Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard

Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard presented a side of duet singing that was at once sweet and gutsy. Although from very different geographic and social backgrounds, the pair came together through the Baltimore folk community in the 1970s. They sang with intense sincerity, performing older and traditional tunes and presenting Dickens’ heart-rending (and sometimes snarky) originals to the world. They were some of the first women to front a bluegrass act and are widely acknowledged as inspiring groundbreakers.

Ricky Skaggs & Tony Rice

In 1980, Ricky Skaggs and Tony Rice released what has become an iconic duet recording, Skaggs & Rice. Its content draws on traditional and pre-bluegrass tunes recorded by earlier brother duets. In fact, Weisberger points out, the album cover illustration, featuring the two men in uncomfortable-looking suits, is modeled after a Lilly Brothers photo. Skaggs and Rice taught us how two voices with starkly different qualities could blend, with sibling-like effect.

Ricky Skaggs & Keith Whitley

Skaggs and his wife, Sharon White, both sing in a high range, blending beautifully and adding intensity to everything they sing. And with his piercing tenor, Skaggs has the ability to create a brother sound with just about anyone. His partnership with Keith Whitley was equally natural, as they started singing together as teenagers in Kentucky. They began touring with the Stanley Brothers when they were both 16. In essence, they grew up together, as did their vocal blend.

Laurie Lewis & Tom Rozum

Laurie Lewis is another who can turn any duet into sibling-style harmonies. She and Tom Rozum have sung together for decades. Lewis said that in addition to working hard on their timing and pronunciation (the word “yours” was once problematic), they have the advantage of remarkably similar vocal ranges for a male and female. When they are both “in the head voice, you can really hear the tension in our voices,” an exciting aspect of their duets, she said.

Laurie Lewis & Kathie Kallick

Since the earliest configuration of Good Ol’ Persons, Lewis and Kathy Kallick have sung together, including producing two duet albums. Lewis said, “We have really different timbres to our voices. But we sometimes get confused as to who was singing which part on our old recordings. ‘Wait, is that me or is that Kathy?’” Lewis’ duet album, And Laurie Lewis, showcases her skill in joining voices with so many of her old friends.

The Johnson Mountain Boys’ Dudley Connell and David McLaughlin

Eric Gibson remembered terrific harmony singing by Dudley Connell and David McLaughlin in the Johnson Mountain Boys days. That revered group won the very first IBMA Award for Album of the Year (for At the Old Schoolhouse) and were inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2020. And since his days in the Johnson Mountain Boys, Connell has shown he, too, raises any duo to the level of glorious sibling sounds. Some examples are with bandmate Lou Reid in the Seldom Scene and his two duet albums with Don Rigsby.

Emmylou Harris & … Almost Everyone

The Gibsons both mentioned Emmylou Harris’ stunning ability to create tension and beauty in sibling duet style with so many. Examples range from her earliest recordings with Gram Parsons through all her singing partners in her band, including Ricky Skaggs and Rodney Crowell, and when she introduced a young country audience to the material of the Louvin Brothers on recordings such as “If I Could Only Win Your Love,” “When I Stop Dreaming,” and “Every Time You Leave.” Her 1990 duet album pairs her with male singers. In 1999, after the success of the Trio albums with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt, she and Ronstadt recorded Western Wall: The Tucson Sessions, showing off the perfection of two beautiful singers who love to sing together.

Dailey & Vincent

Jamie Dailey and Darrin Vincent both grew up performing in family bands. Jamie started singing with his family at age 3, and by age 12 had mastered bass and banjo. For nine years, he sang lead vocals with Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver, a band noted for their excellent voices and superb harmonies.

An article in Entertainment News said the Vincent children “were practically raised on harmony” from their youngest days in the Sally Mountain Show. For nine years, Vincent sang the baritone parts with Ricky Skaggs’ Kentucky Thunder. The two men’s early training, the discipline gained from playing with exceptional band leaders, plus their perfect-for-bluegrass voices created a glorious blend of heartfelt harmony and musical excellence.

Their first album, released in 2008, was met with a flurry of enthusiasm. It earned the duo six IBMA Awards – including Album of the Year – plus two other nominations that year. They have continued to receive dozens of awards from bluegrass, country, and gospel organizations, as well as three Grammy nominations as a duo and two wins between them during their time with other acts. Their 10th album, A Beautiful Life, was released earlier this year.

Explore more of our Artist of the Month content on Dailey & Vincent here. Enjoy even more bluegrass duos here and country duos here.

Lead Image: The Louvin Brothers from Pictorial Press.

The Importance of Scholar and Author Robert S. Cantwell

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Robert S. Cantwell died on July 3, and for people who write about country or folk – and for people who play these musics – this was a major loss. Cantwell grew up on the South Side of Chicago and went to school at the legendary Grinnell College in Iowa. He spent his time at Grinnell learning how to play the banjo, though frequently he would be fined by the college for playing after hours. Committing to a lifetime of writing, he wrote mostly about country and folk music, but in ways that were difficult, all-encompassing, eccentric, and curious. He never really believed in the purity of form, but also was careful about what popular music meant. For decades, mostly in North Carolina, he was writing and teaching about music where legend was more often printed than the truth. Cantwell knew the truth was polyvalent. And slippery.

He writes carefully in one section of Bluegrass Breakdown about what church music means, tracing the sanctification of hillbilly music all the way through Appalachia to Calvinist psalters in Scottish churches. At the same time, he was one the earliest white critics to note that the history of the banjo came from West Africa, but the theft of the banjo, as an instrument and a music, was abetted by vaudeville and burlesque, places where blackface was rampant. These two examples note the public and social problems of the music, but also note that the public performances of these spaces was as much in an oral as written tradition, and that bluegrass requires a performance orientation.

This move towards understanding performance as central to the genre also allowed for a chapter in Bluegrass Breakdown about Bill Monroe at the Grand Ole Opry, an exquisitely reported backstage report. That chapter is so well observed, not through the top-down hierarchy of an academic who needs to pretend that he knows all, but through noting carefully what he does know (the origins of Bill Monroe’s “High Lonesome Sound”), what he doesn’t know (who Jean Shepard was outside of her stage clothes), or what cannot be known entirely (the social pressure of the Opry as a site of country music.)

Cantwell’s observations come out of concerns, a careful listening, which suggest that genre is less important than a loving discussion of what music is, as it is listened to now, and how it has been listened to historically. Cantwell can follow that backstage passage, with its shade of ’70s-style New Journalism, with a discussion of what Monroe was actually playing – and I mean this culturally, but also via actual notation. But he follows that with an annihilating anecdote against an anonymous scholar who argued that bluegrass must result from written sources. He further argues that it is one kind of music, one kind of genre – though not one that is central to the conversation – acknowledging the legitimacy of the form, but asking why the performer would only allow one kind of knowledge.

Cantwell was included in fellow critic Eric Weisbard’s magisterial volume on music criticism, Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music, a book that features almost every important book of music criticism. Weisbard writes about Cantwell’s Bluegrass Breakdown: “Folklore almost dissolved in Cantwell’s antidisciplinary, antigenre, anti (as prose) generic accounting,” then spends the rest of the entry almost walking back what could be considered an accusation – recognizing that if bluegrass was supposed to be a melting-pot genre, then writing about bluegrass should be equally anti-genre. Bluegrass at its best is both pure and filthy; singing about plain truths in flashy suits. Work that happened within written or oral traditions requires a systematic dismantling of the genre, reworking it with new disciplines and stranger understandings.

This is where I say that Cantwell argues – and he does that sometimes – but he also tells stories, and pays attention, and works out some problems about the rise of bluegrass. He considers Bill Monroe central, but uses Monroe as a larger example that the genre is a commercial construction, one that has an origin in a wide variety of oral and written traditions. Bluegrass – and I think by extension folk and country music – is a bastard child with many parents, and Cantwell at his best elucidates all of them.

His other work is equally dense. He traces the entire history of the 1960s folk revival in the ironic and telling When We Were Good, which deconstructs genre as aptly as Bluegrass Breakdown does. His last book, The Poetics of Tenderness, is about how much he loves his wife, but also about how to read with an all-consuming love–and according to its press copy it quotes “Andreas Capellanus, Plato, Schopenhauer, Freud, William James, Hardy, Dreiser and Fitzgerald, D.H. Lawrence and Tom Stoppard, among others.” That might be the central gift of understanding Cantwell, understanding that to love something is to consume it – with tenderness and with ravenous hunger.

In his death, we not only lose a singular voice in American popular music criticism, but we also experience a loss in how exactly to write about genre, and about bluegrass. We lose someone who dedicated care to research, but also with the patience and space to consider work over centuries. In the systematic dismantling of humanities, and in the academic gatekeeping which forbids working-class people from writing about working-class music, Cantwell’s death seems deeply symbolic – of how rare writing this patient and erudite is now.

 

Lily Meola is Lucky to Be Living This Life

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

For the cover of her new album, Lily Meola wanted to lie across a lily pad, but not just any lily pad. Something like the gigantic Victoria amazonica, which has enough structure beneath it to support the weight of a person. After searching the internet and calling botanical gardens around the world, she happened upon a place in Tennessee that allowed her to achieve her dream.

It’s an apt metaphor for Meola’s debut album, Lucky to Be. The Hawaii native has found support in her adopted hometown of Nashville through the likes of Jamey Johnson, who appears on the new album, and through performances at CMA Music Festival and the Grand Ole Opry. Meola draws from all eras of country music – one of the songs, “Daisies,” is inspired by ERNEST’s “Flower Shop,” while “Tumbleweeds and Chewing Gum” is a duet with Willie Nelson. Lukas Nelson, a longtime family friend, also lends his voice to the charming “Mar Vista.”

Meola earned a national breakthrough on America’s Got Talent in 2022 with her original song, “Daydream,” which was written as a way to show support to her struggling friends as well as to grieve her late mother. While writing the new songs for Lucky to Be, the Maui native learned that you have a one-in-400-trillion chance of being born with your exact genetic makeup.

“That sounds like such a wild statistic, right? You’re like, ‘Where did they come up with that?’ But it really stopped me in my tracks and made me think about life differently, and approach the record so differently,” she says.

BGS caught up with Lily by phone a few days before the release of Lucky to Be.

Let’s start with the song “Lucky to Be.” There’s that opening line, where you’re recalling a moment of seeing the shooting star through an airplane window, which I think was a real-life moment for you. So, what were you thinking about when you wrote that song?

Lily Meola: Honestly, that song has so many different little meanings and moments in it. Yeah, that first line – actually, each line – in the song is a real life-moment. I was actually on my way to Nashville to write. At the time I didn’t live here, but I spent a lot of time here over the last 13 years and it felt like a second home to me. But I had been away for a while and I didn’t have a record out.

I was like, “Okay, am I doing the right thing?” There’s always like a little bit of… I wouldn’t say doubt, but I’m always looking for signs that I’m on the right path. On the flight, I looked out the window. It wasn’t even like I was staring out the window. I just looked for a second, and this shooting star went by. And I knew. I was like, “Okay, this is a good sign. I’m still on the right path.”

That’s got to feel good to know you had a little bit of validation that high up in the air.

Yeah, exactly. I didn’t know if that was even possible. It’s just a wild experience to see it, so that’s the first part of the verse, and the next part of the verse actually ties into the first line as well. I lost my mom in 2020 to cancer and I try to look for the signs and everything to keep communication with her alive, if that makes sense. And so it was like a sign from her. … The next line is [about] this palm tree buried with some of her ashes at a special beach on Maui, and even though she’s gone, how lucky was I to be able to have such an incredible mom for so many years?

The whole song is just kind of looking at the bright side of the wildness of life and the next line is, “how lucky are we to feel chaos and peace and everything in between.” … Whatever it is we’re going through in life, whether it be the good, the bad, the ugly, it’s all just part of this experience and journey of being a human. Regardless of it all, we’re all just lucky to be here in the first place, and I think that we lose sight of that within our everyday hustle and bustle of life. And so it was a good reminder for me. I struggle with depression, and I needed that reminder in that moment, that this is all just a part of the journey.

Where do you get your drive to keep forging ahead? Where does that motivation come from?

That’s a good question. It’s literally just a part of me, I guess. I’ve been playing shows since I was 10 years old and I haven’t really looked back. I just had one foot in front of the other and kept going. I have a lot of things I’m interested in in life, but it’s what feeds my soul, and I’m addicted to it, I guess, in a healthy way! [Laughs] I don’t think I could really do anything else, because of how special it feels, and how natural it feels to me.

What were your gigs like when you were 10 years old?

I got my first gig at 10 and it was before a movie at a film festival. And then I just started getting little gigs here and there. I had a weekly cafe gig in my teens. I had a bar gig on Friday nights. I’m from Maui, which is a small island, and so I just kind of popped around all the different places that you could perform and did little shows. Then I did conventions, like Toyota would come and they’d bring their whole company. Anyway, it just evolved and I just kept doing it. Different events, private events, parties. I’d walk around with my little sound system everywhere. [Laughs]

Not a typical teenage life in Hawaii, playing corporate gigs. That’s a cool story.

Yeah, it is, and I loved every minute of it, and I think that’s what kept me going. I’m truly obsessed with what I do. I love every aspect. I love to write, I love to record. I love to perform. I think maybe the only part I’m not that interested in is the business side. [Laughs] So, you find the right partners for that, but I just love what I do and I can’t imagine a life where I’m not doing it.

How did you connect with Willie Nelson?

It’s a small island, and he lives there, and our families are friends. So they came to my gig, and he sat in and sang “Crazy” with me. After the gig, he handed me a napkin and it had a few songs written on it and he was like, “If you’d like to record any of these, let me know.” I was like, “Oh my gosh, of course.” We ended up recording some stuff, but what we had done that day was corrupted. There was some situation that happened with the sound board that made the files unlistenable and unusable. So we’re not going to be like, “Hey, well, you want to come back and do that again?”

So fast forward a couple years, he was making his duets record, To All the Girls…, and he invited me to come and do a song with him. I flew out to Austin and we recorded “Will You Remember Mine?” It’s a song that he wrote, and one of the songs that was on the napkin, I’m pretty sure. Then he took me out on the road with him to promote that record and it was just incredible. It was the best experience ever, and I’m so grateful to him and his whole family. They’ve all been so lovely to me, and taken me under their wings, and showed me that I could love what I do even more. It’s been a beautiful journey with them. I’m forever grateful.

“Tumbleweeds and Chewing Gum” feels like a really full circle moment on my record, coming back to honoring how grateful I feel for that time. His voice is just so, so sweet on it, and his guitar playing is just one of a kind. And having a perspective on a song like that, from two different people in very different parts of their lives and careers, it makes the song have so much more depth to it, and meaning for me.

He’s the perfect voice for that song, because tumbleweeds and chewing gum are gonna be around forever, and the music of Willie Nelson is gonna be around forever, too.

Yeah, exactly. There’s all these things in life that’ll stick around, but we’re here for just a moment. And we might as well do what we love, because it’s gonna end at one point. The line in it that resonates with me the most is, “You and me will turn to dust and all our shiny things are gonna rust, so love me just because.” It’s so true, and we forget that.

I watched your video for “Never Want This to Change,” and I was thinking, have I ever heard Jamey Johnson sing harmony before? I can’t imagine he does that very much, but he sounded great. What did you like about hearing your voices together?

Oh, Jamey is just… I use this quote for his voice: “It’s as if God has favorites.” There’s something to it where it’s so soulful, but it’s gritty, and also feels like you’re getting a warm hug at the same time. Does that make sense? [Laughs] I love him, and he’s been a friend of mine for many years. I’ve always wanted to do a song with him. We did something years and years ago for a Christmas record he did. This song just felt perfect for his voice, and I’m just so happy that he’s on it.

Some people think you have to suffer for your art. Have you ever bought into that theory, that you have to suffer in order to be a great songwriter?

No, no, I don’t think so, but I do think that without darkness, how can you fully appreciate the light? There’s definitely songwriters out there that haven’t had tragedy, but they’re just poetic and it’s a part of their being. But when I write with someone who shares a similar experience, or has been through something hard in life, the songs are just different. There’s an understanding there, but I will say, when I write with someone who hasn’t, it also brings out a light-hearted side of me, as well.

There’s a line on the album that says, “It’s lucky I’m crazy for you,” and later you’re singing, “you’re lucky enough to find you and I,” and of course the album title is Lucky to Be. So I get the sense that feeling lucky is more than just a line in the song for you, and I wondered what makes you feel so lucky these days.

It’s just an accumulation of everything, all the things I’ve been through. All of those lyrics just naturally ended up in the songs. I just pinch myself daily that I get to live this life and do what I love. Again, that statistic made me really think about life and understand how lucky I really am.

Photo Credit: Jimmy Fisco (lead image); Bailey Roberts (alternate images)

Artist of the Month: Dailey & Vincent

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Since they were boys, Jamie Dailey and Darrin Vincent have been surrounded by music. As a child, Dailey sang with his father, who was in a gospel group. Vincent performed at a young age with his family’s bluegrass gospel band, the Sally Mountain Show (which included his older sister, Rhonda Vincent). In 1990, he joined the John Hartford Band and then, in 1996, the multi-instrumentalist and singer signed up with Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder for nearly a decade. In 1999, Dailey started his successful nine-year run in the esteemed bluegrass group Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver as a tenor and baritone vocalist, and played acoustic bass before moving into rhythm guitar.

Dailey & Vincent met at the IBMA’s annual business conference and festival in 2001 and became quick friends. One day, after having breakfast at a Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, they went to Dailey’s car to listen to a tape of a song he had written. When they sang along to it, the two realized that their voices blended together in an uncanny way. It took several years for them to leave their respective groups and officially become a duo.

Along the way, they contributed the track “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem” to a Christmas compilation and that tune hit No. 1 on the Prime Cuts of Bluegrass charts. Dailey & Vincent then scored a deal with Rounder Records based on a demo they submitted. Since 2007, they have released 11 albums (including A Beautiful Life, released in June), won multiple SPBGMA and IBMA awards, and received several GRAMMY nominations. They also host a TV series, and have attracted a devoted following for their mix of traditional and contemporary musical styles that draws upon bluegrass, country, and gospel.

From September 17 to 19, the two are again hosting their annual Dailey & Vincent Music Fest. Held in Hiawassee, Georgia, up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the festival’s lineup this year includes friends and family like Ricky Skaggs, Rhonda Vincent, and Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver, as well as Lonesome River Band, Seldom Scene, Gene Watson, and Wyatt Ellis – with Dailey & Vincent performing different sets each day.

To celebrate A Beautiful Life, we’ve named Dailey & Vincent our BGS Artist of the Month in August. Enjoy our exclusive AOTM interview with the duo below and don’t miss our Essential Dailey & Vincent Playlist, too. Plus, keep an eye on our website and social media for even more D&V content all month long.

When you all were creating your new album, A Beautiful Life, did you go in with an intention to make a certain type of album? Because your records frequently have had some type of theme or concept – like your prior release, 2022’s Let’s Sing Some Country.

Jamie Dailey: For me, it was not a themed record at all. I think Darrin and I both feel the same way. We just wanted the best songs that we could get our hands on to record. By being with Morris Higham [Management] and our manager Robert Filhart having the tie-in to the publishing companies to help us with songs, that gave us a whole new breath of life to be able to get a hold of some really great songs. And so that’s kind of how we were looking at it. We were not thinking about a theme at all.

Darrin Vincent: We’re able to create the bluegrass and the country music feel on the same record. But it’s mostly acoustically based. One of the coolest things about those elements was our management saying, “Go out and create the best songs and the best record you guys can. Don’t worry about [the album being] branded at anything or themed at anything. Just go make yourself a record.” And that’s kind of our mindset, and what we did with that encouragement.

How did you find these songs come together?

JD: Our manager, Rob Filhart … took us to Music Row and set us in publishing offices with speakers on both sides of our heads and a person across from us. They would play song after song after song, and you would listen to one and you’d be like, “No, that’s not it.” They’d play another one. “No, that’s not it.” And then a song came on and it was, “Wake up in the morning to a big orange sun/ Calling in sick, gonna have a little fun…” I thought, “Wait, wait, wait, what is that?” I want to keep listening. And it was “A Beautiful Life.”

One of the reasons that we love the song is that both of us have lived that lyric. Growing up, we have lived that lyric and still live a lot of it today. So that song touched our hearts and touched who we are as human beings. And we thought, “Man, we’ve got to record that song.”

We kept listening to more and more songs. Then they played us the song that was written by Don Schlitz and Josh Kear called “I Grew Up in Heaven.” Once again, we’re sitting there and I’m like, “I grew up in a beautiful rural area with the hills and the mountains and lakes and the rivers and bluffs and wildlife.” And I’m like, “Oh my goodness, I’ve lived this lyric” – and so has Darrin, you know? We fell in love with that. So, we thought, “Well, that’s going to be a good song.”

DV: We actually recorded 16 of the songs and those 12 [on the album] seemed to fit together the best. We got four other songs we haven’t even finished yet, but they’re great songs as well. We need to probably look at those at some point, but these really fit together well. I’m so thankful for them.

“Ruby” makes for a tremendous lead-off track. How did that get in the album?

JD: We got a call from the Grand Ole Opry, and they were going to recreate a show from 1974. They said, “We want you guys to come in and sing an Osborne Brothers song and a Jim & Jesse song and recreate a night that they were on this stage. You have to say what they said that night and you have to sing one of their songs.” They gave us choices. Darrin picked the song “Paradise” from Jim & Jesse. And I picked the song “Ruby.” I didn’t really want to sing “Ruby,” because it’s really high. It’s really fast and it’s really hard. I’m going to be honest, I was extremely intimidated by the song.

We sang the song on the stage of the Ryman Auditorium during the Grand Ole Opry. And the crowd went bonkers. I mean, bonkers from the front to the middle of the back! We thought, “What is going on?” And I simply think it was because they enjoyed watching me trying to kill myself singing. But when we came off stage we said, “Man, what a reaction! You know, it really doesn’t lend itself to the record, but people loved it so much. It might be a great opener to the record – loose and fast and high and all the things.” So, we decided to do it and lo and behold, it went No. 1 [for multiple weeks on the Bluegrass Today charts].

DV: My favorite thing is to watch Jamie kick off “Ruby” and see the people’s reaction to that. They’re just absolutely floored and that the reaction is so cool. I don’t think they’ve ever seen anything like it. It’s awesome.

The album has a good number of songs, like “A Beautiful Life,” that have a soulful, soul-feeding quality. Not just in a religious way, necessarily. Like “God’s Country,” you might think it is a religious song but it’s just about praising – praising where you come from.

JD: Yeah, and the place that I come from, everybody has different beliefs here. They have different political backgrounds. The song is for everybody. It’s not just for one set group of people. It’s for everybody because I love everybody. I mean, if you’re a nice person and try hard and treat people right, then I love you. I don’t have an issue with anybody.

When you started off as a duo, your first show was the Grand Ole Opry, right?

JD: We’ve played the Opry a lot. Darrin had played it longer than I had. But we both played the Opry a lot in other bands we’d been in. And then as Dailey & Vincent, we started our career off there. Darrin can tell you about us turning down dates just so we could play something like the Opry.

DV: Yeah, we had a manager by the name of Don Light who really, really put us under his wing and really gave us great advice. Advice we’re still using today after all these years. After we quit [working with] Ricky and Doyle, or we turned in our notice … we were getting all these offers of really good money to go out and play. Don Light said, “Boys, there’s only one first. I really believe your first [performance] needs to be at the Grand Ole Opry.” He said, “I know you all could use the money and it’s nice to have money,” but he said, “It’s more important for the longevity of you guys to make that Grand Ole Opry your first performance.”

Jamie and I agreed to it, we said no to everybody, and just kind of hung on to that. The thing of it is we weren’t promised [the Opry gig]. Pete Fisher [Opry VP/GM at the time] did not promise, “Yes, you guys can make your debut at the Grand Ole Opry.”

JD: It was a gamble.

DV: He and I took a gamble. We said no to everybody and, man, are we ever glad we did! ‘Cause we can honestly say our very first paid performances were the Grand Ole Opry. The Ryman, no less, of all stages. The birth of bluegrass music [was there], started with Bill Monroe. Isn’t that something? That’s really something!

JD: And we had to eat beanie weenies for about four months, but, you know, we’re alive now. We made it.

You both have been performing music since you were children, and been professionals for a long time. Besides having a lifelong love of music, it seems like you have a respect for the profession of being a musician.

DV: We’ve been recording records for a long time and have been on wonderful projects. Jamie grew up with his dad playing music and I did the same thing with my mom and dad. I think that my very first recording was at age five. So, we’ve been doing this a long time. I tell people this is not a hobby. It’s our job and our life and our livelihood, and man, it’s our DNA. It’s the way we grew up, and being members of the Grand Ole Opry and just being able to carry on that legacy of our family tree is really, really important. … It’s what we’ve done all of our lives. My wife, as a child, wanted to be a teacher and be in education. For us, this is our job, yes – but it’s more than that. It’s our life. I mean, this music, this record, is our life.

I think there’s some people that do it for a hobby, and that’s wonderful. But for us, our job is to get music, songs that will help people. I mean, we’re basically therapists as well. I can’t tell you the number of people that come through our line that are going through chemotherapy or some kind of issue in their life. This music is therapeutic – especially “A Beautiful Life.” I’ve had so many people come up to me and say, “That just makes me happy listening to those lyrics.” I feel like we’re sometimes musical doctors as well.

Harmony singing has always been important to you, and to the history of bluegrass. Jamie, I know the Statler Brothers were a huge influence on you. How do you see the state of harmony vocals in bluegrass music today? Is there a resurgence or are you just like holding the torch?

JD: Okay, we may have two different answers… How I’m going to answer this, I want everyone to know, I don’t mean this negative at all. This is just something that I’m seeing – and I could be wrong, okay? I’ll be the first to admit it. I am seeing more great pickers and a lot of picking now than I am, per se, a lot of great, top-notch vocal art. Now, yes, there are lots of people out there doing it, but it used to be that I saw more of that than I did a lot of the hot picking. It seems to me that’s what I’m seeing now. Folks, I could be wrong. Okay? If I am, please point me in direction so I can learn. But that’s what I’m seeing and what I’m hearing. So I found that to be interesting. Darrin, how do you feel?

DV: Yeah, you know, [Jamie] and I are always going to do four-part harmony, if possible. I never ever did four-part harmony with my family group all those years. With Ricky [Skaggs], we would have “Remember the Cross,” the Bill Monroe song, with the bassist in Ricky’s band doing the Bill Monroe quartet kind of thing. Of course, now Jamie, being with Doyle in those nine years, that was absolutely Doyle Lawson’s sound, the four-part harmony gospel. We have since moved back to three-part harmony, and we’ve been having Kyle [Ramey], our banjo player, do the bass part. I think Jamie and I will always do duets, trios, all the different types of songs, because that’s our DNA, that’s part of bluegrass’s DNA as well, all the way back to Flatt & Scruggs and Bill Monroe. It’s just something that’s part of bluegrass. I think that people need to hear that and we certainly feature that on our TV show. It’s very important and it’s just a cool thing to hear.

It also feels like you two are at an interesting traditionalist/non-traditionalist intersection, where you respect and follow some traditional leads, but also listen to your own inner voices of what you want to sound like.

JD: That has been a craw with some people on the traditional side. You know, “What are you guys? You used to be bluegrass, but we can’t really call you bluegrass. But you’re not really country, so we can’t call you that. What are you?” And all we know to tell them is: Dailey & Vincent! We sing and play the songs that we like and love. We play and sing the styles that we like and love. And we play and sing the way that we play and sing. We don’t know what that is, other than it’s just us. It’s how we think. How we breathe. It’s just who we are. And that’s not a good answer for a lot of people. They don’t like that answer, but honestly, we really don’t know how else to answer it.

You’ve finished your tenth season of your TV show. How has the TV show fit in with or affected your overall music career? Like, has it improved your live show?

JD: One of the things that I am so thankful for about the television show is, of course, we get to sing our bluegrass songs, whether they’re covers or originals that we’ve written. We get to sing a lot of the country songs that we like – original or covers. But something I have loved, it has given me the ability to sing songs like Bryan Adams’ “Heaven.” I’ve been able to sing Christopher Cross’s “Sailing.” I’ve been able to sing Sting’s “Fields of Gold.” All these old pop songs.

It’s given me an avenue to get that side of my fanboy out on all these pop songs and get to sing them and put them out. It’s interesting. When we have put them on social media, I have been very clear in my wording of, “Hey, one of the reasons we love to get to do our television show is we get to sing songs we’ve always wanted to sing, but that we never really could put on a record or necessarily really sing on a stage somewhere.” So, that has been one of the most fun parts for me. Darrin, how about you?

DV: I’ve loved being able to sing different songs and create different musical settings for different songs. Even songs that we did bluegrass, we go back into country now and just flip it around. It’s just wonderful being on the creating side of the musical side of that with these songs.

For me personally, I love all that and creating, but I’ve always been behind the vocalists in my group. It was my dad and my sister Rhonda. When I went with John Hartford, it was John. He was the frontman. He was the voice. Ricky, he was the voice. Jamie’s a great MC and a great frontman. But in our group now, I have to walk out and do more lead vocals and do more talking. And being a part of the Grand Ole Opry and this TV show has really set me to be out front, to be more of a talker. I’m more of a thinker on that side of it. Jamie is great off the cuff. I have to think about what I say and then I have to try to make it feel correct. I struggle with that.

JD: [Laughing] I probably should think about what I said!

DV: I’m not ashamed of this. I spent my whole entire life in special ed. Education was very hard for me. Being in the background is more where I like to be. I love being on the backside of things and I don’t need the spotlight. But since it’s Dailey & Vincent, Jamie and I both go out there, but those [TV show] settings have helped me to try to be more outgoing. I love that Jamie’s very outgoing. He’s such a great speaker and it has really encouraged me to try to do better at that. He’s absolutely the best, but I feel like I have grown because of those platforms to be able to speak better. My thought process goes a little quicker now and I feel more comfortable with it, and I’m sure grateful for that.

Photo Credit: Gregg Roth

Do You Know the Story of Betty Harford?

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Over the past year, I have been surprised and delighted to find myself working closely with the Hartford family to continue the legacy of one of my favorite musicians, John Hartford. John is famous for his songwriting, but he also loved the fiddle and was a true scholar of the instrument. After his death, thousands of previously unheard and unrecorded fiddle tunes were discovered, written out in his personal notebooks. John’s daughter, Katie Hogue, has spearheaded the effort to get these tunes recorded.

With the album Julia Belle, she brought together an all-women cast of musicians, engineers, and producers to record a second volume of his original tunes. (The first was released in 2020 as The John Hartford Fiddle Tune Project and was nominated for a GRAMMY.) I was honored to be included, and impressed that Katie had decided to frame the second volume of John’s fiddle tunes around women. But this focus on women musicians also got me wondering about the women in John’s life. As a woman honoring the work of a very successful male artist, I had to wonder, “Who were the women who made all of this creative time possible for John?”

I had briefly met John’s first wife, Betty Harford-Gilbert, at a dinner party. (John later added the “t” to “Hartford” as an artist name.) We got to talking about the past and her experiences meeting and marrying John, as well as raising their two children, Jamie and Katie. I was relieved to find that Betty wasn’t especially bitter towards John. In fact, she had a lot of nice things to say about him. But I wanted to know more about her role behind the scenes, and I asked if she would be up for doing an interview with me. As so often happens in these situations, I had an idea of the story I wanted to tell: Two musicians meet and fall in love. Both want to pursue a professional music career, but as soon as they have children, the woman is relegated to motherhood and steps out of the spotlight to support her husband’s stardom.

However, when I started talking to Betty, it became clear how much I was projecting my own insecurities and generational desires onto the situation. Betty is an extraordinary woman who seems to have lived a million different lives. The story she told me was much more interesting than the one I had made up in my head. In fact, I feel confident that this article is just the beginning of a much bigger project surrounding Betty, her music, and her life.

Betty Beck was born in a small town in southeast Missouri in 1939. Her parents separated when she was three and she was raised by her mother and her grandparents, along with her mother’s siblings, on a cotton farm. As a child, Betty began playing music with her uncle, Jimmy Payne. Jimmy was her mother’s baby brother and he was only 4 years older than Betty, so they grew up like siblings.

“We both hated being in the cotton fields,” Betty explains. “All my life I was working in the cotton fields. We would chop cotton. We would pick cotton. I couldn’t remember a time when I wasn’t doing that. But Jimmy and I were dreamers. I was always looking up at the clouds, saying, ‘I wonder what’s out there? There’s something beyond this cotton patch.’”

The family had a radio at home and they would listen to the Grand Ole Opry on Friday nights. Betty remembers writing down the lyrics to songs in her little black book as she heard them. She and her Uncle Jimmy began learning to sing songs from the broadcast and trying to harmonize like their idols, the Louvin Brothers. Eventually, Jimmy managed to save up enough cotton money to order a $25 guitar from an Aldens catalog. Once a week, he went into town to learn guitar chords from the local church musician.

James and Betty, as they were known in the region, began playing together regularly. When Betty was 14, the pair began hosting a radio show at KTCB in Malden, Missouri, and their duet became officially known as the Allstar Gospel Singers. (When I texted her to ask about this detail, Betty sent me an eyeroll emoji and said, “Hey, I was 14!”) The duo went live every Saturday and sang requests on the spot.

Betty Harford pictured with John Hartford circa 1963.

After graduating from high school, Betty packed her bags and took the bus to St. Louis looking for work. She had been working part-time as a secretary during high school and had become an expert typist. She soon landed herself a job and apartment. Her mother showed up with her younger brother three weeks later, placing the responsibility of breadwinning squarely on Betty’s shoulders. Betty describes those three weeks before her mother arrived as some of the happiest of her life: “I was free!”

Her uncle Jimmy Payne arrived in St. Louis not long after and the two continued playing music together occasionally, although she felt that he was more interested in pursuing a solo career at that point. It was through Jimmy that Betty met John, when the two of them went to perform at a radio station for which John was DJing. Notably, in my research about John’s early life as well as Jimmy’s, nobody mentions playing or writing music with Betty, even though she is the common denominator between these two hit songwriters.

Betty and John hit it off immediately, although Betty says she was “not impressed” with John.

“He was a good musician,” she explains, “but there were a lot of musicians better than him… and he dressed terribly. He had holes in his sleeves and wore ridiculous hats. I was sometimes embarrassed to be seen in the diner with him.”

Despite all of this, she fell for him, and the two began dating, eventually marrying in secret to avoid grief from Betty’s loving but controlling mother.

This is where our conversation started to surprise me. Betty told me about the two of them singing together, the music they would listen to and learn, and the hymns and country songs that she taught John, but she also mentioned going along to his band practices with Don Brown and Norman Ford, falling asleep on the couch as they played late into the night, then having to get up early for work the next day.

“You went to his rehearsals?” I asked.

“Well, yes,” she explained, “that was the way to be with him.”

Later, John told her that he was “testing her” to see if she could handle the musician lifestyle. It occurred to me at this point in our conversation that Betty wasn’t thinking about her career versus John’s career, it was just their lives together and a life around music that they both loved. They listened to records together, they wrote songs together, they sang together, and they went to rehearsals and gigs together. Betty played me an old recording that she and John had made of three songs; two they had written together and one she had written. Their voices in harmony over solo banjo gave me chills.

“How has nobody heard these?” I asked. She just shrugged.

It was on the drive home from one of John’s gigs (John was playing in the Ozark Mountain Trio) that Betty first suggested to John that he could consider playing his own songs rather than being a sideman for a band he was bankrolling. He soon began gigging solo and gaining a following. Betty was also the first to hear “Gentle on My Mind,” the song that launched John’s career into Hollywood via Glen Campbell. They had just been to see the movie Doctor Zhivago and Betty put Jamie to bed while John wrote.

“He came downstairs and said, ‘Honey what do you think about this?’ He was so proud of it. And I said, ‘Yes, I really do like it, but what about these two women you’re talking about? Which one am I?’” she laughs.

Some of our conversation revealed disappointing, though typical, attitudes of the time. Although John wanted children, when Jamie and Katie came along, he didn’t cope well with factoring them into his bigger picture. “John wasn’t a hands-on dad, never was,” Betty explained. By this time, Betty and John were both working musicians living in Nashville. They decided that John would pursue his music and Betty would focus on the kids.

When I asked Betty if this bothered her she said, “I agreed to it. I could just feel that he had a real fire to make it happen, more than I did.”

But it wasn’t that John wanted Betty to stay home while he went off on tour. He wanted her right by his side. “He called me one day so excited. We had always talked about going to Europe and he said, ‘Betty, we’re going on tour, 21 days in Europe.’ Well, Katie was six months old at that time and when he called I was holding the phone with one hand and trying to feed her with the other. I said, ‘Okay, well…’ and he said, ‘I thought you’d be more excited!’”

After some argument – John thought they could leave the kids with a babysitter and Betty was not in agreement – they decided that the kids would stay with John’s parents back in St. Louis. But the tour was the beginning of the end of the marriage.

More troubling than John’s absence as a father was the environment of Los Angeles stardom. John had found a new social scene, with actors, groupies, and plenty of weed. It was the early ’70s and John was on TV.

Betty told me about a performance John did at the Playboy Club, after which the two of them got into an elevator only to be squeezed in by several well-endowed “bunnies.” “He came home one day with Carl Gottlieb, a writer for The Smothers Brothers Show, and the two of them were just so happy. Later, he said, ‘Betty, we should smoke some grass together’ and I said, ‘John, I don’t need that stuff.’”

Betty felt John was becoming something she didn’t recognize, something she didn’t want the kids around, and something that they hadn’t planned on for their life together. Betty stayed in Los Angeles for six months after she and John separated, but he hadn’t made much effort to be a part of the kids’ lives, so she took them back to Nashville, a place that she missed terribly.

Betty is religious and refused to stray from her principles for John’s sake, something she feels that John always respected her for. As the years went by, he made more effort to get to know his children, but they were largely raised by Betty. However, this was in no way the end of Betty’s story.

After her kids had grown up, she moved to Alaska where she “worked part time for Statewide Blasting … rigging explosives and blowing stuff up, and flew all over Alaska in a [Piper] Super Cub.” Betty met the true love of her life in Alaska, a man who she married just weeks before he died.

John returned to Nashville and, in some ways, returned to himself. He married Marie Fielder and they lived on the Cumberland River in Madison, Tennessee, until he passed away in 2001.

During the last weeks of his life, Katie and Betty went to visit John. He asked Betty to sing to him and she began singing the old gospel songs that they had learned together. After she went through all that she could remember, he motioned for her to come close to him. He could barely speak but whispered to her, “Life of a Flower.” And she sang to him:

As the life of a flow’r,
As a breath or a sigh,
So the years that we live
As a dream hasten by
True, today we are here
But tomorrow may see
Just a grave in the vale
And a mem’ry of me.

It occurs to me now that John Hartford’s legacy and catalog is in the hands of his daughter, Katie Hogue, who runs his estate. Katie has worked tirelessly to put out records and books of her dad’s fiddle music, partially with the intention of getting to know him posthumously, but also because she believes that his music is a gift to the world.

Though John was unable to factor his family into his creative success, or perhaps they were unwilling to follow that success on his terms, it is the women in his life who continue to support and uplift his career long after his death, just as they did while he was living.

Photos courtesy of Betty Harford-Gilbert via Rachel Baiman.

Suzanne Cox & Brandon Ratcliff Follow Their Inspiration

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

When mother and son Suzanne Cox and Brandon Ratcliff first began posting vertical videos to social media singing harmonies and cover songs together, they were just doing it for fun. Virality hadn’t entered their minds at all. In fact, Ratcliff had almost sworn off the internet, or using social media to advance his artist or songwriting endeavors anymore. Meanwhile Cox had been asking herself, “Am I retired? Does anyone want to hear me sing?”

From their very first videos, the answer was an obvious and resounding yes. The denizens of the internet were apparently starved for Cox’s voice – but of course they were, haven’t we all been? – and were ravenous in their discovery of Ratcliff’s own talents in musicianship and songwriting. Song after song, clip after clip racked up thousands of likes and views, dozens and dozens of new followers (including quite a few celebrities), and built an organic momentum neither artist had ever seen in their music-making careers so far.

Cox, in her late 50s, and Ratcliff, in his early 30s, have both enjoyed numerous successes and accomplishments in roots music. The Cox Family won GRAMMY Awards and IBMA Awards and appeared on the iconic O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, and are routinely named as one of Alison Krauss’s major influences in bluegrass and harmony singing. They are legends. Ratcliff has had record deals, prominent co-writes, his own solo releases, and been on the Nashville singer-songwriter hustle for more than a decade. But the energy behind their mother-son partnership has been unlike anything either have experienced before.

It’s no surprise, though, viewing their many popular videos or listening to their debut EP, Mother/Son Volume 1, released back in April. There’s something special here that can’t just be attributed to blood harmonies or genetic predisposition or God-given talent or “right time, right place.” There are aspects of each of these inputs throughout their current sky-bound trajectory, but the end result is certainly greater than the simple sum of its parts. And it’s landed them on the Grand Ole Opry, while continuing to garner even more views/followers Looking toward the future with excitement, they still let their inspirations and their audience guide them.

BGS sat down with Cox and Ratcliff at a coffee shop in Bellevue, Tennessee, on an afternoon dotted with sprinkling rain to talk about letting go of expectations, where they’re at now, where they’re headed next, and how badly the roots music world had been missing the inimitable voice of Suzanne Cox.

@therealbrandonratcliff I am weary, let me rest #obrotherwhereartthou #gospelmusic #acousticcovers #family #harmony @Suzanne Cox ♬ original sound – brandonratcliff

I wanted to start by going back to the beginning. Making music has been a lifelong thing for y’all. Your exposure to the music of your family, it being a part of the household. It’s a little bit like “chicken or the egg.” Obviously, y’all singing and being together and making music together would be a part of your family since forever. But I imagine there was a transition point when it went from being like, “We’re mother and son and we sing together,” to being, “Oh, there’s something here that maybe we should pursue.”

Suzanne Cox: I’ll have to let you tell that, ’cause you tell it very well, what happened.

Brandon Ratcliff: Thank you. When we started this really, none of [the business side of things] was on our minds. I keep telling people, “This whole thing has been a happy accident.” This has been a rare thing for me, and I don’t know if this is the same thing for Mom and them [the Cox Family], ’cause it was a different time. But for me, everything I’ve done in Nashville – for the most part, in the business – has felt a little bit like my dad always says, “Pushing a rope up a hill.” [Laughs] It’s like I’m putting so much effort into making something happen. And this [duo] thing kinda felt, for the first time ever, like we were constantly playing catch-up to what was reacting just naturally. Which has been very fun and has made us move very fast.

SC: Oh, it’s like we cannot keep up.

BR: We put something out and all of a sudden it starts working incredibly well and the next thing you know we’re like, “We gotta go record this. What are we doing? We’re late already.” That has been very exciting, fun, refreshing. The other thing is, too, having this kinda direct-to-consumer thing, where you post a video online and it resonates with people – which by the way, just even that was a surprise to us. Mom and I have talked for years about doing a project together or something. But it was mostly just for us. It was just for fun.

SC: “Someday.”

BR: “Someday we’ll do this thing. One day…” [It started when] I was back home for the holidays and we were together anyway, and singing and hanging out like we always do. I was like, “Hey, if we’re gonna sing anyway, we should just post some of these online.” Like, why not? And again, totally not thinking about the outcome. Never once considering–

SC: He was kinda done with TikTok for a little while.

BR: I was holding on loosely with the internet in general at this point. I told Mom right before, “Look, I’m not giving up on the internet, but I’d kinda let the idea that the internet would be my path to success [go].” I was like, I’ll still post, but I’m gonna try not to think about if this is gonna make my career. This was the first time I was kinda letting go of that outcome situation, and then we posted – the first thing, it was a song I was singing on the way over to her house. And it was [sings Roger Miller’s “King of the Road”], “Trailers for sale…”

SC: We were probably in Louisiana.

BR: “King of the Road.” I was singing it while I was riding the roads back there. And it did pretty well [online]. Better than most videos I had posted at that point. I was like, “Oh, this is cool,” but nothing gangbusters. But then the next one we did was a song that Mom sang on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? movie, “I Am Weary (Let Me Rest).” Yeah. We just got out there, started singing it.

SC: In front of an old vintage truck.

BR: Sang it five times in front of this old drilling rig truck. I posted it, forgot about it. My daughter’s third birthday party was later that afternoon, so I had to rush back over, get set up. All of a sudden family starts showing up and I’m getting texts from my cousins and people at the house are going like, “Dude, your video’s going viral.” I got no service out there in Louisiana.
It’s like I’m off the internet. Once I post, I’m done. So I get back on there and, sure enough, I’ve never gotten flooded with so many [notifications]. I open my phone up and it’s about to crash. It’s 400,000 views, 500,000 views. And I’m like, “What the…? This is crazy!” So then I tell Mom shortly after that, I gotta go back to Nashville.

And this, to your point, is where it starts going, “Oh wow, this is something.” This is resonating. There was one week where Rosie O’Donnell and Joe Jonas followed me and started reposting my videos. And it just keeps coming, all these people – Emily Ann Roberts, Ashley McBryde. It just kinda kept growing. Then it was immediately obvious to us and then everybody we were working with – like my producers and songwriter friends – something’s happening. The whole thing’s been like this, just accident after accident–

SC: [Smiling] Which I don’t believe is an accident.

BR: No, it’s divinely orchestrated, for sure. Very divine. The hand of God is all over this stuff.

SC: Brandon’s been at this [a long time], I [have been] for 52 years. And not really doing as much [lately], really at a point in my life where I’m trying to figure out what I’m doing in this new season. And even in prayer: “God, I’ve had a great career.” And I just thought, “Is it a time where I’m just a wife, a mother, and a grandmother?” Which is the best job. I love it. No regrets on that. No regrets. I was at a point before this all happened of just trying to figure out what my new season is. “Does anybody want to hear me sing anymore?” Still love to sing, but just had a lot going on. I had a real hard time. My husband got really sick in 2021. … And it put a lot of age on us both.

BR: Honestly, I think for us both, this season really came [while] we were both in a season of surrender. This openness – “What could happen? What God may do…”

SC: We answered quickly.

BR: It made the soil fertile for this real, raw passion – a just-living-life kinda thing. And I think it came from that season of surrender.

SC: And I was totally fine with that. I felt a calmness in that.

I hear you both communicating not a sense of giving up, but of letting go. Of realizing, “Maybe this isn’t something I need to clutch so tightly anymore.” And there is a freedom in that letting go.

SC: Yep. I agree. And also for it to be such a connection with other people. And that it resonates with people. And I love – I wasn’t reading any of the comments or anything and finally they called me and said, “Mom, you need to read these. You need to see some of this.” It’s just been such a wonderful thing to read what people say. Even if it’s, “My mamaw’s favorite song.” Or, “I bet you she can cook some good meals.” “Can I be adopted?” I just love that.

I think what stood out to me immediately is there’s something here that feels totally distinct from the Cox Family. Fresh and bright and sparkly in so many ways. But also, I was there on TikTok, y’all were on my FYP when that first video blew up. And I, like so many people who grew up with your voice, Suzanne, realized in that moment how starved I was for it. And then to see the world, all of us who did grow up with your singing have that same reaction – and then so many people who didn’t, too, have that moment of, “Who the hell is this?!” That was special to watch happen, even from the outside. Would you have ever believed people were waiting around for you to “come back”?

SC: No, I would not. And like I was telling you, a lot has gone down the pipe since then. It was a lot of heartache that I’ve gone through. We lost our dad in 2019 – so a lot of different issues. So yeah, at some point I was just thinking, “Does anybody ever even want to hear me singing?” I did. I went there. “Do I wanna hear myself sing anymore?” It wasn’t that bad, it wasn’t like I’m bawling in the bathroom or anything.

But we all have those thoughts.

SC: But we do! And it can get to your confidence, because you think that’s something in the past. For me, it was a good run [back then], and it’s been quite a gift for me to hear [the response now].

@therealbrandonratcliff I feel like I’m in a creaky old pew right now #sunday #hymns #hymnfortheweekend #motherson #familyharmony @thesuzannecox ♬ original sound – brandonratcliff

There’s something encouraging in how you’re speaking about yourself, because, to me, to somebody on the outside – you’re one of Alison Krauss’s favorite vocalists of all time! Suzanne Cox has the same sort of existential doubt that anyone might have. “Does my voice matter? Does the music I make matter?” And if we could all remind ourselves that’s just being human, we all have that ebb and flow.

SC: That’s right.

I think for so many of the hundreds and thousands of us, we never would have imagined that you would have that sort of doubt.

SC: It’s a little different these days. A lot of people have said, “Is she in retirement now?” I don’t know! Am I? I didn’t say it, but just life happens. As women, too, we wear just as many hats as a man does–

Even more.

SC: You’re a mother, and you’re a grandmother, and you’re fixing problems. I wasn’t heartbroken. I had a life that was good and felt good, I felt a peace about it. But I am delighted to be able to have a new song in my heart.

BR: And for me it wasn’t a shock, of course, because like you’re saying–

SC: Yeah, he’s always been so encouraging– him and his brothers.

BR: I grew up hearing mom sing and always knew she had a world-class voice. I used to hear mom all the time growing up, and me and dad would talk about it. I’d talk about it with my brother. It was like, “If anybody could hear this…”

SC: This might be when you were clueless. [Laughs]

BR: If anybody could just hear Mom singing around the house! And this kind of points to what we’re talking about again, this free space. If you could hear her sing just around the house, when she’s just messing around, you’d be like, “This woman is insanely good at singing.” It’s amazing, and almost even better than anything you hear on a recording.

SC: I feel so uncomfortable with y’all saying that. [All laugh]

BR: But to your point, though, this is a universal thing. I think this is true of a lot of us. That “dance like no one’s watching” mindset. When you don’t care, and you loosen up–

First take magic.

BR: Yes!

SC: If you’re like my sister, there was a lot of them that she did was her scratch vocal. One take!

BR: I tell Mom this all the time, and you learn this over and over with the internet, because posting online, there are diminishing returns the more you polish it. … We do have a tendency as creative people, as performers, to be perfectionists. Nothing’s ever good enough. We’re our worst critics. We all have a little bit of deep insecurities or impostor syndrome.

One of the things I love most about roots music – whether bluegrass or country or Americana or folk – is it’s always asking us to let the imperfections be. That’s why this music is so good. Because you can’t ever get a banjo in tune. Because the music has pocket. Because when you’re singing harmonies with somebody, maybe sometimes you are singing a dissonant note, or you’re singing a flat seven instead of something that’s diatonic, because “that’s how it goes.” Even though it’s got a little ugliness in it. The internet wants everyone to be perfect, but roots music is never perfect.

SC: Yep. Never perfect. Like you said, that’s what makes it really special.

@therealbrandonratcliff Can’t wait for @unclebsdamnedoleopry with @heyuncleb and the gang! April 28th we are honoring #continuum with some insanely talented artists and musicians by singing through some classics from the goat @johnmayer #motherson #cover #harmony #johnmayer @thesuzannecox ♬ original sound – brandonratcliff

I love how you guys are making cross-generational music in so many ways. But one of the ways that evidences itself is that I think this is some of the more “outside” or progressive music I’ve ever heard you sing, Suzanne. You’re really playing with genre in a really interesting way. Whether you’re singing a John Mayer cover or it’s “Far Side Banks of Jordan,” I love seeing how these sort of modern, more pop sensibilities are coming into the music. Then you also how the Cox Family vocal stylings have always had a modern crispness, modern licks, runs, and turns of phrase. How are you thinking about genre and playing with that?

SC: I don’t know. I’ve told Brandon this, I’ve never been one of those [tradition hardliners]. I know you say our sound [was traditional], but Daddy, from the get-go, we were doing [all kinds of styles]. He was very open. We started out old traditional country. We used to do old hayrides before we went into the bluegrass scene. But he introduced us to Don Reno & Red Smiley, plus Merle [Haggard] and Loretta Lynn. I’m getting a lot of people saying [I sound like] Loretta Lynn. She was a hero of mine, so I see that. Of course, Dolly [Parton] and Patsy Cline. But [Daddy] was really open to [different styles], so I was already at a point where I love what I love.

If I can make it sound like me, that’s what I wanna sing. So [the Cox Family] opened up for the Counting Crows. And did Eagles songs and “Blue Bayou.” We listened to classical and anything that we liked – Kenny Loggins, Loggins and Messina. … I’ve done Marvin Gaye, on that last album… It was good that he encouraged us to be able to be open.

BR: I feel like for me – and again, I wouldn’t have probably said this five years ago. I would’ve probably taken some real credit for this and been like, “I think it’s ’cause of me!” I’m young, whatever. But I think that, now, as I get older and I kinda look at the context of my life and what they did and everything, and how she raised me growing up, I kinda think it’s a natural downstream effect. Outside of just how she raised me on music, I grew up in the late ’90s, early 2000s, so I grew up listening to everything. She raised me listening to everything, like Songs in the Key of Life by Stevie Wonder, Hall & Oates, all the stuff she grew up on. But then Backstreet Boys and the rock groups of the ’90s, Sugar Ray – it was just all over the place.

SC: And Don Reno & Red Smiley. [Laughs]

BR: There’s still a box set of Merle Haggard in my truck right now. I’ve listened to all these kinds of things. I grew up with a very diverse listening, and then I was in the iPod generation, so there was the shuffling music. …

I think when we sing something, even as off the beaten path as it is, I think you just innately are you, and I am innately me. It’s fate, we’re mother-son. We kinda have similar tendencies, to notes and a choice of a run here or not there. I think that’s kinda what gives it that common thread. You can take a hard rock song or you can take an old country song, and as long as it’s me and you singing it…

SC: Sometimes it’s a challenge, too. In a good way! …

BR: But whenever I blend with Mom, it’s like I’m learning how to take the thing that I do that’s really distinct and interesting about myself, but also shed some of the other solo stuff to match with her. Because it’s me and Mom, it kinda changes the alchemy of the song a little bit in a really cool way.

One practical impact of you both being at this point in your careers – Brandon, you have already done two or three or four laps around Nashville, trying to get into the scene in the same way most folks do. Suzanne, you had this vibrant career and were asking yourself, “What now?” So, for both of you to then be able to be like, “Actually, we know we don’t have to do it the ‘Music Business’ way. We know we can just do it the way that we’re gonna do it.”

SC: Exactly. I told Brandon, “I’m 59 this year. And at this age you start relaxing a little bit more.” I could relax a little bit more, my son would say. [Laughs] But I’m learning so much, and I don’t think you can [avoid that]. I don’t think people give up. And I feel like I can still learn a lot. I’m learning from my child, I’m learning from this industry. But we always want to be unique.

BR: That’s one of the cool dynamics about being mother-son. We found a niche, I believe, too. … I’ve seen both sides. In the 12 years I’ve been here, it was the old world one minute and then everything was new. I’ve kinda gotten acclimated to this. And I’m always telling Mom, “It’s really funny we share these stories.” ‘Cause there’s stuff to learn from both eras. I’m always telling Mom, “That thing that you see as messy or weird or, ‘Oh, that was embarrassing,’ I go, ‘That’s when I and everyone else see you shine. You’re funny, you’re smart, you’re incredibly talented.'”

That’s something about this new world, the internet world, that is so different from whenever they were coming up. Where everything was kind of media-trained and scrubbed and, “Let’s shave the edges off.” Whereas now I’m telling Mom, “No, that is the goal.” When you are just yourself and I happen to catch it, that’s the thing that people light up for.

In a world where more and more, when you go on the DSPs and you hit shuffle, you might be hearing AI music, having those moments of real humanity are so important. Maybe it’s imperfect, but it’s real and it’s raw. You see so many videos online that are like three singers in a kitchen harmonizing together “impromptu.” You go to the comments and everyone’s saying, “We can hear the auto-tune.” Audiences know what’s real and what’s fake.

SC: Which is fascinating that you say that, because a lot of people have said, “Oh, there’s no way this is just in your backyard.” [Both laugh]

BR: TikTok has a great reverb, if you only knew.

SC: I think it’s funny.

I want people to think I’m tuned when I’m not!

BR: Exactly. [Laughs] I think people are jaded. I think they’re paranoid – to your point about they’re getting fed so much phony stuff. They don’t know what’s real anymore. That’s one of the encouraging things about the world we live in, I think it is increasing the demand for real human authenticity. That is a positive side of this pendulum swinging. People are fed up with this “sounds too perfect” trend. It’s indiscernible from a robot.

Even to the point that there was a girl who commented on this video we did, I posted a backstage video of us at the Opry. She said, “There’s no way this wasn’t studio-recorded before.” I’m sitting here going, “I’ll take it as a compliment.” ‘Cause I felt like I was all over the place in that video! But thank you for thinking that.

I think people are telling on themselves with a lot of the hand-wringing over what to do about AI. Of course I agree, we should be very careful with how we’re proliferating this technology and protect creators’ rights, but also AI is never gonna be able to do what Suzanne Cox’s voice does, right? And I’ve not yet heard a convincing AI bluegrass banjo player. I don’t think it’s coming for our jobs! I hope that what we’re all doing is real and human enough that AI will never come for these jobs.

SC: When they’re all in the coloring book, inside the lines, we’ll color outside … and the rest of us. We’re gonna color outside the lines. …

BR: I’ll say, I think the one thing I’ve learned from this whole experience is there are no rules.

SC: Yeah, exactly.

BR: This whole idea that you gotta post this many times, you gotta do this, you gotta do that… Blah, blah, blah. People will tell you, whether you’re talking about the internet or anything else, they’ll tell you there’s a certain math to it. I’m like, “Man, I don’t know anything about what I’m doing.” My guesses have gotten better, but I’m still clueless. The only thing I can tell you for sure is that you have to follow the pace of your inspiration. As soon as you start doing it because you feel obligated, you’ve already lost.

Photo Credit: Chase Hentges

Waylon Wyatt Leads a New Generation of Country Stars

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

With a raw, gut-wrenching approach to songcraft, Waylon Wyatt is quickly becoming an essential voice in the new generation of Americana artists. Emphasis on “new generation.”

A 19-year-old from the tiny West Arkansas town of Hackett, Wyatt has parlayed a razor-wire vocal and songs written to honor the memory of a lost brother into rising acclaim, first via social media and then on country’s biggest stages. Already a fan of Zach Bryan, Wyatt opened two shows for the superstar at London’s massive BTS festival in Hyde Park in 2025, and since then he’s continued growing.

Gritty anthems to love like “Arkansas Diamond” have been met with massive streaming number and a pair of duets with fellow red-dirt riser Bayker Blankenship set the pace for more singles to come. In June, the young talent was performing as part of CMA Fest when his friend and hero Wyatt Flores invited him to make his Grand Ole Opry debut. And the instinctive songwriter has made huge creative leaps as well.

On his debut album Dustpiles that released on July 17, Wyatt seems to unburden his soul a little more on each craggy, sun-baked, acoustic anthem. But with a long list of big-name collaborators like Ian Fitchuk, Carter Faith, Joe Becker (Sam Barber), Tofer Brown (Tim McGraw, Old Dominion), Anderson East, and Brett Truitt, his signature style is more honed than ever.

Waylon Wyatt spoke with Good Country about where his tunes come from, and where rising fame has him headed.

Tell me a little about home in Arkansas. What’s life like in Hackett?

Waylon Wyatt: Hackett, it’s a map dot for sure. It’s pretty easy to overlook. There’s nothing too crazy. We don’t have any stoplights in my town so I guess you could say it’s pretty go, go, go. But it’s a small town and it’s very homey and I love how peaceful Hackett is. My first time going to Nashville, I was not ready for how just lit up everything would be.

I’m very glad to be where I’m from. Growing up in Arkansas is just a blessing and a half because you have so many people that are so encouraging. I mean, I didn’t grow up with any bullies in my life or anything like that. I had more supporters than I did haters. So I would say that I was pretty well backed up during my whole development of trying to find a career path, especially by my parents. I say they are my biggest fans, but they also are my biggest humblers. My family in general is very good at keeping me grounded and making sure that I don’t get no big head.

You said family’s a big part of your life and I know that’s true, because when I saw you at Basement East [in Nashville], you talked about how you got started after losing your brother. Can you talk a little bit about why that inspired you to start in music?

Yeah, of course. So when I was about eight or nine years old, my brother ended up taking his own life and that just kind of threw me off for the longest time, because I just questioned why. I didn’t really have the knowledge or idea of why that come to be, what was the reason behind it, that kind of stuff. I mean, I was young, so it just didn’t make sense. I’m still kind of figuring those things out. Even now, I’m still questioning as to what directed that to happen. But growing up with it there was kind of a hole in my life, a hole in the family amongst us all, because he was the oldest brother of my family.

Later on, I got into music through learning guitar, because my older brother was a guitarist. He was a musician. He was a good one at that. Wasn’t as much a singer. I don’t think he could carry a lick of a tune whatsoever, but he was a guitarist. When I was younger, I had this fake little electric guitar that if you plucked it, it would make guitar sounds and we would call it our little jam sesh. I would be with him while he was playing and I’d act like I was playing and just riffing off each other. But I like to think that we’re still having our jam sessions now. When I get up on stage and I sing the one song that I wrote directly for him [“Phoning Heaven”], it feels like he’s in that room with me. I think it’s such a beautiful thing that even though it was such a misfortunate and depressing thing that happened … it led me to this music career and to shed light on that for other people that need to hear such things.

I’m sure he’d be very proud of you and how far you’ve come. Is your style kind of close to what he was doing? What kind of music was he into?

Oh man, he was a rocker. I wish I could rock like he did. He was just amazing at riffing.

So were your parents super into outlaw country? Is that why they named you Waylon?

Yeah, my dad was super big into outlaw country. My mom, she’s big into bluegrass and, weirdly enough, heavy metal. That’s her two things. But he was the giver of names. Also, my little brother, his name is Jesse – as in Jessi Colter – and Cole, like Cole Younger [of the James-Younger Gang]. Jesse Cole. My name’s Waylon Wyatt, like Waylon Jennings and Wyatt Earp. It’s just all kinds of things.

That’s cool. Also though, your style is very raw in that acoustic folk-country vein that definitely reminds me of artists like Zach Bryan. Did he make an impact on you?

Oh yeah. I mean the reason I wrote my song called “Arkansas Diamond” was due to a song by Zach Bryan called “Oklahoma Smoke Show.” Oklahoma and Arkansas being so close together, I was like, “Arkansas needs a song about a girl.” And that’s why I started writing that song. It was definitely [the] fuel behind my lyricism, the way he writes his music and the way he depicts a picture through his lyricism as well. His song, “Something in the Orange,” I’m sure that it kind of sparked up my idea of writing “Everything Under the Sun.”

Then I guess it came full circle last summer. You ended up opening for him in London, right? Two nights in Hyde Park and like 70,000 fans each time. What’s going on in your mind in that moment?

I was just kind of bewildered by the fact that I’m all the way in Europe. I mean, I loved that I was playing this thing, but I didn’t know what it was. All I knew was that I was in Europe and I was like, “This is so crazy.”

Yeah. If you thought Nashville was overwhelming, then I’d say London was probably that times a hundred, right?

Definitely. Yeah, it was absolutely insane. The people there were so incredible just to hear talk. I get told I have an accent and I don’t think I do, but those people definitely have an accent. … It was a fun time and I can’t wait to be back. We’re going to be hitting that market later this year too. Not Hyde Park, though.

Tell me a little bit about Dustpiles. This is the album debut. What do you love the most about this thing?

So the reason behind this is just the nostalgic feeling of finding love and losing said love and then rediscovering love. … The reason I love it so much though is just because it’s my biggest work to date and I’m so proud of it because it was putting myself out there, working with other songwriters and other producers that I hadn’t yet gotten to know. There was some that were just not the best hang sessions, and there was some that I’d be like, “All right, I’ll be with you till the day I die,” kind of thing.

It was just the idea of getting out of my comfort zone. But the main theme behind Dustpiles specifically is I was writing this song for my girlfriend saying whatever we go through in life, I want to make sure we become so secure with each other that in the end, we can just be two piles of dust. It’s kind of an eerie sound to it, but it’s basically meaning just finding that one that you love so much you see growing old with each other.

That’s an interesting way of looking at something beautiful, and then it’s also got a bit of a darker side.

Definitely. I don’t know why. I could be the happiest man on earth and I’ll still find a way to write a gut-wrenching lyric.

You’re wrapping up a headline tour pretty soon. That’s a big step to come early in your career. So how’s it going?

So we’re wrapping up the Everywhere Under the Sun Tour pretty soon, but we’ll be starting the debut album tour – my first world tour, Dustpiles World Tour – and I’m super stoked about that. We’re going to be hitting Europe and Australia on this leg. Touring’s been insane. It’s just been crazy. Before even doing all of this, the furthest I’ve been out of home-state was just to the state over, Oklahoma. That’s the furthest I had been. And now I can say I’ve been to Australia, I’ve been to Europe, I’ve been to Scandinavia. That’s probably in Europe, too. I don’t know. But it’s just insane the places I get to go now doing these shows and the people that come to my show and for some reason know the lyrics. I still can’t believe it. I have to preach myself every day I wake up just to see if it’s the reality I’m living right now.

Especially headline shows. I get to act myself and show my true self to the people. I love that so much. And doing these festivals too, one of my favorite things is doing festivals just because I have such an early slot in the day that I get my show over and then I’m just seeing a bunch of other concerts. I’m like, this is awesome. Not only am I seeing a bunch of concerts, but I’m seeing them backstage. So I’m closer to the artist than anybody else.

Speaking of festivals, CMA Fest was a big moment, right? You ended up getting invited to make your Grand Ole Opry debut from your buddy, Wyatt Flores. The look on your face was just utter shock, kind of bewilderment. So what was going on in your head, and how’s it feel to make this Opry debut?

I’ll tell you right now, it was such a big deal. Had it been anybody else, it would’ve been a big deal, too. But being Wyatt, it was the biggest deal it could have been just because Wyatt Flores happens to be the very first live show I ever got to witness. It was at Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was such a big deal because I had never been able to go to a live show before. We didn’t have a lot of money. We didn’t have a lot of time on our hands to be able. My dad does his own construction company. My mom, she’s a mail carrier, so they’re always gone and out doing their own thing. And we kids were just kind of stuck at the house.

His agents had reached out when I had slowly started making waves on the TikTok and that’s how we got the ability to go to a show. And sometime down the line, I met him in a VIP lounge and the first thing after talking to him he gave me his phone number and told me, “If you ever have trouble on the road, just call me and text me.” And later that year, too, I had opened for him for a few shows and then later down the line also we put a song out. So it was just kind of like a gradual circling of each other.

It was also connecting the dots just from him. I think Turnpike [Troubadours] told him [about his Opry debut], so it was one of his idols telling him, and it was my idol, too. Just kind of passing on the torch. I’ll tell you right now, I was doing my best to not tear up. I’m not a very emotional man – except in my lyricism – but there that day I was gutted and I was trying my best not to cry. I took my glasses off because the sun started going down and I told him right in the mic, I was like, “Yep,” then “Thanks for coming!”

Photo Credit: Cole Silberman

The Origins and Evolution of Jamgrass – And Where It Goes From Here

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Whether it’s Bill Monroe, Sam Bush, Sister Sadie, or Billy Strings, bluegrass has always pushed boundaries. At the forefront of that movement sits jamgrass, which brings together a barrage of influences performed with grassy, stringed arrangements and an improvisational sensibility that makes each song and show feel like a living organism – and results in each performance having its own qualities and quirks.

However, despite many tying the origins of jamgrass to ’90s upstarts like Leftover Salmon and Yonder Mountain String Band, its roots actually go back at least a half-century – and in some cases to the very origins of bluegrass music itself.

“When Bill Monroe started the Blue Grass Boys and they came on the Grand Ole Opry with that band, they were so far removed and different from other string bands of that same era even though they had the same instrumentation,” says Bush. “They were light years ahead of all the rest of the music on the Grand Ole Opry in terms of progressiveness and innovation, so in his own way Bill Monroe was a rebel. The Opry audience was just astounded with the way they played, and then when Bill introduced a great fiddler like Chubby Wise and the banjo playing of Earl Scruggs, that’s what kicked what we call bluegrass into gear.”

That same trailblazing spirit of Monroe could also be found in Bush himself several decades later, with the formation of the Bluegrass Alliance and, shortly after, New Grass Revival. The latter went against the grain of traditional bluegrass in nearly every way imaginable, from covers of Jerry Lee Lewis, Bob Marley, and The Beatles to their long hair and the tie-dye they dressed themselves in. All more akin to Deadheads and the hippie movement than bluegrass at the time. Per Bush, the group was inspired by bands that had already deviated from the old-time ways of bluegrass like the Osborne Brothers, Jim & Jesse, the Country Gentlemen, the Dillards, the Greenbriar Boys, Area Code 615, and even John Hartford – who he’d later pay tribute to with his 2022 album Radio John.

That being said, New Grass Revival and the movement they helped spark also held the tradition of bluegrass in as high regard as anyone, even as the band pushed the music in a direction it had never been before. “We always said that if you want to play newgrass, you first have to know how to play bluegrass,” recalls Bush.

The band’s rise gave way to the progressive leaning newgrass movement that saw an influx of outside influences and experimentation flood into the music that Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys made famous, with one of the most notable being Leftover Salmon. Formed in 1989 – the same year New Grass Revival first broke up – in Boulder, Colorado, Salmon brought together acoustic and electric arrangements with percussion to create an offshoot of newgrass they coined “Cajun slamgrass.” The outfit’s hybrid sound was an instant hit, and by the early ’90s the band found itself on the H.O.R.D.E tour with rock and jam bands like Phish, Widespread Panic, Spin Doctors, and Blues Traveler. This further connected the worlds of bluegrass and jam, resulting in what many refer to as the official launch of the jamgrass movement later in the decade when Yonder Mountain String Band burst onto the scene.

In fact, Yonder’s bassist, Ben Kaufmann, recalls attending that H.O.R.D.E tour and credits it for sending him down the rabbit hole of bluegrass. But being from Boston and growing up a Deadhead, he knew that any music he’d go on to create would be radically different from what had come before it.

“We didn’t grow up in the rural South,” explains Kaufmann. “We were suburban kids, which was critical to whatever Yonder ended up achieving. If we weren’t, the band likely would’ve leaned much more traditional. We thought the music of Flatt & Scruggs, Bill Monroe, and the Stanley Brothers were the coolest things ever, even though it was born out of an environment that’s not ours.

“That, combined with the influences of our formative years, helped to mold our own little version of what a bluegrass band could be, even though not everyone thought it was the ‘right’ way to play it. For a while the bluegrass community didn’t want any part of us, which made me realize that if people weren’t going to invite us to their party that we’d create our own, which is exactly what we did.”

From there, Yonder integrated their high-strung and energetic live show even more than the jam band circuit, piecing together the foundations of what would soon become the jamgrass scene in the process. That momentum reached a fever pitch for the band in the late 2000s when the band was headlining bigger rooms than it ever had before and landing opening slots on arena tours with the Dave Matthews Band and Widespread Panic, similar to the gigs New Grass Revival had opening similar venues for Leon Russell in 1979.

Thinking back on that era of the band, Kaufmann says it made him understand the full potential of what jamgrass and bluegrass could achieve if given the opportunity, which he says is now being realized with artists like Billy Strings, Mountain Grass Unit, and others.

“Even in the late aughts when Yonder was at max room capacity and opening these arena shows, we wondered if bluegrass would ever work in rooms this big. And, to our amusement, it did – you just needed to fill the venue with the right people. We didn’t know if that would be us headlining those places one day, but playing those gigs showed us it was something that could happen.

“With that in mind, it’s no surprise to see a young gun like Billy Strings come along and set the world on fire. In the little amount of time we’ve spent together it was obvious that he is a special talent, so observing his rise and all he’s done for this kind of music has been mind-blowing.”

Yonder’s success lit a spark for the jamgrass movement that’s been burning ever since, with countless performers crediting the band for the influence they’ve bestowed upon them. One of those people is Kyle Tuttle, who grew up following the band around on tour in the early 2000s before eventually landing a spot playing in founding member Jeff Austin’s band after Austin departed Yonder in 2014.

“I was just starting to see real bluegrass and already loved the Grateful Dead, so when Yonder Mountain String Band came along and overlapped with those two worlds, it was like a dream come true,” Tuttle explains. “I’d been seeing all these suit-and-tie bands playing straight bluegrass and loved it, but at the same time I was also wondering where I fit into it. Then Yonder pops up and it feels like what I’d been waiting my whole life to discover.”

Tuttle played his first gig with the Jeff Austin Band in 2016 and remained in the group up until the singer’s untimely death in 2019. He went on to perform with the GRAMMY Award-winning Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway from 2021 to early 2025. Now he leads his own collective, the Kyle Tuttle Band, where he intertwines original compositions with traditional bluegrass covers and other off-the-wall influences as he puts his own spin on what jamgrass is.

“It’s a common perspective for people to not want you to mess with their bluegrass and tradition, whereas the jamgrass world tends to be more wide open,” admits Tuttle. “Fans nowadays are ready to hear whatever interesting mashup you create, which makes for a really nice union.”

With how wide open the jamgrass has become, even bands outside its periphery have found their way into the community from time to time. Take Fruition for example, a band that began busking on the streets of Portland over 15 years ago with a mix of string instruments and a poppy folk sound that sits on the far outer reaches of the jamgrass spectrum. Similar to how Yonder struggled to be embraced by the bluegrass community in its early days, Fruition’s Kellen Asebroek said it was the jamgrass community that first embraced and welcomed the band when nobody else would. “There’s no telling where we’d be if they hadn’t welcomed us into their family.”

“I was introduced to [jamgrass] in 2002 before I even knew what it was,” recollects Asebroek. “My uncle was a big Leftover Salmon fan and gave me an audience recording from the ’90s to listen to that left me in awe wondering what the hell it was they were doing. I grew up in more of a punk, reggae and classic rock world, so that was the first time I heard something remotely grassy. It wasn’t until we started Fruition and were busking on the street that people began referring to us as a jamgrass band. That being said, Fruition tends to be on the more structured side, so much so that I wouldn’t even call ourselves a jam band. We’ve always been in a unique place in that world in the sense that the jamgrass community is who took us in as babies and showed us around even though we were on the fringes of it.”

Also on the fringes of jamgrass is Daniel Donato, who began picking country and bluegrass tunes on Nashville’s Broadway strip as a teenager before launching his own project, Cosmic Country, in 2015 after seeing shapeshifting country singer Sturgill Simpson at the Ryman. The sound that grew out of that moment is equal parts Simpson and the Dead, but Donato says that bluegrass legends like Bill Monroe are also critical to what he creates as well, even though he utilizes mostly electric instrumentation.

“Jerry Garcia also had a really sophisticated understanding and appreciation for bluegrass music,” compares Donato. “The arrangements of the Dead were not succinctly bluegrass, but there was a ton of bluegrass influence that went into the way he played, especially with Old & In The Way and the Jerry Garcia Band. My goal has been to tap into a similar feeling, but with a slightly more prominent country twang.”

Someone else who’s spent plenty of time in the jamgrass scene despite not always producing music that would be categorized as such is Sierra Hull. The mandolin prodigy grew up on a heavy dose of traditional bluegrass in East Tennessee, with acts like Blue Highway, the Seldom Scene, and Lonesome River Band being the soundtrack of her youth. While she’s tended to lean more towards “chambergrass” and singer-songwriter styles in her adult life, she also takes plenty of time to let loose and jam, whether it’s stretching out her own material or joining artists like Cory Wong, the String Cheese Incident, Greensky Bluegrass, Béla Fleck, and Sam Bush on stage. The latter of whom she credits – along with luminaries like Peter Rowan and David Grisman – for planting the seeds that later grew to become jamgrass.

“For people like me, [Sam] was such a huge gateway to a lot of these other musicians who were really open-minded about what they played and who they collaborated with,” confides Hull. “Coming from a more traditional background, what I’ve enjoyed most about getting out to these bluegrass and jam festivals [is] mixing it up with folks. I’ve become a fan of jamgrass from seeing it all happen up close, rather than having grown up on albums – which I feel is the case for a lot of fans of jam music. The recorded music is still awesome, but the live shows are where the spirit and energy of jamgrass truly live.”

Hull continued, stressing how despite the current momentum behind jamgrass it’s still a very niche genre that nobody gets into expecting to become famous from it, which makes the heights Billy Strings and others are taking it to that much more mesmerizing.

“There’s something really cool about seeing folks who maybe don’t know who Bill Monroe or Doc Watson is, but they can go to a Billy show and immediately connect to the authenticity of what the music is,” exclaims Hull. “We live in a day and age where people are ripping on their pedals and doing more progressive stuff than they ever have before with string music, but at the same time most all of these bands have their moments where they throw that all away and just play a straight-up bluegrass tune. Seeing people resonate with that is central to what this music is and does.”

Another woman staking out a career in and around jamgrass is Lindsay Lou, who first discovered the subgenre witnessing the early days of Greensky Bluegrass performing in Michigan. Although she’d already been vaguely familiar with Yonder and Leftover Salmon, Lou credits Greensky’s sound and proximity to her as the driving factors for introducing her not just their music, but jamgrass as a whole.

“Greensky was my gateway to the jam world, because we were both part of the same scene,” says Lou. “I started hanging with them and soon found myself at festivals with other like-minded bands that sent me diving into the music of the Grateful Dead and others.”

One of those artists she wound up connecting with was a young Billy Strings, who she’d grow close with and later live across the street from in Nashville. The two would even go on to co-write a number of songs together including “Freedom” and “Nothing’s Working,” which both appeared on Strings’ albums Home and Renewal, as well as the latter appearing on Lou’s Queen Of Time. “It’s been really cool having written songs with Billy and hearing him perform them to arenas packed with 30,000 all singing along.”

“It’s no surprise to me that Billy has brought so many people to jam and bluegrass music in the same way that Yonder and Greensky did for so many before him, including Billy himself,” she stresses. “It’s been so much fun watching a young hippie kid like him take a traditional song to places you never thought it could go due to him embracing the musical conversation that jam music is centered around.”

Someone at the heart of the Billy Strings phenomenon is Jarrod Walker, who’s played mandolin in the Michigander’s band since 2018. Similar to Sam Bush, Walker believes the roots of jamgrass can be traced all the way back to Bill Monroe, due to how he took popular songs of the day and breathed new life into them with stringed arrangements – similar to how modern day jam bands pull from influences far and wide to create something entirely new. And although he credits Sam Bush as being a central figure for the movement, he also holds the Seldom Scene – who recorded an extended version of the Grateful Dead’s “I Know You Rider” (simply called “Rider”) on its 1973 album Act III – in a similarly high regard.

“There have been a smorgasbord of different influences in jamgrass from the very beginning with Irish and English music and gospel and blues – all of it was an integral part of what Bill Monroe originally did,” says Walker. “Then someone like Jerry Garcia comes along and follows Monroe like people would soon be following the Dead, which led to Old & In The Way, continuing the prophecy that’s still playing out to this day.”

But even as that prophecy continues to play out, Walker is amazed by where it’s taken not just the Billy Strings band, but string music as a whole. Having been accustomed to gigging at performance art centers and other smaller, seated venues for most of his pre-Billy picking days, he says that the experience of performing at rock clubs and now arenas with fans going crazy for bluegrass music has been mind-boggling and a phenomenon he’ll never stop being captivated by.

“[Playing arenas] is something none of us saw coming and is a combination of being at the right place at the right time and the contributions of everyone who came before us that paved this path for us to do it,” states Walker. “Billy is also a fantastic musician and student of bluegrass whose love for the music combined with his other influences is emblematic of the cohesion that is core to jamgrass and everything it stands for.”

Like all forms of music, jamgrass is a living, breathing organism that is constantly evolving and bringing new ideas and influences to the table. Whether it’s traditional and progressive bluegrass or rock, blues, punk, soul, country and everything in between, it all has a place in the jamgrass setting and is without a doubt the biggest driving factor of the genre’s success. It truly is a “rising tide lifts all boats” scenario that may have been a long time coming to arrive, but now that it’s here and thriving shows no signs of departing anytime soon.

“It took a long time for listening tastes to catch up with this kind of music and these instruments, but it’s no surprise to me that someone as talented as Billy is having the success he’s having,” declares Bush. “It’s only natural that the music is going to grow, and it’s in a really healthy place right now. But even with the rise of jamgrass you still have good ole Del McCoury leading the pack with his Bill Monroe style of bluegrass, and the same audience that loves jamgrass loves him too.”

Continue exploring our Jamgrass in July coverage here. This content brought to you in partnership with Preston Thompson Guitars.

Photo Credit: Sam Bush courtesy of Crossover Touring; Sierra Hull courtesy of the artist; Ben Kauffman courtesy of Crossover Touring.

Thomas Csorba is Bringing Tender Country Back

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Thomas Csorba’s new album, Tender Country, is a tip of the hat to a gentler time in country music, when songs about family life and nostalgia were easier to find on the radio dial.

For this album, his fourth, Csorba (pronounced Chor-ba) drew songwriting inspiration close to home – specifically his wife and two young sons. Raised in Houston, Csorba naturally found an early affinity for Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, and Don Williams, all of whom came up in that city’s live music scene. In 2019, Csorba graduated with an English degree from Baylor University in Waco, Texas. It’s no surprise that his literary leanings are evident in his lyrics, while his low-key vocals fit right in with his musical heroes.

“I’m obsessed with Don Williams, and what I love about Don is that it sounds like he’s sitting down on every recording, every vocal delivery,” Csorba says. “The thought and spirit behind this album was like, ‘Let’s make a record like those Don Williams records that I want to listen to when I’m doing laundry.’ I’m not in the business of making ‘exciting music,’ or what the world says is exciting. What’s exciting to me is something disarming and something thoughtful.”

Now based in Dallas, Csorba will hit the road later this summer with fellow Texas artist David Ramirez. In the meantime, calling in from a family vacation in Colorado, Csorba chatted with Good Country about his responsibility to share good music with his kids, the revelation of Tony Rice, and his long-held Grand Ole Opry aspirations.

I like that kind of comfortable, relaxed feeling on this record. What was the vibe in the studio during these sessions?

Thomas Csorba: It’s funny how relaxed and comfortable it was, in contrast with how quickly we worked. Most people would think that when you’re trying to record 10 songs in two days it’d be pretty uptight and stressful, but the goal was really like, “Hey, I got two extra days, let’s go record whatever we can.” Because I felt so comfortable with the guys, because I felt so comfortable in the studio, and because the players are so damn good, I was able to say, “Hey, here’s the next song.” Everybody charts it and I’m like, “All right, you want to try it?” And by the third take, it’s like, “All right, that feels good.”

Obviously, we live in a world of perfect and auto-tune and Melodyne and AI integration into Pro Tools. And, for better, for worse, I can’t understand how and why. I just can’t see myself getting into that. I don’t have the time or energy, so I’d much rather turn and burn with guys in the band, overdub a couple things, and what comes out of it is like, “Oh, this feels nice.”

I was curious about “Homemade Margaritas,” because to me it sounds like the spirit of Guy Clark and “Homegrown Tomatoes.” Was he an influence on you?

Yeah, absolutely. When I was a kid, my mom sang Willie Nelson songs to me. The mother-son dance at my wedding was “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” She’s a Texas gal and loved Jerry Jeff Walker and Willie and all those guys. She knew about Guy, but my older brother, Will, who’s a phenomenal old-time player, who’s wicked smart and wicked talented – he’s the kind of guy that’s frustrated with me and doesn’t think I’m cool because I have words in my songs. He’s quite the purist, but he was the one who introduced me to Townes Van Zandt’s music when I was 14 or 15 years old. And my parents are rolling their eyes, thinking the older brother’s corrupting Thomas.

I fell in love with Townes and my brother was like, “Great, if you like Townes, you’ve gotta like Guy and Blaze Foley and Rodney Crowell.” Then I went down that deep dive and his response to that, he just kind of walked through with me and said, “If you like all these guys, and if Townes is your favorite and Guy is your favorite, you’ve got to like the people they were obsessed with.” So, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Blind Willie McTell, and this kind of lineage.

I don’t know how relevant this is, but the big through-line there is that everything I love, in some way, comes from the bedrock that is Black American music. Guy certainly embodies that, Townes certainly embodies that. Guy was a big influence, and Texas Cookin’ is one of my favorite records of all time. Especially on “Homemade Margaritas,” I’m like, “Man, let’s do something fun like that.” … Anything I can do as a songwriter to have somebody listen to my record and be like, “Oh, this reminds me of Texas Cookin’,” mission accomplished in my book.

Since Good Country is on the Bluegrass Situation, I do have to ask about “Tony Rice & Beans.”

Hell yeah! I wrote that song with Matt Tedder. He plays guitar for me and he’s a phenomenal thumbpicker. He can play Western swing stuff. He played all over my record, has toured with me, and has been a dear friend for ages now. Matt knows the songbook. If I get booked for a private gig, and I know I’m gonna have to play covers, I bring Matt because he knows every word to every Merle Haggard song, and I can just sit there in a cowboy hat and strum.

He can tell where I am musically and what I want musically and point me in the right direction. All that to say, over the past 10 years, especially, a lot of our heroes from the ‘70s, who made those recordings that I love, have passed away. Jerry Jeff and Merle and obviously Tony Rice. For half of these folks, like in memoriam, it’s like, “I’m going to go listen to Jerry Jeff today,” in honor of Jerry Jeff, and I know exactly what deep cut I want to listen to.

Other people of that era have passed away, and I’ve been like, “Man, I know ‘Church Street Blues,’ but why have I not done the deep dive?” That was Tony Rice for me. When he passed, I did the deep dive, and Matt was there to hold my hand and point me to the right records and tell me what to listen for, because I’m much less musically advanced, as a way to put it. So, he pointed me through those records and I just fell in love. It made me want to start trying to practice guitar again, and get better flat-picking, which I am still a beginner at.

I think it’s because I was so new to the idea of Tony Rice that I was like, “Why is there no song called ‘Tony Rice & Beans’?” So, Matt and I wrote that tune and tried to shoehorn about as many references from the country and American songbook as we could. In Matt’s favorite line, the fact that we fit “The mule and the grasshopper are eating ice cream” from “Stay All Night, Stay a Little Longer,” from Bob Wills and Willie… It’s like, “What the hell does that line mean?” I don’t know, but there it is in my song, too.

Is it fair to say that one of the obligations of fatherhood is introducing your kids to good music?

Oh, totally! Maybe this is hyperbole, but I’ll say it anyway: There’s no better feeling as a father than your kids sitting in the back seat and saying, “Dad, can we listen to ‘Working on a Building’ but the Stanley Brothers’ version?” It’s like, ‘Dude, you’re not even four. Why do I want to cry right now?” Our oldest son turns four in July, and he’s requesting Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt and the Trio records, and loves Doc Watson.

Obviously he wants annoying brain rot songs, as well. There’s this song called “Chicken Banana” that he’s obsessed with that’s just terrible. We listen to soundtrack stuff and even in movies, it’s like, “Yeah, let’s watch Robin Hood, and let me tell you about Roger Miller.” It makes it much more enjoyable for me. … I think our kids need to listen to stuff they don’t understand, and I think they need to sit there in adult conversations about music and about art that they may not understand. But they’ll sit there and they’ll absorb it.

I just think my responsibility as a parent is to put the right things in front of them and bring them alongside of where I am creatively, where I am socially, and not draw the line between what Dad listens to and “Dad music,” and what the kids listen to and what “kid music” is. Because it’s unfair to them. It’s unfair to me, too. So, that’s my spiel on kids listening to good music.

I did want to ask about “He Would’ve Loved This.” In country music, there are a lot of songs where Dad is talking about the lessons he’s learned, or saying something with wisdom, but this song has a list of action items that show love. He’s trimming the trees and checking the gravy, and so on. Who were you thinking about when you wrote that song?

I was thinking of my granddad. We called him Papa. He passed away when I was in high school. My oldest son carries his name, which is really sweet. The guy was a chain smoker since he was 12 years old, and worked drywall in Canada after he moved over from Hungary. He’s got this amazing story, and because of his history and his background, his whole spirit was kind of like, “Isn’t this awesome?” Even the little things. And that permeated through all of his life.

You know, he was certainly a crotchety old man at times, but there was a sense of gratitude that was kind of unfathomable, literally. I couldn’t understand it, even if I tried, just because of where he came from. All he wanted was to survive and start a family one day, and there he was watching me grow up and taking me to baseball practice, and trying to correct my attitude on the golf course as a 10-year-old. It’s like, the fact that he was there embodied that gratitude.

So, as my wife and I are watching our boys grow up doing all these menial, seemingly throwaway things, I have to remind myself that if Papa was here, he would be beaming with joy.

You’re not even 30 years old yet, and I know time passes fast, but do you consider yourself to be a nostalgic or sentimental person?

Yeah, I’m a “hoarder lite.” I hang on to things. On this record cycle, I’ll be transparent here, it’s like my big dream – if there’s any record I’ve put out so far, this is the one that would bring me to the Opry. I think it just fits the spirit of the history of the Opry. That’s been a dream for a long time. I’ve wanted to do that, and my manager and I talk about it, literally, every phone call.

The other day, my wife said, “I understand the historical significance, but what’s the deal? Why do you want to do the Opry so bad?” In the same way I talk about these records being handed down to my kids, I was kind of like, “I really want to have done it. I really want my kids to be like, ‘Dad played the Opry!’” Not to look cool, but mostly as a nostalgic thing, to get them to come and stand side stage, whether they understand it or not.

Those moments of nostalgia, in conjunction with the moments of nostalgia around the house, paint a really idealized, probably, but really beautiful picture of what I am up to, what I want to do, and how I want to show my kids I’m going about life.

Photo Credit: Alex Csorba

The Gentle Genius of Don Williams Sees Daylight Again

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

It’s the age-old dream of the music fan: To unearth old recordings from a favorite artist, laid down in their prime and never heard. And with Epilogue: The Cellar Tapes from the late Don Williams, the dream is 100 percent real.

Capturing the famed Gentle Giant of country music at his creative zenith, 12 new tracks revive one of the format’s most soothing voices, nearly a decade after his passing. Inducted into both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Grand Ole Opry, Williams’ soft-spoken manner underpinned 17 Number Ones between 1972 and 1992, with enduring hits like “Tulsa Time,” “I Believe in You,” and “Lord, I Hope This Day Is Good” showcasing his simple style. It’s been said that country music is three chords and the truth – but Don Williams could do it with two.

After his 2017 passing, Williams’ son Tim went down to the family’s cellar and came back with a treasure trove of tapes, recorded during his dad’s creative peak. Languishing in the dark for 40+ years, they were surprisingly complete. The younger Williams was stunned.

“I was like 12 or so when these things were cut,” he says.

He then turned to the work’s original producer, Garth Fundis, and together they’ve added a remarkable new chapter to a legendary story, which fully lives up to the Williams legacy. Like a window back to a different era, the icon’s tender vocal is in fine form, while a long-gone, patient production style recalls a time in country music when quiet wisdom was a selling point, and men could share feelings directly – no clever turn of phrase necessary.

Williams and Fundis spoke with Good Country about taking the project on, the memories it brought back, and how the Don Williams legacy stacks up in 2026.

I think this story is amazing. This is some really great music that I’m glad people will get to hear. But tell me off the top, why were these songs never released?

Garth Fundis: No particular reason other than when you’re making a record, sometimes you cut more songs than you need. … You might have a song or two songs that sound kind of similar and it might get pushed aside for something else. I think that was the case in most of these. They weren’t things we didn’t like, because there’s strings on some of the [original] stuff and percussion, and those were usually the last things we put on a record.

The intention was there to probably use them, but for one reason or another, something outshined a song we were considering. I remembered all these once I heard them again and remembered working on them, and it’s not like they were bad songs. They just got set aside and then we went on to the next project.

Tim, could you tell us how you became aware of the recordings? Were they stashed somewhere hard to find?

Tim Williams: No, not at all. We have a root cellar at our house that I live in now – the same house that I grew up in – and I knew [Don] had put some stuff down there. They were the big two-inch tapes, like 16-track tapes down there, and I just basically hadn’t thought anything else about them. And I didn’t think anything about them, until recently when my dad’s manager, Robert Pratt, wanted to see what was there. He wondered what was left – what we could transfer digitally, and just see if there was anything usable and viable to release.

Your dad passed away in 2017. What did it feel like to play the tapes that first time? Songs are an intimate thing and an artist has to be vulnerable to capture them.

TW: Well, when Robert was talking to me about doing this, I was pretty lukewarm about it, to be honest. Then we got the actual multi-track rendering and opened them up in Pro Tools, when I heard the vocal tracks, I just thought “That’s just so good.” It’s just right during his primo sweet spot of where his voice was during his career [high]. At that point I was pretty determined that we should carry it to fruition.

So you were a little bit skeptical. Is that because you didn’t want to put anything out that wasn’t up to your dad’s standards?

TW: Yeah, for sure.

GF: That’s where I came from, too. I was hesitant. But Tim said, “Come on out here and hear this stuff.” I remember the songs, I remember recording them with Don. But hearing that voice again, crystal clear and in his prime, it got me hooked. I said, “Yeah, I’m in.”

That’s what’s interesting here. I think when most people hear about a project like this, they might assume these were songs that didn’t quite make the grade. But that’s not the case at all.

GF: I hope you feel that way. That’s the way we feel about it. We think other people will think that, too.

Tim, you were so young when your dad was in his prime. Did this make you see him in a different light?

TW: Well, really it just reinforced what I thought. When you’re listening to the absolute raw audio and there’s nothing between the voice and the microphone and the board, and it’s just as raw as you can get, it proves how technically good a singer he was. It might’ve bolstered that thought.

Garth, you’ve mentioned a couple times now that you remembered cutting these original tracks back in the day. What was it like to start working on them again? Do you remember that first day?

GF: It was just like hearing an old friend again. And like Tim said, just to be able to pull that vocal up and listen to it all by itself without the band and the track and everything around it. … It was really fun to hear that familiar voice and hear just how good it was. To have worked with him and to hear the quality of his voice, the simplicity of how he sang – he didn’t shout, he just kind of framed the song. He always wanted the song to be the focus and not to get above it.

How much did you actually have to change from the original recordings?

TW: The stuff that survived, we used as they were. Garth doesn’t know this. I don’t guess I might’ve shared this with you, Garth. The only thing I had to move at all to get it to lock in, was “Leaving Louisiana [in the Broad Daylight].”

Really?

TW: Yeah, we had to replace so much on that track that I did wind up quantizing that one. The only thing that survived the transfer was Daddy’s vocal and Danny Flowers’ harmonica.

GF: When I first heard what Timmy had done to the track and how the guys had worked to replace a lot of those instruments, I wasn’t involved with that part yet. But I remember thinking, “Well, this isn’t anything like the original track we got. This is so much better.”

TW: But everything else, if the bass part, piano, or whatever survived the transfer and hadn’t deteriorated from sitting in a root cellar for 40 years, we used it.

Garth, you mentioned the simplicity of the way Don sang. It’s so nice to hear that today. Plus, heartfelt country songwriting that’s not trying to be too clever or edgy. Do you think it’s good for the genre to remember that?

GF: I think so. I applaud anyone’s success and good for them. But Don was not a person who needed to shout or sing so hard that he was trying to convince you of a performance, or convince you in any way that would help the song. He came from a folk music background. So he was accustomed to just being easy. Let the song shine through. And, that you cut good enough songs you don’t have to shout. Not only did he have a gentle manner, he had a gentle manner with the microphone and I was able to put the microphone right up next to his mouth. That’s why you get this intimate feeling when you’re hearing him sing – because he’s not shouting, he’s singing.

Which one of these is the most impactful song in your point of view?

TW: Well, there are two or three. I remembered when Daddy originally cut “I’m the One.” I loved it then and I was hoping that was going to be one of the songs that was on these tapes we found. I was thrilled about that. As far as what I like, just consistently enjoy going back and listening to? Because of Daddy’s vocal, it’s “How Can I Miss What I Never Had?” I just think of everything, if you wanted to play for an alien what Don Williams sounded like, I would play that one.

GF: I’d go along with Tim on “I’m the One.” Don’s feel, what he thinks about, how he feels about music, everything about it, is in that song. And fortunately, somehow Tim didn’t really hear the original version of “I’m the One” until I showed up one day with a tape copy of how it was originally recorded. I said, “Hey, have a listen to this.” And we liked both versions so much we just had to keep both of them on the album.

How did he feel about music? What do you mean by that?

GF: I would say he always felt so strongly about trusting the song. If you’ve got to go to the trouble finding something that you can sing, and feels like it belongs in your repertoire, that was the first thing he looked for when he was searching for songs that would feel like him. It had to feel like it’s something he could say and it had to have a good melody to it, and just don’t get above your raisin’. So just take it easy and frame the song.

I did want to ask you about “Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight.” That song became a Number One for The Oak Ridge Boys just after Don recorded it. It was in that same era. So Garth, do you remember why he cut that?

GF: Well, we listened to that song a bunch before we cut it and when we finally started in on it. … We had redone the vocal, I know, because there’s rapid-fire lyrics. It took him a little while to get comfortable with it. It wasn’t necessarily his style, but we put a lot into that, working on that song and then not knowing that The Oak Ridge Boys were coming out with it as a single.

Is that right?

GF: We were working on it about the same time they were finishing it. Don was on the same record company and the same booking agent that worked with The Oak Ridge Boys, and somehow we missed knowing about that. So we kind of stepped aside and just put that one away for safekeeping. Now 30, 40 years later, I’m not thinking about The Oak Ridge Boys record. Congrats to them for the Number One record, but it kind of foiled our plans at one point. Tim and the musicians built a great new track for that song. [Co-writer] Rodney [Crowell] was really tickled when I played it for him. He said, “It was even better than my version.”

Do you think there are any more songs to unearth down in that cellar?

TW: Nope, that’s it.

When this project was announced you said Don would’ve been proud of it. What would he want listeners to take away?

GF: Don always was asked that question, “What do you want people to think about your music?” I often heard him say, “I want people to feel something.” So in the way he communicated a song to the listener’s ear, I think that was first priority for him.

Tim, how about you?

TW: Well, along those same lines, everything started and was sustained throughout the whole process by the song. If it was a good song, regardless of genre, the way it was approached or whatever, a good song delivered authentically was going to be appealing to people. These are just more examples of that, and I think he would expect people to be moved by a song delivered authentically.

Photo Credit: Jim McGuire