Tag: hazel and alice

My Friend Dawg: Three Musicians on the Real David Grisman

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

To complete our Dawg in December Artist of the Month series, we asked several musicians who have worked with and made music with the inimitable David Grisman what it’s like to really know him.

A mythological figure in American roots music, the Dawg remains remarkably accessible and embedded in the scene, despite his unofficial role as a sort of guru-meets-mentor-meets-hermit. He’s been a teacher and encourager of multiple new generations of pickers and mandolinists, from Grammy-nominated Ronnie McCoury to young, impressive upstarts like Teo Quale – who, with his brother Miles and band, Crying Uncle, performed for Dawg’s Bluegrass Hall of Fame induction at IBMA’s annual awards show in September. Others, like fellow Hall of Famer Alice Gerrard, began their friendships with Grisman long ago, before his skyrocketing notoriety and impact.

We asked these three pickers and friends of Dawg – Gerrard, McCoury, and Quale – to reflect on their relationships with the man, who despite being placed high upon a pedestal by many in bluegrass, new acoustic, and old-time music, remains a grounded and down-to-earth mandolin player with an extraordinary legacy.

Alice Gerrard

Alice Gerrard: “I remember sort of my first impression of David – I think it also was Hazel’s too, because he was this very young looking kid from New York, but he played this great mandolin. It was kind of, “What’s going on here?” you know, but the thing that really stands out in my mind is when we were riding to New York [once]. I don’t remember, it might have been my van, but it was a van, and we were going there to record the second Folkways album.

“I think that’s the one that had, ‘The One I Love is Gone.’ We were on our way to record that album in New York and Peter Siegel – who is a friend of David’s and I think Peter was the one who suggested that David play mandolin on the album, because we didn’t really know David at that point. But we did trust Peter. So, David is in the band with us and and we were practicing that song as we were driving up to New York from D.C.

“Hazel was singing the tenor, and I was singing the lead, and there was a problem. Because, you know, often those Bill Monroe harmonies are kind of a mix of major against minor and stuff like that. Hazel was having a hard time getting it, but I’m not. (I’d have to go back and really think about whether she had it right and Peter and David had it wrong.) But it ended up with David lying on the floor of the van between the front and back seats. I don’t know why he was doing that, but he was lying on the floor and singing it with Hazel, trying to get her to find this particular note.

“It was just hilarious! I mean, it was like, I don’t know, two or three hours worth of David’s face, singing ‘The One I Love Is Gone,’ and him fairly well convinced that she did not have the right note. I don’t remember. I mean, I don’t remember the specifics of that, but it was hilariously funny, and of course, what she ended up with was great, but I’m not sure whether he was trying to get her to hit a minor note or what.

“He was just this little kid, you know? From New York. And played this great mandolin. It was beautiful what he did on that song.

“I had to think about how we first met him and how we first decided to record. So I called Peter Siegel on the phone and he told me that he was the one– I mean, David was a friend of his in New York. [Peter] came down to D.C. with David. They were going to go to this bluegrass show, but that got rained out, so they didn’t go. They canceled the show. They [both] heard about this party. I remember where it was. It was at my cousin’s house, who at that time was living sort of on the edge of Georgetown.

“And so, according to Peter, they just came to the house and Hazel and I were sort of sitting somewhere singing together. It was Peter’s idea to use David. And I’m so happy that we did because yeah, he’s amazing.”

Ronnie McCoury

Ronnie McCoury: “When I started playing music, I started playing the mandolin with my dad. I was 14 ‘81– like ‘82 or ‘80, somewhere around there, either before I started playing or right after. My dad got this package in the mail and David had gotten a hold of him and said, ‘I found these tapes of a show we did in Troy, New York in 1966.’ And it was my dad, David, Uncle Jerry [McCoury], and Winnie Winston. [Dawg] said, they sounded pretty good and he’d like to put them out. So he did. It’s called Early Dawg on Sugar Hill. It was half this live stuff and the other half was studio. Along with that package he sent a couple albums of his stuff.

“I mean, that’s just how he is, you know? He just sent this along. He didn’t even really know that I was playing music at the time. I had no idea he was a California guy. I found these albums [he had sent], I had never heard anything like that played on a mandolin, because I was just [getting started]. You know, I’m a child of bluegrass. I was born into it. My dad started a band in ‘66. I was born in ‘67. [It’s] always been a part of me.

“This new music I was hearing, I couldn’t even grasp it. I didn’t know what it was, but I went to bed at night all through my teens putting his albums on and it would play one side and I’d be usually asleep by that time. I did that basically every night to David’s records.

“When I was probably 18 or so, David called my dad and said, ‘Hey, I want to do some bluegrass and I want to do this thing called the David Grisman Bluegrass Experience and we’ll do some shows.’ Basically, it was my dad’s band [backing him up]. We did that quite a bit, for a year or two – just on and off.

“I got to know David and every time we go west, we always were basically playing Northern California and either Grass Valley, California – for the festival – or touring out there playing with my dad. It was just starting for my dad a lot more in the West. He’d been going there for years, but sporadically, and we’d always wind up going to the Dawg’s house. I had been playing a Kentucky mandolin, and he told me, ‘Hey, I got a mandolin at my house for you.’ And I never thought anything about it, and I surely wouldn’t ask about it.

“My dad went out, while we were still in Pennsylvania, and he recorded with David for what is called Home is Where the Heart Is. Dad did a show at the Great American [Music Hall], I think, with Dawg, and he came home with this Gilchrist mandolin. The neck was coming out of it at the time and I had a guy repair it – Warren Blair, who was playing the fiddle.

“He laid that mandolin on me, I believe I was probably 19 or 20, and it’s the same one I play today. I’m 56. I got a Loar 10 years ago and played it a little while, but David and Sam Bush and all my peers said, ‘Hey man, stay on that Gilchrist.’ So I stuck with it. I owe him such a debt. He gave me something that is such a part of me, it defines me, I guess. I’ll tell you, it’s his giving heart. He has a huge heart.”

“My dad met David in 1963. He was playing with Bill Monroe and Ralph Rinzler was his manager at the time– Bill’s first manager. He played in New York somewhere and they stayed at David’s house. David’s father passed when he was 10 and his mother, I can’t remember if his mother was even there, but my dad would have been 24. [Dawg] would have been six years younger than my dad. He was a teenager, you know. I don’t know if Monroe did, but my dad wound up staying with David, because Ralph put him there. He and my dad go back to when he was a teenager. There’s such a long friendship there.

“One time, we were at Grass Valley and Dawg said, ‘Have you heard of this kid?’ He comes riding up on a little bicycle with his mandolin on his back and I said, ‘Well, I’ve heard the name Nickel Creek, but I didn’t really know much.’ He says, ‘Chris Thile’s his name.’ He comes riding up, you know, and he jumps off his bike and he wants to play for David.

“We’re standing around picking and [Chris] sings, ‘Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms’ – super high, you know – and he’s playing. David said, ‘Hey, man, do you know this tune?’ And he starts playing ‘Big Mon.’ Or ‘Monroe’s Hornpipe,’ I think it was. [Thile] didn’t know it, so David’s playing it and he starts showing him it. And [Chris is] just like a sponge. He starts just running it real slow, then he’s like, ‘Oh, that’s neat!’ And he hops on his bike and he’s off. Like an hour or so later, he comes riding up, jumps off his bike, and he’s got it down. It was pretty neat to see David show him.

“The first time I ever heard or met Jake Jolliff was with David. The first time I ever met Julian Lage was with David. Both of those guys, probably at the time, were 10 and 11, something like that.”

Teo Quale

L to R: Teo Quale, David Grisman, and Mile Quale. (Photo courtesy of the Quales and Crying Uncle Bluegrass Band).

Teo Quale: “I first met Dawg as a young kid at a Manning Music event when I was about 6 or 7 – so about 10 years ago. Actually, the first time I was around David was when I was still a baby, but I don’t really remember that!

“Anyway, he jammed a bit with us and Tracy played bass. He and Chad [Manning] played later on. At the time, I was playing fiddle and I really wanted to start learning the mandolin, but my fingers weren’t strong enough yet. So, my mother got me a ukulele and replaced the strings with ones tuned in fifths. Then about a year later, I finally started on the mandolin.

“David has been an inspiration to me ever since meeting him. Over the years, I’ve also had the opportunity to take some lessons with him and he’s always been really generous with his time and his knowledge, but always in that relaxed Dawg way. His music has influenced the way I approach every aspect of my playing, from improvisation to composition.

“Most of my other heroes were also greatly influenced by David – Mike Marshall, Darol Anger, Ric [Robertson] and [Dominick Leslie]. I’m thankful that I get to call him a friend and that I’m also around so many musicians who were touched by him. I don’t get to see him as often as I’d like, but we keep in touch.

“He was born on the same day and year as my grandfather, both two really special people in my life. I play one of his old mandolins now (made in 2006, the same year I was born!), and I am thankful each time I pick it up, knowing that a part of Dawg will always be in this instrument.”

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Acoustic Disc.

The BGS Radio Hour – Bluegrass Duets, New & Old

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

Every week for the past few years, we’ve brought you a radio show, and now podcast, revisiting all the great music recently featured on the pages of BGS. This week, we bring you a special episode for our Duos of Summer series — a musical recap of our 2019 collection of the 22 Best Bluegrass Duos.

APPLE PODCASTS, SPOTIFY

We’re listening to some of these classic duos, and exploring bluegrass’ longstanding and continuing tradition of wonderful duet harmony, be it sibling or otherwise. And while most fans of the genre may recognize names like Flatt & Scruggs or the Monroe Brothers, here you’ll also find newer acts that are following the path laid by those hall-of-famers.

Head to the original story to explore the full list while you listen!

The Breakdown – Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

Emma and Patrick dissect the 1976 album Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard (not to be confused with their earlier recording Hazel and Alice), a release that came out after the unlikely duo already broke up.

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Hazel and Alice have become one of the most influential artists in the history of bluegrass, tackling subjects that range from racial injustice to the hardships of being a working woman in their music.

Featured Songs
West Virginia My Home
Mama’s Gonna Stay
Nice Like That
Mary Johnson
Beaufort County Jail
James Alley Blues
True Life Blues

Alice Gerrard: Unearthed Tapes and Unintentional Activists

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

A cursory scan of the track listing for the new Free Dirt Records release, Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard Sing Me Back Home: The DC Tapes, 1965-1969, doesn’t reveal any sort of agenda or political bent, though that might be expected. The duo has long been celebrated for their unabashed approach to not only being women in a male-dominated genre in a male-dominated world, but also for writing and recording protest songs and feminist old time anthems, performing at political and activist events, and touring the South with integrated show bills. Hazel and Alice were so impeccably equipped to lift up these working class and feminist issues, because, at their core, they were always simply expressing their own lives, their own truths, and their own stories. No overt, obvious rallying cry of a song would be necessary. (Though they do have many, many of those sorts of songs in their catalogs.)

The undeniable legacy of protest and activism and lifting up the forgotten among us, continued and propagated by Alice Gerrard still today, is a striking reminder of the limitless value of allowing personal voices, true self-expression, and individual advocacy to shine clearly and crisply through art — especially roots and vernacular musics — without editing, or shame, or fear.

We began our conversation travelling back to the ’60s, examining this set of songs, how they came to be, and how the organic activism of Hazel & Alice blossomed of its own accord through their music all along, whether they knew it or not. 

I wonder, what goes through your mind when you listen to this album? What is it like to go back and revisit those points in history when you were working up those songs, figuring out your voices, and what you wanted to accomplish musically — and how you wanted to position yourselves, musically?

You know, I had totally forgotten that I even had those tapes, I just came across them. I was giving a bunch of stuff, a bunch of tapes and stuff like that, to the folks at UNC (University of North Carolina), so in the back of my closet was this box, I pull it out, and there were these reel-to-reel tapes. Some of them said, “A&H Practice.” So, I listened, and the first thing I thought was, “Well oh my god, some of this is really nice!” Then I realized that it was a lot of stuff that we had never recorded.

 We had just agreed to go on this tour that Anne Romaine had put together, this Southern tour. She was from Gastonia, North Carolina, living in Atlanta at the time. She was very into the civil rights movement and was friends with Bernice Reagon, who was also in Atlanta. Bernice was an African American woman who was the founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock. Anne wanted to start this tour, the idea being that if a tour of traditional music went around the South, it would be kind of a new thing. And it could be political in the sense that it could be traditional musicians, it could be integrated, black and white, and it could go around and speak to the struggles of working people. At that time, a lot of these musicians, like Dock Boggs and Lily May Ledford, they were being “discovered” and taken up north — to New York, and Newport Folk Festival, Philly Folk Festival, stuff like that. They were definitely sort of underappreciated in their home regions in the South. The idea was to just stay in the South, with this tour. It was always going to be a few white and a few black musicians.

She had asked Hazel and me to be on it, but she couldn’t afford [for us] to have a band, so we were trying to figure out stuff that we could do, just the two of us. I think that’s why we were kind of messing around with me doing some breaks, and Hazel playing guitar, which she didn’t usually do. What it sort of brought back — she had moved from Baltimore to Washington and I was living in Washington. My husband had been killed in this automobile accident, so I was living in this house with my four kids and she moved in for a while, before she got an apartment. It was those years [that we made the tapes], in D.C., when I was living there. We were just practicing stuff, like, “Let’s try this, see if maybe I can play an autoharp break” or, “See if I can play the banjo.” I’d work up these little guitar breaks for some things, and it just brought all that back to me when I listened to it. Some of that stuff seems pretty good! Although, it was definitely field recording quality. [Laughs] The kids would come in, doors would slam, stuff like that.

People think of the Hazel & Alice canon of material as having that through line of activism, Southern activism, and protest. Going down the list of songs on this record, one wouldn’t necessarily feel that any one of them would jump out at you as fitting those categories. But yet, you were working up all of these songs for a tour of the South, as an act of protest and activism. This is something so important to your and Hazel’s legacy — at the time, and maybe looking back now, how did that fit into how you were making music and why you were making music? How intentionally were you making that your mission statement?

I think when we started out, it was not intentional. We were kinda clueless. I’ll take the risk of speaking for Hazel. [Chuckles] I for sure was pretty clueless and I think, to some extent, she was too. We were surprised when we’d go do a concert somewhere and there’d be a whole lot of women in the audience. You know, “What’s going on?!” I remember being at some motel, we were around the swimming pool and I had my daughter with me, and the promoter of the event there came up saying, “I just came from the women’s liberation movement! It was really great!” And I said, “What’s women’s liberation?” [Laughs] Really! I think we were kind of surprised when there was attention coming to us and we would see lots and lots of women at the concerts we’d do. The first time we did this one festival in Canada we did a workshop and I sang the “Custom Made Woman Blues” for the first time and got a standing ovation and they made me do it again!

We were a little bit clueless. I think these things were happening because we had our own feelings about things and we started to express that. I don’t think we were aware of the effect that it was having. The other thing that happened when we started going on these tours, because they were so political in nature, we were tuned into what was going on. We’d do a tour of the Mountain South, then a tour of the Deep South, and sometimes we were playing in communities for various events like an anti-strip mining thing or this biscuit place in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, that was started by some nuns, so we were sort of tuned in. For me, for sure — I read Night Comes to the Cumberlands — it was a huge learning experience. I had never been in those types of situations before.

Hazel, of course, grew up with it. So I think what happened with her, being on those tours, it gave her permission to speak. It encouraged her giving voice to feelings that she already had. That’s why she really started writing a lot of songs. For me, it just introduced me to and raised my consciousness about a lot of things. Those tours got us started.

There’s a beauty in that it started so organically for you, because I think the most effective and visceral and immediate way to translate these messages of politics or activism through music is when the message is as natural and intrinsic in a human being as possible. Clearly you and Hazel were just being yourselves, expressing yourselves, through your music — that in itself was political and people responded to it. I think that’s the best way to effect change: to be ourselves, true and pure, unadulterated.

That was the whole point of those tours. It wasn’t to stand up and preach to people, but if Roscoe Holcomb gets up there and sings a song — by the way, those were the people going on these tours. Roscoe Holcomb, Dock Boggs, Bessie Jones, people who had lived these lives and had been affected by whatever had been going on, politically. Strip mining ruined Roscoe’s well, you know, so he could just stand up there and live his life. It was amazing. It was a great thing. Someone should write a book on that tour and organization!

Do you ever think back and wish that you could’ve just had the musical careers and experiences of your male contemporaries without all of the rest tacked on? Without the constant clarification and added phrases like: “Important women in bluegrass.” Do you ever wish you could do it all again and do it just for the music?

Well, you are what you are. I think you have to accept that. I don’t think I’d be who I am without that. So it doesn’t really bother me. What bothers me is when people call me “spry.” Like, “She’s 84, she’s really spry.” [Laughs]

[Laughs] So the ageism is more bothersome than anything else.

You know what, in a lot of ways, it really is.

Hazel, I know that she had many, many, really bad experiences before she and I teamed up. It was the usual kind of sexist crap. She’d put up with it most of the time, but she was very aware of it. But when we started singing together, I had become a part of this whole scene around Washington D.C. — and she became a part of it, too — which was a mix of young, sort of college-educated or at least high school-educated, middle-class folks. A bunch of young people who weren’t like [sexist]. I felt when we started that we were surrounded by a very supportive community. I never felt like they didn’t want us to do anything because we were women. They were really encouraging. I didn’t experience those things. I felt like we were lucky to have guys around us that were supportive.

I do remember, before Hazel and I started singing together, I would go with my husband– boyfriend? Whatever he was at that moment. We’d go to Baltimore to listen to Hazel and whomever she was playing with, she had a band, and we’d go listen to them practice. I did feel at those times sort of compelled to join the other women in the kitchen. [Laughs] Even though I really wanted to be in the other room!

When did you start feeling that change? When you met up with those folks in D.C.?

Yeah… more so. There weren’t a lot of women in what we were doing. I think part of what was going on was these guys, who’d moved up from the South, living in these hardscrabble places in the city, there was a lot of hard work involved, there was a lot of drinking, women had a perfect right to feel shit upon a lot of the time. Their husbands ran around on them, they’d get drunk. So it felt sometimes that we were treading a fine line in trying to be part of the music in that situation and context, and yet, not make the women dislike you because of it. It was a weird little thing going on there. But that didn’t happen in the D.C. scene.

Let’s talk about the present for second — what do we do in the face of the “shut up and sing” mentality that’s so rampant right now? This idea that if somebody on stage has political views that are different than somebody in the audience, that’s a problem. Roots music has always been built upon speaking truth and speaking to the most basic, concrete, ground-level needs of humanity. How do we translate the value of that in a modern context?

That seems to be the environment these times. I feel like I don’t care — I do pay attention to where I am. At the time, I do care about the context of where I am, usually, but I feel like you need to say what you have to say. It’s easier when it’s in a friendly environment, like Shout & Shine [the showcase]. That was a no-brainer. Everybody there was right behind me, one hundred percent. But if I went to… oh, I dunno…

Fill-in-the-blank.

Yeah.

That’s something we want to be cognizant of anyways, because reaching people that are further away from our frame of reference and our point of view requires us to be aware of context and to allow nuance into the situation.

Exactly.

Now there’s this local band, the New Deal String Band, college kids from around here back in the ’70s and ’80s. They were one of the first Southern hippie bands before the other hippie Southern band — I’m blanking on the name. [Laughs] They would go to the Galax Fiddlers’ Convention back in the day. They had long hair, but they were really good players and Leroy [Savage] was a really great singer. It was a little bit of a toxic environment. People didn’t like long-haired hippies and were likely to start a fight with you as not. Leroy used to say, “We’d get in there, with our long hair, but if we could get our instruments out and start playing before a fight broke out, we’d be okay.” [Laughs] Because of their music! It really does transcend a lot of barriers. You can start with the music and then maybe you can make some inroads.

…Getting to know people — it doesn’t hurt to make friends first and then play the music or take a position or whatever. I think sometimes that goes a longer way toward more permanent changes than busting in–

And raising hell.

Yeah. [Laughs] They have something to say, too. I might not agree with everything, but… [sighs] I don’t know, you know… it’s complicated!!

Photo credit: Betsy Siggins

Counsel of Elders: Alice Gerrard on Growing with Your Voice

Posted on by Editor

Some voices create passages to the past, as if they were secret wardrobes through which listeners can crawl and enter their own private Narnia. It’s not just what these voices sing about, but rather their color, tone, and timbre that conduct audiences to times gone by. Alice Gerrard has one such voice. She rose to fame in the 1960s and 1970s singing traditional bluegrass songs with her Appalachian music partner, Hazel Dickens. Their voices provided a juxtaposing force against one another, generating instinctive harmonies that felt closer to a familial note than any born from two unrelated musicians. Simply put, they raised the hairs on your neck.

Gerrard’s voice soars with Dickens, but it’s equally capable of standing alone, as sure-footed and earthy as the land that produced it. In 2015, she released her latest album Follow the Music, which she recorded with M.C. Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger. The two met when he was a grad student and she a visiting instructor at the University of North Carolina. The project would go on to earn a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album, and it’s easy to see why … or, rather, to hear. Her interpretations of classics like “Wedding Dress” and “Boll Weevil” pit her voice against the fiddle, the two rising to meet each other and fueling a thicker melody as a result. At 82 years old, Gerrard’s voice has aged, but it hasn’t withered. With over 50 years in the business under her belt, and a staunch determination to fight for traditional sounds, she proves how the past endures, offering its voice to any willing to listen.

What quality would you say age has brought to your voice?

That’s a hard question for me to answer. It’s probably better answered by people who have heard me. I don’t find that it’s diminished. I do find that it takes longer to get back into singing, if I’ve not been singing for a while. I think you do have to exercise it more as a muscle and it’s more important to do that when you get older. I find if I don’t do it for a while, it’s like “I’m not going to be able to hit that note so easily,” or little glitches come into your voice and you have to sing through a bunch of stuff and, eventually, it sort of comes back.

Male-male and male-female harmonies tend to be popular in bluegrass and alt-country. Female-female harmonies exist, but not to the same extent. What do you consider important about that kind of singing?

It’s pretty amazing when you get two or more women who can actually sing together. It doesn’t always work. You might love to sing with somebody, but maybe your voices are too much in the same range and it’s hard to harmonize, or something like that. To me, any harmony — whether it’s female-male, male-male — it’s all about the blend that you get with the other voice. There are many different harmony sounds. To me, it’s a sort of a special sound; it’s the same as if you had two brothers. It’s a well-known fact that within families, two sisters or two brothers, they have a family blend that’s unique, that you have to really work to capture, if you’re not a family member.

I was just listening the other day to Mountain Man — they don’t exist anymore — but it was three women, and they had beautiful harmonies. It had such a great blend. My feeling is that, no matter what the combination is, what you’re going for is that special kind of blend. Everybody has a unique voice, and the trick is to make your voice work with the other voice, and sometimes that just takes singing together a lot. When you sing together a lot, you tend to feel the other person’s energy and how they use their voice, but I think it applies to women and to men. I don’t see it as strictly a woman thing. But it’s always great to hear women harmonizing, when it’s a good harmony sound.

How long did it take you and Hazel to hit upon that blend?

Well, we sang together for a long time, and I think you have to pay attention to what the other person is doing. When you hang out with somebody a lot, it’s easier to sort of internalize some of the characteristics of their singing with your vocal sound. It’s like talking. When you grow up learning to talk as a child, you repeat whatever you hear around you, and it’s the same with singing. I was really listening to her. It’s not just two separate voices following their own path; it’s two voices listening to each other and bending and moving together. It becomes one voice.

It’s very interesting because I’ve been in a studio where they would track the lead vocals and then they track the harmony vocals. As you’re singing harmony to the lead vocals, you’re listening to it and you’re matching it, but then when they play your separate track — this happens to more people — you listen back to your track by itself and it’s like “Whoa!” It sounds terrible. Maybe it’s a little flat here, maybe it’s a teeny bit sharp there, that pronunciation is a little weird. But you put the two together and you realize what you’ve done is bent and accommodated to the other voice, and they’ve done it, too. But together it works, and that’s what it’s all about.

You’ve used the word “spare” to describe the photo that graces Hazel and Alice ’s album cover, as well as some of the more traditional songs. What does spare music offer that much of today’s overly produced music might not?

I can remember the days when you’d flip through the radio dial and you could immediately pick out the country station, and now you can’t. It all sounds like mass-produced pop music. To me, I always prefer — I like to listen to a lot of different kinds of music — but the American Idol over-production sound does not appeal to me. But I think people have gotten used to that in the mass market, so their ears are attuned to that over-produced, auto-corrected perfection. When stuff comes along that has a little more edge — a slight pitchiness or something that’s very simple — it can be a beautiful sound, but I think that a lot of people just don’t get it because they’re so used to the over-produced quality of most pop recordings. I know that that’s not my niche anyway, so who cares! There’s plenty of other stuff out there, and there’s a lot of really great stuff going on, so I don’t have to listen to that other stuff, if I don’t want to.

You’ve mentioned before, prior to releasing Follow the Angel, that happier songs don’t resonate the same way with you. Why is that?

You mean Follow the Music, not Follow the Angel. Woo hoo! Where’s that coming from? I might have to use that in a song.

You’re more than welcome to my mistake! What a slip.

I do not know. You could consult a psychiatrist, but I’ve always been drawn — there’s a kind of a melancholy side to me — and I’ve always been drawn to the darker, more melancholy side to country music. I love the dance tunes, too, but the things that really get my goosebumps up are the more melancholy sounds, and the sadder songs, and other kinds of stuff. I don’t know why that is true, but I’ve heard a lot of people — I’m not alone — say, “The sad songs are the best songs” or “Oh, man, I like those old mournful songs.” I think there’s something that raises the hairs on the back of your neck sometimes about some of them. I’m sure that there are people who prefer happier songs. This is probably an over generalization, but I don’t think too many people who are in the middle of, say, a bad breakup want to listen to happy music. They want to go and wallow around in slow George Jones or Merle Haggard or somebody like that.

They want that company.

Yeah, it’s very cathartic in some ways.

I’m not sure if you do this, but even when I’m at my happiest I really love listening to the saddest songs. It’s that idea of the sublime: watching something fearful from a distance.

There’s this saying, and I can’t remember who told me this, “The sadder the song, the happier I feel.” That can be true at times.

Bluegrass has come a long way since you first started singing. Is there anything about the way bluegrass has evolved that really excites you?

My heart is with early bluegrass, pretty much. I feel totally as though there’s room for all of it and I’m glad that some people hold the line and I’m glad that other people are experimenting. But my soul is much more in the Stanley Brothers and Bill Monroe. I feel like there’re some amazing musicians and they can do anything; they’re just really really talented musicians. Sometimes I feel like there’s too much emphasis on the technicality, rather than the soulfulness of the music. I have this sort of theory that, in this digital age where everything is very technical — you know there are computers and iPads and you can make everything perfect in a studio — there’s a huge emphasis on technical, so that I sometimes feel that people’s ears get used to what they think of as perfection: the perfect note, the perfect tone, the perfect blah. And, to me, that gets really boring. But there is so much good music out there. I think that’s what it’s all about.

Everyone finding their space.

Yeah, and there’s room enough for it all.

Do you have any advice for those interested in taking up the mantle of bluegrass?

I really feel like you have to follow your own path, and I always feel like, if what you’re doing musically has some basis in tradition, it will be more meaningful and have more soul, perhaps. That’s just my point of view. Songwriting is a very personal thing and people … there are factories that churn them out, for sure, but then there are people who don’t, who write really good songs, some of which will never ever get heard in this lifetime. And then there are people who write a lot of really bad songs, too. But I think you have to follow your path, and if you feel called by a certain direction, you have to try that path, see where it takes you. Get the editor out of your head.

 

Catch Alice Gerrard performing with Laurie Lewis at World of Bluegrass in Raleigh next month. To hear from another another bluegrass elder, check out our conversation with Del McCoury.

Photo credit: Irene Young