Tag: J.D. Crowe

The most influential band in bluegrass music’s second generation only lasted 10 months, but it may have worked harder — and become tighter — that many bands do in five years or more.

J.D. Crowe and the New South’s path-breaking January 1975 studio recording was the only one ever released in the U.S. and yet had an immediate and enduring impact on the music that is still strongly felt even today, 40 years later.

The untitled album, widely known by the number that Rounder Records assigned it — “0044” — remains revered by artists like Alison Krauss, who grew up listening to it. For years, she kept a framed copy of the album cover on a wall in her home in Tennessee.

Barry Bales, who’s played bass for Alison Krauss and Union Station for 25 years, says of that New South incarnation, “That was the first generation of bluegrass, to us.”

Contemporary radio host and show promoter Fred Bartenstein says that, at the time of the album’s release (in August 1975), “The bluegrass world thought of the Crowe-Rice-Skaggs-Douglas-Slone band as the second coming — the best performing ensemble to arrive since Flatt-Scruggs-Seckler-Benny Martin 22 years earlier.”

A Working Band

The now-classic New South sound was honed as a working band — a hard-working band — with a steady six-nights-a-week gig in Lexington, Kentucky, at the Holiday Inn North’s Red Slipper Lounge. The Holiday Inn gig began in August 1968 and lasted for years. A typical evening saw the band play four sets. That’s a pace of a thousand sets a year. Presenting a good show, when one has to perform that often, is a challenge. Band members don’t want to get stale; any whiff of that conveys itself to an audience right away.

The band combined veterans Bobby Slone and J.D. (born in 1936 and 1937, respectively) with Tony Rice (1951), Ricky Skaggs (1954), and by the time of the studio session, Jerry Douglas (1956). J.D. and Bobby already had many years under their belts and — despite their ages — so did the younger players, all of whom started performing at very young ages.

There were connections, though, that one might not expect. At one point in his past, Bobby had lived in California and played in the Golden State Boys, a band in which Tony’s father played mandolin and Tony’s uncle played guitar. And J.D. had seen Jerry playing with John Douglas, Jerry’s father, in the West Virginia Travelers, a group made up of steelworkers from West Virginia who had found work in the steel mills in Ohio.

All of them were open to newer music. J.D. had a working band, and had had one for years before Tony joined. He’d always liked different kinds of music. He always welcomed something different. He encouraged experimentation. He knew that you can’t play as many as 24 sets a week, 52 weeks a year, without keeping mentally awake.

J.D. was the elder statesman of the group, and he appreciated that having the young cohort helped bring a lot of extra energy. “Tony … we’d play all night at the Holiday Inn, and we would go over to Tony’s apartment and sometimes pick until daylight, wouldn’t we, Bobby? We’ve done that I don’t know how many times. And Tony would do it all the time.”

J.D. started professionally at age 16 and, when he was still 18, became the banjo player for Jimmy Martin and the Sunny Mountain Boys — Jimmy being the self-proclaimed “King of Bluegrass Music.” His banjo work with Jimmy Martin remains highly revered today, but J.D. always had his ears open and had always enjoyed presenting other kinds of music bluegrass-style.

He was pre-Elvis, after all. There was so much change during the 1950s. The war was over, prosperity was in, people were more mobile, and diverse cultural influences were in the air. Literally. Radio was everywhere. J.D. was in his formative years and was hearing music of all sorts. One of the tracks on Oh Oh Four Four was Fats Domino’s “I’m Walking” (1957). It was J.D. who introduced it. “I brought that in,” he says. “I was always wanting to do something of that type of music. Nobody was doing that in bluegrass. Doyle and I got together — that’s when Doyle was with me — and we started doing that thing. Then we started doing ‘You Can Have Her’ — that’s an old rock tune [Roy Hamilton, 1961]. Different things like that, that make great bluegrass conversions, that adapt over to bluegrass easily.”

Working up music from other genres to bluegrass had been done, but it was much more the exception than the rule. Another song on the 0044 album was Bruce Phillips’ “Rock Salt and Nails.” J.D. had heard Flatt and Scruggs do that on an album which they released in 1965. He says, “I always wanted to do that song when I first heard it, and I said, ‘Man.’ But at the time, I never had the personnel that could do that. When Tony joined the band, I said, ‘Man, it would be right down his alley to sing that.’” Flatt and Scruggs recorded Chuck Berry’s “Memphis, Tennessee” that same year. The Country Gentlemen had, even earlier, worked with songs from the folk revival. And Jim and Jesse and the Virginia Boys recorded a whole album of Chuck:Berry Pickin’ in the Country, also in ’65. The Charles River Valley Boys — from the Boston area — had released their album Beatle Country the following year.

So the idea of recording music from other genres in a bluegrass style was far from new. (It worked the other way ‘round, too: Elvis himself recorded Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” in 1954.)

Marty Godbey notes Doug Benson’s Bluegrass Unlimited review of a J.D. Crowe and the Kentucky Mountain Boys show at Reidsville in the summer of 1970, when Larry was in the band, a year before Tony joined. The review was titled “Breakthrough in Bluegrass Repertoire” and noted some of the Flying Burrito Brothers material that Larry had brought to the band.

Tony Rice joined the New South on Labor Day weekend, 1971. He’d just turned 20 that June and helped expand the repertoire, too. J.D. says, “Tony brought some stuff into the band. That’s what I liked all the pickers to do. I’d just gotten familiar with Gordon Lightfoot. I liked him. Really enjoyed him. When Tony brought it up, I said, ‘Man, we could do those.’ We started kind of running over them and I said, ‘We need to record some of this, because it’s different. Nobody else was doing this.’ That was before anybody was doing that at the time. So we started doing that and he started looking for more of the Lightfoots and just different people.”

Ian Tyson was another such songwriter. “Right,” says J.D. “I knew who he was, but I never had listened to him that much. Tony heard this particular song and he brought it to me, and said, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘Man, this is a great song. Do you like it?’ He said, ‘Man, I love it. We can do that.’”

J.D. was always ready to try something different. One thing he did was change the name of the band to the New South, not long after Tony joined. “To me, the Kentucky Mountain Boys kind of labels you to one style of music, and I wanted to change it to something that wouldn’t label you — to a name that you could play whatever kind of music you wanted, and the name would still fit.” Along with the name change came the introduction of drums and electric pick-ups. The New South wasn’t the only bluegrass band introducing newer material, nor were they the first; it’s the treatment they gave the music that made the difference.

What was new about the New South with Tony in the band (and Tony’s brother Larry) was how it all came together. Tony was thrilled to join the group. “I’d wanted into Crowe’s band since right after my brother Larry joined in ‘69. My uncle, Frank Poindexter, and I made a trip to Kentucky to see them. You remember how good that band was back then. That band had so much drive and precision and tight harmonies that there was no band out there in existence that could even touch them. As in one pill of generic Cialis. The moment we saw them at the Holiday Inn, it was a dream of mine to be a guitar player and singer in the Kentucky Mountain Boys.”

Jerry Douglas, Ricky Skaggs, J.D. Crowe, and Tony Rice at the Bicentennial Folk Music Festival and Revival, Escoheag, Rhode Island, 1975. Photo credit: Phil Zimmerman

They experimented with repertoire, and the band’s members — young and older — were all firmly rooted in bluegrass. They had a determined bandleader in J.D. Crowe and they all had professional pride as they plied their craft six nights a week in front of a live audience. The frequency and steadiness of their long-standing gig led to their ongoing interest in new material.

J.D. “liked playing stuff from the Jimmy Martin days — Flatt and Scruggs, Osbornes, and whatever — but he was constantly on the lookout for something new that we could add to the regular repertoire. Think back on this: When you’re playing four and sometimes five sets, six nights a week, you’re going to get bored if you keep playing the same stuff over and over again. You could lose your mind.”

The Holiday Inn

The audience was a very receptive one. It wasn’t just overnight guests at the Holiday Inn. There were rather few of those. The audience drew a lot from the University of Kentucky, and weekends drew standing room-only crowds. Tony told Tim Stafford that about 60 percent of the people were college students and the other 40 percent were locals, but it was — by and large — an attentive audience. “These were college student that had an ear … We’d have a rowdy crowd occasionally, but not that often. It was more or less a sophisticated audience. Looking back, I’m sure we were probably the only band in the history of bluegrass up to that time that had anything like that — a club gig where they served lots of liquor and beer, and a listening crowd. That was almost unheard of.”

Ricky Skaggs painted a good picture of the Red Slipper Lounge in his book Kentucky Traveler: “Décor-wise, the Red Slipper was a fancy place for bluegrass, especially considering the era we’re talking about. It had chandeliers and mirrors and thick shag carpet and real waiters … the works. But, true to the music, it was rowdy and noisy as could be. It wasn’t really a place to get food unless you consider booze and bluegrass to be food groups, and I reckon a lot of the regulars did. They loved to drink and holler, and they loved their bluegrass and they let you know it.

“The Red Slipper was loud and smoky and, when I say smoky, I mean every fiber of your clothes would be saturated with stale cigarette smoke, right down to your socks. I’d come home at night after four hours of playing and try to pull my shirt off, and I got to where I’d flinch. I’d just about upchuck my dinner by the time the shirt got around my nose.”

It was a steady gig, too, with a weekly paycheck — and a decent-sized one, a rarity for a bluegrass band.

But there were, inevitably, down times, too. Bobby Slone said, “We worked [at the Holiday Inn] five years …You get so you can’t impress yourself a bit; you can’t feel the music good. People say you can get really tight playing in bars — and you can, if you’re playing three or four nights — but six nights is just too much. You play to the same audiences over and over, and you play so much you’re tired … It’s not good for the music, but it’s good for other things — it pays your bills.”

This is part one of a three-part series about the iconic bluegrass album that will be re-released by Rounder Records in an expanded vinyl edition for Record Store Day 2016. Read part two here.

The Convergence of 1975

What came together, fortuitously, and not that many months before the recording of 0044, was what Crowe biographer Marty Godbey called “the convergence of 1975.” It was a turn to the acoustic that brought a new freshness to the New South, and it really began in September 1974.

Tony takes credit for it. When Larry left around Labor Day 1974 to join Dickie Betts on tour, Tony really wanted to bring Ricky Skaggs into the band, and he thought that was what it would take — to turn away from the drums and electric bass and go all-acoustic, back to the roots, so to speak. A lot of bands had success with drums and electric instruments — the Osborne Brothers, for instance. Ricky had, himself, been playing with a plugged-in mandolin “and it just wasn’t him,” Tony says.

Sam Bush had filled in for a while after Larry left, but no one ever thoughtSam was cut out to play that many sets, that many nights of the week. And then came Ricky. He was leaving the Country Gentlemen. “I didn’t get to sing a lot in that band. They used me on ‘Lord, Protect My Soul’ or something that had real high singing in it, but mostly I was there to play fiddle. I didn’t have the opportunity to get to sing a lot. I guess the main reason I turned Emmylou’s job down is because, if I went with Emmylou, I didn’t think I would get to sing very much. I had already kind of made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t work in a band where I didn’t get to sing a lot. I wanted to really keep my singing chops up.”

Ricky came to Lexington and sat in for about 10 days. (“My God, that was a workout!”) The sound changed, and it felt real good to Tony. “I was trying as hard as I could to talk him into staying on, and Ricky made it real clear that he couldn’t take the drums, the electric bass, being plugged in.” He got Ricky to agree to stay for about a year, but there was one condition, Tony told J.D. “It wasn’t real hard to coerce Crowe into what was being offered to him: Ricky would stay with the band if it would go back to being a traditional bluegrass group … I think J.D. was ready to get back to the roots of bluegrass for himself anyway, not to mention that traveling on the road, he wouldn’t have to take drums and amplifiers and whatever else. Crowe was tired of drums … by that time, electric instruments and drums had already run their course. The change that happened overnight was really incredible.” Turning back to the purer sound brought a breath of fresh air into the New South.

A New Record Deal

The Rounders (Ken Irwin, Marian Leighton, and Bill Nowlin) were at the CrazyHorse Campground in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the weekend of August 17 and 18, 1974, for Carlton Haney’s 8^th Annual Gettysburg Blue Grass Music Festival. They had their Volkswagen bus (in which all three slept on the road and at festivals) and their set-up — a record table where they sold their albums and those of other small independent labels. The New South (with Tony and Larry both) played those two days; others at the festival included the Osborne Brothers, the Seldom Scene, Jimmy Martin & the Sunny Mountain Boys, Del McCoury & the Dixie Pals, the Blue Sky Boys, and Mother Maybelle Carter and the Carter Family. Admission each day was $6.

The Rounders well knew of J.D.’s stature. J.D.’s band was active on the festival circuit and it was at Gettysburg when Rounder Records first asked J.D. to do a recording. The Rounders never dreamed that one of the hotter bands in the business would record for their small record label out of Massachusetts, so they asked J.D. about doing a banjo album. As Ken told Crowe biographer Marty Godbey, J.D. “at that time, was a legend in our eyes.”

A banjo album would have been a foot in the door; it also would have been a great album. It still would be. But a banjo album wasn’t what interested J.D. He said no. But Ken remembers being bowled over at what happened next: “A couple of hours later, J.D. and Hugh [J.D.’s manager at the time, Hugh Sturgill] came over and said they wanted to speak to us. They said he wasn’t interested in doing the banjo record at this point, but would we be interested in doing a band record?”

J.D. remembers, “I knew that we needed … I’d rather have a band album out than an instrumental album. Band albums do a lot better. We’d been talking about doing one with somebody before Ken and Marian ever approached us. I never was into instrumentals that much anyway.”

There actually had been a New South album that had been cut back in April 1973 for Starday, but for reasons that remain unknown today, the label never released it. It was very frustrating, at the time, for J.D. because it left the band without a product to sell and wondering what went wrong. And unable to record for anyone else for two years from the date of signing, which J.D. honored. The Starday recording featured some of the standard Nashvillestudio pickers of the day, with drums and all. In the long run, it was fortuitous that it hadn’t been released, because it very well might have detracted from the impact that the nearly all-acoustic 0044 had when it landed. (Starday did eventually release the album … in June 1977.)

Why a small label like Rounder when he probably could have had his pick of the bluegrass labels of the day? “Theywere new. And they didn’t have a lot of artists. They were interested in us and I figured, ‘Well, maybe they’ll promote us.’ They don’t have a lot of artists they have to contend with. Especially bluegrass, because you all were just getting into it.”

In other words, maybe J.D. would be a bigger fish in a small pond? “That’s what I figured, you know. That’s why we went with Rounder. I just didn’t like the sound Rebel was getting. I didn’t, at all. A lot of the good groups recorded for Rebel and their performance was good, but I thought the quality was not there. I talked to the other record labels. What got me was that their budget was ridiculous. You can’t go in and do an album for $5,000, and that’s the way a lot of those groups were doing and I thought, ‘no way,’ because I heard the results. Poor recording quality. I said, I’m not doing that.

“We thought, why not? [Rounder] was a fairly new recording company and I didn’t want to go with those other people that had been doing it for a while. Anything you do in Nashville could lay on the shelf. I didn’t want to do that.”

Rounder was already known for its better-designed album covers and its extensive liner notes. And the company was willing to cut a different kind of deal with J.D. — a profit-sharing deal.

“The way we set it up was a lot better deal than most of the other record labels would do,” J.D. noted.

“I’ve known Hugh since dirt,” says J.D. Hugh Sturgill was a venture capitalist but loved the music. “This was a hobby,” Hugh says, “mostly because of my love of J.D. Crowe and Tony and Bobby Slone. Those were dear friends.” He recalled what he said to J.D. about Rounder: “Look, J.D., let’s take a different approach to this. First of all, this is a new company. I don’t know that they’re crooks like a lot of them are, but maybe we can set up the kind of deal where we can do something that, if it sells a lot, we can make a lot of money and, if not, at least you’re not out anything and you’ll have a chance to put a good sound together. I think you ought to give it a shot.”

The profit-sharing arrangement was a good one from the artist standpoint; there was no assessment for overhead or anything other than verifiable third-party charges. “I think it made a lot of sense, really,” said Hugh. “Pretty good way to do it. It’s not typically the way record businesses work.”

Why had Hugh recommended Rounder?

“I kind of liked the fact that you were young people and from a different area. I wanted to get separation from the typical hillbilly stuff — plus the fact that a lot of it was centered around D.C. and I didn’t want to be a second banana to the Scene and the Country Gentlemen. That’s part of why we picked you, yeah.”

Not long afterward, the band got even better. When Ricky Skaggs joined the band in November, there was the return to an all-acoustic aesthetic and the classic, though short-lived, New South configuration was nearly set. Ricky was wowed: “J.D.’s timing was so good and Tony’s timing was so good, that if I didn’t play 2 and 4 and put it in there, I was the one who looked like the fool. That’s right. So I had to really know where that pocket was … There was a settling and a defining that J.D. had. He had this maturity in his playing and you just didn’t push him. He set the timing … And, boy, you knew where the one was! Man, you just knew. And you could set your watch to J.D. … It really helped my timing a lot.” Tony knew they had something special, too: “There had certainly been no bluegrass band in history that had that much precision and drive.”

The Recording Session

It was close to 40 years later that the Rounders heard that the session almost didn’t happen. Tony Rice tells it: “About a week-and-a-half before the session, in January of ’75, I remember we were in the lobby of the Holiday Inn at a gig one night. I was sitting there with my pocket knife whittling something off the heel of one of my boots. It got screwed up the way the knife blade closed and it put a gash across my right thumb, the one that I used to hold my flatpicks.

“Skaggs was sitting there and he just freaked out. It was so deep that he saw blood flying and he went, ‘Oh, my God!’ We took a look at it and somebody said, ‘You can’t fool with this. You’ve got to get to the emergency room right now’ — which I did. I went down there and they patched it up. I did the first two or three cuts of the album with my thumb bandaged up, with stitches in there.”

In fact, that wasn’t the end of it — nor the only hindrance. “I managed to get through those,” Tony continued, “but I called up John Starling and I said, ‘John, can you come down here?’ I told him that I had had this accident and how many stitches and that I had this bandage that was being a pain in the butt. Starling said, ‘Hang on. I’ll be down there in a couple of hours.’ He came down and he took the bandage off and he said, ‘Yeah, man, these stitches are ready to come out.’ He said, ‘I’ll take them out right now.’ He took the stitches out and I went in and finished the album. It was so much easier to do without those stitches in my thumb because that’s where my flatpick went.”

Then there was illness, again afflicted on Tony. “When we first started, I had a head cold from Hell. Hugh said, ‘You know what’ll knock this out. There’s a drug in the pharmacy called Sudafed and that will knock this out real fast.’ It was affecting my voice. So I took a dose of Sudafed and, in no time at all, my sinuses cleared up and the session started.”

Indeed, the session did start. The recording was done at Track Recorders in Silver Spring, Maryland. And the date of the first session was January 16, the day after J.D.’s contract with Starday expired. The choice studio emerged from Ricky and Tony talking. Ricky says, “I knew Brian Ahern from working with Emmylou and we had recorded some up there with George Massenburg. He was involved somehow with that studio. I’d worked there with Brian on some of Emmylou’s early stuff.” Tony knew that Track was where his California Autumn record had been mixed, and he liked the sound of the Seldom Scene albums that had been cut there.

And it was at Ricky’s suggestion that Jerry Douglas got on the sessions. They had worked together in the Country Gentlemen and the Gents were based in the D.C. area. The band was working up the songs in Lexington at Bobby Slone’s house in the east end of the city, rehearsing a couple of afternoons a week, and Ricky began to realize how good Jerry’s dobro would sound with the New South. “J.D. said, ‘Ah, I don’t know if I want a dobro on there or not. I like what we got enough.’ I said, ‘That’s cool.’ I was the new man in the band, so I wasn’t going to say too much. But we’d do the Ian Tyson song, the Gordon Lightfoot things — the slower things — ‘Ten Degrees and Getting Colder’ — some of that slower stuff. I was thinking, ‘Jerry would just kill this stuff!’ J.D. agreed to let him come in and maybe do one or two. So I called Flux. He was still working with the Gentlemen. I asked him if he would be available and I gave him the dates and he said, ‘Yeah. Okay, that’d be great.’

“He comes over. I know J.D. knew of Jerry’s playing with the Gentlemen, but I don’t know how familiar he was with his playing. So Jerry comes in and we do some of the slower things, and J.D. liked it a lot and said, ‘Well, maybe you could do another song or two.’ So Jerry did those songs and J.D. said, ‘Man, that sounds great. Maybe you could do a couple of these other things.’ I think Jerry ended up playing on like eight of the 12 or so songs. “

Regardless of how tight the band was, the dobro fit in seamlessly and even helped knit it together; it made a big difference in the sound. Ken tells a story of how Jerry caused jaws to drop: “On ‘Summer Wages,’ when they got to Jerry’s break — and, again, you have to remember that they’re not used to playing with a dobro and not used to playing with Jerry — they were all so stunned that all three singers forgot to come back in for the tag line. Fortunately, they held the track. Everybody was really tense when we went back and listened to it. It was fine and they just came back in and did the tag line.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” J.D. said. “He did that little thing with his finger, pulled the string kind of like a pedal and I just went … [opens mouth].”

It didn’t hurt that Jerry knew J.D.’s playing well — he called Crowe “the pile driver of banjo players.” And Ricky and Tony had supplied Jerry with tapes of the songs the band had been working up for the album, so he was familiar with the repertoire and the New South’s performance of it.

Ricky had a new mandolin, a Lloyd Loar F-5 from 1924. It came from an old friend of Ralph Stanley’s who lived around Port Huron, Michigan, and was one Ricky had known about for years, but couldn’t afford. Hugh helped him get it, co-signing for a bank loan. The guy who owned it almost back-tracked on the deal, clearly reluctant to give it up, until his daughter reminded him that he’d promised his wife a new washer/dryer. “The Maytag won over the mandolin,” laughs Ricky.

Bobby played upright bass on the album, one borrowed from Ed Ferris on the first day and one he borrowed from Tom Gray on the second.

There were some other instruments in the session. Some may have wondered why the original album notes had the line “Thanks to Emmylou Harris’s Angel Band.” Ricky explains, “We used her drummer and her piano player on ‘Cryin’ Holy.’” And Bobby remembered that “Emmylou helped sing on one or two songs. They didn’t use it. Didn’t fit the trio or something. To me, she sounded good. She sounded real good but they decided they didn’t want to use that part on there.”

J.D. said, “Most of the songs we did, we had played them. We were familiar with them. The new ones, we had rehearsed those and we had played them enough that we knew them real well. So we didn’t have any problems. We had problems figuring which ones to do, because we had so many. We just picked the ones we thought would be the best.”

Ricky Skaggs and Tony Rice in 1975. Photo credit: Marty Godbey.

In fact, J.D. liked Jerry’s playing on the session so much that he invited Jerry to join the band. And there was a lot of mutual respect. Jerry said of Bobby, that he “just enshrined himself in the bass players’ hall of fame, when he kicked off ‘Born to Be with You.’ How in the world did he do this, and he’s left-handed, reaching across, slapping?”

It was an efficient recording session — two days.

Most of it was done live. Ricky had to overdub the viola and twin fiddles, and he did a few vocal parts, but there wasn’t much of that. Hugh said, “I had everybody’s ass outta bed and in that studio at 10 o’clock in the morning, and we finished by 5:50 or 6 in the afternoon … and went and had a good dinner! And we took a break [during the time in the studio] … we spent a little over six hours each day. That whole project took about 12 hours.”

J.D., Tony, and Ricky went back to Silver Spring and mixed the album with Bill McElroy between February 9-12. As the 0044 recording session proved, though, it was not really a matter of budget alone. Talent — on both sides of the console — made a major difference. Great albums needn’t always cost so much. The total cost for the studio and mixing, including J.D.’s expenses for the mixing — and even $10 to Ed Ferris for the loan of his bass — came to $5,931.79.

Hugh: “The bottom line is, riding back to Lexington — Bobby Slone and J.D. and I were listening to it — and Bobby said, ‘Hugh, that’s not really bluegrass. I’m not sure what it is, but I like the hell out of it.’”

So did the rest of the bluegrass world. Come the festival season, there was nothing but acceptance — the New South became, far and away, the hottest band of the summer of ’75.

The Holiday Inn came under new management as 1975 began, and the band shifted venues to the Lexington Sheraton. The band kept honing the repertoire they’d recorded, and other material compatible with their new sound. Then came the summer festival season. Jerry joined the group, and the band broke out on the road playing to great acclaim. The 0044 record wasn’t released until August, so a lot of festival goers were taken by complete surprise when they heard the new New South band live.

Hugh remembers the excitement at the bluegrass festivals: “The funny thing is, nobody wanted to follow the New South. You never heard so many damn excuses. ‘We got to get to Michigan … can we go on first?’ Nobody wanted to follow what those guys were doing. They were burning up the damn bluegrass circuit. It was great material, great vocals, and unbelievable picking.”

And Hugh didn’t want Bobby Slone to be under-appreciated. “His timing and his support and the way he was kind of the grease that kept all the wheels running … I love that man. He’s one of the outstanding human beings I was ever around in the music business. I put him and Vince Gill right at the top of the list. Bobby was the unsung hero in that whole deal.”

Bobby was, in turn, gracious in his remarks about Tony: “We had good timing. That was the main thing, right there, to start with. Tony had rhythm that just wouldn’t quit. His lead hand rhythm was so good.”

This is part two of a three-part series about the iconic bluegrass album that will be re-released by Rounder Records in an expanded vinyl edition for Record Store Day 2016. Read part three here.

The End of the Road

They played the festival circuit that Summer and then did a quick 10-day tour of Japan that turned out to be their swan song. Eight shows in 10 days. And then the band broke up. Tony went to play with David Grisman. Ricky and Jerry formed Boone Creek. And Bobby continued his string of what became 27 years playing with J.D.

Tony takes “responsibility” for the band coming to an end. The group was at the top of its game. In talking with Tim Stafford, he alluded to Miles Davis’s best group — the group that recorded Kind of Blue. Yes, that was Miles’ best group, Tony says, but that group wasn’t together a full year, either. In the case of the Crowe band — the band that recorded 0044 — well, Tony suggests, there probably wasn’t “any real room for improvement. I think everybody had sort of a sublime awareness of that. We knew who we were as a bluegrass band. We had all the elements there: the harmonies, the drive, the tune selection. It’s almost like it was so good, it was doomed to burn out real quick.”

For that matter, going back to do another album might not have worked, as well. “That album hit with a pretty hard impact,” Tony says. “Double-oh forty-four hit pretty strong. To have done a follow-up to it a year later would have only done the same thing.”

But there wasn’t the opportunity — though years later, Tony was the key figure putting together the recording known as The Bluegrass Album (Rounder 0140, July 1981) which reunited Tony with J.D., joined by Doyle Lawson, Bobby Hicks, and Todd Phillips. That band, with some variations in personnel, recorded six albums in all for Rounder.

One still wishes the J. D. Crowe and the New South band of 1975 could have lasted a little longer and recorded at least another album or two. Tony acknowledges, “The ’75 band was really short-lived because of me.” Then he adds, “If I hadn’t left, it wouldn’t have stayed together much longer anyway, I don’t think. Ricky had a real staunch traditional side, even back then, and he wouldn’t have hung around. But the legacy still lives on. It raised the bar for what is still going on, to this day, in bluegrass music.” Another time he said, “It’s almost like it was so good, it was doomed to burn itself out real quick.”

Ricky had been talking about starting his own group with Keith Whitley, and he and Jerry had grown close while working in the Gents. But, Ricky admits, “If Tony had stayed two or three more years, I’m sure I would have stayed, because I loved singing with him. I loved making music with him. We’d have done probably another record or two. Who knows? Who knows what that band could have been?”

To be fair to Tony, on Labor Day 1975, he’d been with the band four full years, to the day. And he was only 24 years old. That was a long time to stick with any one band. He’d had the opportunity in March 1975 to play on Bill Keith’s first Rounder album and that was an eye-opener for him. “Keith was able to pull more out than I thought I had in me. As far as I know, that was the first record of significance I had ever guested on. It was probably the most significant recording of my career, in terms of setting a stage for the music that I would be most identified with, even to this day. It was at the sessions for that record that I heard David Grisman’s music … This music that I heard Grisman play on that tape machine, it instantly started flowing through the veins. I’d never heard a sound like that. I was in heaven.” New horizons beckoned.

“I think it was just time for Tony to musically move on,” Jerry says. “It was tough on J.D., and Ricky and I had been thinking of having a band together … forever. It just seemed like it was time, but I wasn’t sure. I really left half-heartedly. I hadn’t been there that long and I really liked J.D. — as a man, as a person. He was great to me. He wasn’t sure about me when I came in but, by the time I left, I really liked him and he was like a father figure to me. I suppose I was looking for that because I was 18 years old. But it was a chance — the same as Tony was doing — it was a chance to go out and do something and put it in our column.”

“Our last song was ‘Sin City,’” J.D. remembers, “and Tony was standing there with tears running down his face. While we were walking offstage, everyone felt pretty sad about the situation, but things have to change.”

Marian remembers how quickly other bands started playing New South material and, by the summer of 1976, she recalls one festival where it seemed that every band was playing something from 0044 — and one group played a whole set that was almost entirely comprised of songs from the album.

Hugh recalls that the album “was not well-received by Bluegrass Unlimited and the bluegrass experts, because it wasn’t the hillbilly stuff that they expected from J.D. Crowe. But, by God, the radio stations loved it and played it. And that’s where its strength came from. Because the next year when Glen Lawson and Jimmy Gaudreau and J.D. Crowe rolled into the parking lot, every goddamn parking lot bluegrass band there was playing ‘The Old Home Place.’”

“Not only is it one of the most important records in our catalog,” says Marian, “but I was in awe of them then, and I’m in awe of them now. There are very few bands about which I feel that way.”

The look mattered, too, she says — a lot. “I remember as much about how they looked as how they sounded. There was a whole feeling that you got from listening to them. Tony wore those colorful shirts and looked kind of like a young poet. J.D. had such stature. He paced at the back of the stage and always was there just at the right moment, at the microphone. They just had such a physical presence. It was easy to be swept away by them.”

Jerry laughs when reminded of the shirts. “We all had really weird shirts, man. If we’d come within 500 yards of a bonfire, there was so much rayon in Tony’s shirts alone that we would have melted. Those were really crazy shirts.”

The Album Cover

As something of a postscript, we might acknowledge a little controversy regarding the original cover of Rounder 0044. The photograph was taken, J.D. explained, “at a place called Boone Creek. It’s a big hunting area. Hunt club, is really what it was. There’s a big creek down through there. We went down there. I remember it was real cold, and it gets colder around water. He was running out of film. We were just horsing around, and that was really the only one that turned out, where we was all smiling. You know how that goes.” The only one in which the band was all smiling was the one that was used, surrounded by a dark brown chocolate border in designer Douglas Parker’s rendition. The problem was, some soon noticed, that J.D. had the middle finger of his left hand extended, pointing toward Bobby’s ear. There were some in bluegrass circles who were offended.

“We all wanted to put it out,” J.D. said. “I was kind of reluctant, but the guys, you know how they are, young. ‘Hey, man, let’s put it out.’ We were all kind of an outlaw deal … trying to do something different. Not the same old thing you get to see all the time. Gets boring. You know, I have talked to people who had that record for a year and never noticed that. They weren’t expecting it. They might have looked at it, but it didn’t dawn on them what it was. I was just goofing off with Slone. Really, like I said, it was the only one that turned out where we were all smiling, looking like we were happy.”

After an initial run of about 10,000 copies, Rounder did replace the cover with another image taken later at the same hunt club.

The record was a very successful one for Rounder over the years, and one of the records in which the Rounders take pride of stewardship. The influence the album had was clearly much greater than the sales might indicate. In the first nine months, the total sold was 8,748. It took a little longer before the new cover could be adopted, after the first 10,000 were sold. That was a big seller for Rounder in those days, around the time of America’s Bicentennial.

The album was one which had a profound influence on generations of bluegrass musicians. Alison Krauss enthused about it: “That album — that’s the one! I don’t even know how many times I’ve bought the J.D. Crowe album now. I don’t even know how many. If I can’t find it, I go and get another one. If I can’t find it within five minutes, I go and buy another one.

“All the time! I listen to it all the time! It’s a little scary. Might be time to move on. But I can’t seem to. … It’s so new, even now. Even when you hear all the people who have been influenced by it, it’s still so new.”

Notes

Interviews for these notes were conducted with every member of the band: J. D. Crowe (December 28, 2012), Jerry Douglas (January 5, 2013), Tony Rice (October 17, 2013), Ricky Skaggs (October 22, 2013), and Bobby Slone (December 28, 2012).

Interviews were also done with Hugh Sturgill on December 28, 2012, and with Ken Irwin and Marian Leighton Levy on December 6, 2012. Thanks, as well, to Fred Bartenstein and Tim Stafford for email correspondence, and to J. D., Tony, Ricky, and Jerry for reading over the notes.

In addition, the notes draw on interviews done by Tim Stafford in 2005, which were kindly made available, and correspondence with Fred Bartenstein. Marty Godbey’s biography Crowe on the Banjo (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2011) was an important resource, as was Tim Stafford and Caroline Wright, Still Inside: The Tony Rice Story (Word of Mouth Press, 2010) and Ricky Skaggs, with Eddie Dean, Kentucky Traveler: My Life in Music (New York: itbooks, 2013).

This is part three of a three-part series about the iconic bluegrass album that will be re-released by Rounder Records in an expanded vinyl edition for Record Store Day 2016.