Tag: jim & jesse

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

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

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

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

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

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

Jackie and Esco Hankins publicity photo, original date unknown.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Work road shows. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(N:) Oh, yeah.

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

(N:) It’s a splendid job.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve got a six-string ordered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks to Tim Stafford and Carl Fleischhauer.

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

Photo of Rosenberg by Terri Thomson Rosenberg.

Edited by Justin Hiltner

Bluegrass Memoirs: Jackson, Kentucky Bluegrass

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

[Editor’s note: Photos by Carl Fleischhauer]

On Monday August 7, 1972, with fresh memories of Maritimes old-time and bluegrass, I drove from New Brunswick to New England to join my wife and kids, who were house-sitting for my in-laws in Norwich, Vermont. 

On Thursday the 10th I headed south. A fourteen-hour drive brought me to Morgantown, West Virginia, the home of my friend and partner in research, photographer and film-maker Carl Fleischhauer, then employed at West Virginia University. We’d known each other for twelve years. (Our stories are in Bluegrass Odyssey: A Documentary in Pictures and Words, 1966-86 [U of IL Press 2001]). We were about to embark on fieldwork.

During the preceding year, when I began planning for the book Bluegrass: A History, I asked Carl to help me think about photos. In addition to documenting bluegrass festivals and other venues he, with Sandy Rothman, had recently looked for traces of earlier days in a field trip to the old Monroe home in Rosine, Kentucky. Now, we made plans for our own field trip. Carl would take photos. I would make notes and do interviews. 

We spent that Friday in Morgantown looking at Carl’s photos and films and listening to LPs as we prepared for the research. At the end of the evening, my notes say,

Did some picking.

Early Saturday morning we piled in my new Toyota with our gear (cameras, tape recorder, axes, tent, sleeping bags) and headed southwest, crossing into Kentucky from Huntington, WV and snaking down through the mountains to Jackson, the seat of Breathitt County. Three hundred miles; we arrived around 2 o’clock.

There we headed just outside of town for Bill Monroe’s Second Annual Kentucky Blue Grass Festival. When I went to Canada in 1968, Bill Monroe had one festival a year at Bean Blossom in Indiana. Now he was running a bunch in other states, as were other artists. Festivals were the big news in bluegrass music in 1972. We sought to document the bluegrass festival experience.

Later others would write about this, like Bob Artis (“An Endless Festival” in Bluegrass [1975]) and Robert Owen Gardner (The Portable Community [2021]). Here’s how my notes from Jackson begin:

West of town on main hwy, down short steep road. Paid camping & Sat. fees, never did pay for Sunday. Parked & walked down to the stage area — tent set up, natural amphitheatre, uncovered stage, bad sound. Lots of cops around on Saturday.

Made contact with Pete & Marion Kuykendall, and agreed to move in next to them to camp. Set up tent, attempted to speak to Monroe but he was busy coping with the Goins Bros. problem of being hassled by the cops for drinking. Later Kuykendall said that cops had asked Monroe for $ (3 or 6 hundred) and he had refused to pay off so they were taking it out in fines. Lots of racing around on Sat. with flashing lights et al, but they stayed away on Sunday.

Listened then to IT’S A CRYING TIME, hot & exciting Japanese bluegrass band. Then back to Kuykendall’s bus/home whatall. Thunderstorm; discovery that cassette recorder didn’t work on batteries because plug distorts switch; got it running eventually. Oldest Kuykendall girl Sam/Ginger comes in with bass player of above-mentioned Japanese band, then leaves. Kuykendalls are a bit worried about this but Carl & I both notice later that a number of young girls (McLain girls, for example) are hanging around, with this group.

Dinner with Kuykendalls. Frank & Marty Godbey come in and are around for the rest of the evening. Mostly we sit & talk, though I went down to the amphitheatre to catch Jim & Jesse and the Japanese bands. Came back, then returned to catch Monroe. Afterwards listened to picking group in tent near us. Did mainly Emerson & Waldron, Newgrass Revival, Bluegrass Alliance, Gentlemen, etc. Chromatic banjo. Noisy night in Carl’s tent, as sessions went on late and busses started early. I got a spider bite.

Bill Monroe (center) and the Blue Grass Boys at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Saturday, August 12, 1972. Bandmembers include Monroe Fields, bass; Jack Hicks, banjo; Joe Stuart, guitar (hidden); Monroe, mandolin; and Kenny Baker, fiddle.

I’d known the Kuykendalls since 1966. Pete, a 1996 inductee to the Bluegrass Hall of Fame, was a musician, record collector, producer, publisher, and, since 1970 owner-editor of the first and leading bluegrass monthly Bluegrass Unlimited.

Pete Kuykendall, editor of Bluegrass Unlimited, in his RV parked in the camping area at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Saturday August 12, 1972.

Pete and I had already been corresponding about bluegrass history when we met on Labor Day weekend 1966 at the second Roanoke Bluegrass Festival. Subsequently, I visited the Kuykendalls in Virginia where Pete encouraged me to write for the then all-volunteer magazine he would later own. I began with a review of the festival, published the following January — the first of eight articles I did for BU in 1967.

Photo made by Pete Kuykendall’s son Billy with one of Carl Fleischhauer’s cameras. Carl is seated at left with two other cameras on the table. This photo was made at the time of Neil Rosenberg’s (top of head above stove) interview of Pete Kuykendall, editor of Bluegrass Unlimited, in his RV at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Saturday, August 12, 1972. In the background, at left, is Pete’s wife and Bluegrass Unlimited co-manager Marion Kuykendall.

By 1970 Pete and Marion were running BU full-time; I’d done an article for them earlier in 1972 (eventually I would write a monthly column) so we had been in touch recently by mail and phone. Conversations with Pete were never brief! He loved to share the business scuttlebutt and he had plenty since they were selling the magazine at festivals every weekend and had just launched BU’s own annual festival. 

I think this may have been the first time I met the Godbeys. From Lexington, and before that, Columbus, Ohio, they had been following the bluegrass scene for a decade. Frank is a musician who is still performing these days. By 1972 he and Marty had begun writing and publishing photos in BU. For them, as for me, hanging out with the Kuykendalls was a good way to keep up on the bluegrass news. People were already talking about starting an industry association, though that — the IBMA — wouldn’t happen until 1986. Pete was one of its founders.

Neil Rosenberg (facing camera) interviewing Pete Kuykendall, editor of Bluegrass Unlimited, in his RV parked in the camping area at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Saturday, August 12, 1972. In the background, with an air rifle, is Pete’s son Billy Kuykendall.

With the growth of the festivals came clubs, newsletters, and magazines. Bluegrass enthusiasts (many of them musicians) followed their favorites to festivals and other venues. Paths crossed; networks grew. The politics of bands was a favorite discussion topic.

Over the course of the festival, I made note of gossip about the always changing bands. Ricky Skaggs had just left Ralph Stanley — there were rumors about where he was headed next. Was Bill working to get Ralph Stanley on the Opry? Some thought so. The II Generation was said to be splitting up. Stories were told of bluegrass festival camp followers. 

At this Jackson, Kentucky festival were a bunch of bands that had been appearing at Bill Monroe’s other 1972 festivals — Monroe, Jim & Jesse, Flatt, Reno & Harrell, the Goins, Ralph Stanley — mature musicians who’d been working with this music for a substantial period of time and who stuck close to the early models of which they were, often, the authors. Classic bluegrass, one could say. 

What the audience didn’t hear was the kind of stuff we’d heard from the jammers late Saturday night, like “One Tin Soldier,” The Bluegrass Alliance’s cover of a song popularized in the film Billy Jack. Their bluegrass version, with Sam Bush’s lead voice and Tony Rice’s harmonies and guitar work, was a hit, a big step on the road to newgrass.

The Japanese bands were new to the scene. Japanese bluegrass began in the early sixties. In 1971, Bluegrass 45 came from Kobe, Japan, with the sponsorship of their label, Rebel, to tour U.S. bluegrass festivals. They made a big hit at Monroe’s Bean Blossom festival with their showmanship and musical savvy. This year they were back, along with another Japanese outfit, It’s A Crying Time.

Visiting from Japan, the band It’s a Crying Time performs at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Saturday, August 12, 1972. Band members include Eiichi “Ei’ Shimizu, banjo; Kazuyoshi “Kazu” Onishi, mandolin; Satoshi “Sato” Yamaguchi, guitar; Akira “May” Katsumi, bass.

Monroe had booked the Japanese bands as a novelty, something you couldn’t see just anywhere in the bluegrass world. As I mentioned in my field notes, I found It’s A Crying Time’s music “hot & exciting,” and I was not the only one in the audience reacting this way. They came to the attention of Lester Flatt, who, after watching them rehearse, invited mandolinist Kazu Onishi to join him on stage at his final set. 

Backstage moment at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Saturday, August 12, 1972. Akira Katsumi, Kazu Onishi,
Lester Flatt, and Akira Otsuka. Otsuka was Kazu’s friend from the Japanese scene, a member of the Bluegrass 45.

This video comes from the Bluegrass 45’s appearance at Carlton Haney’s Camp Springs festival:

They are announced at the beginning of the video by emcee, writer, and DJ Bill Vernon. Vernon was here at Jackson, as I learned Sunday morning when I went down to the early morning gospel show. Pete Kuykendall introduced me to Bill there, and we had a long chat about the politics of the bluegrass industry. I wrote in my notes:

A very loquacious and complex person.

At that morning’s gospel show, the music came to a stop as a fundamentalist preacher began his sermon. At that point, I noted:

Bill Vernon cut out from the morning sermon, he’d had enough…

During the preacher’s sermon at the gospel program at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Sunday, August 13, 1972. Bill Monroe (wearing a black suit) is seated in the audience area at left.

I stayed and heard some good music, noting:

The gospel section’s high point was when the Goins Bros. did “Somebody Touched Me” and Eleanor Parker came on stage & started clapping hands and singing; Monroe caught on and came up to join in too.

During the gospel program at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Sunday, August 13, 1972. When the Goins Brothers band performed “Somebody Touched Me,” they were joined on stage by Eleanor and Rex Parker and Bill Monroe. Eleanor and Bill joined the Goins trio at the main microphone while Rex sang and played mandolin at the “stage right” microphone.

This kind of spontaneity, which gave festivals their appeal, was not there all the time. Jim & Jesse, I wrote, had:

A good show, with Jim Brock sounding especially good, but … a cut and dried quality to it all.

Describing Lester Flatt and his Nashville Grass, I concluded:

To me the whole band sounded tired, lackluster.

But Flatt’s final set was enlivened when It’s A Crying Time mandolinist and tenor Kazu Onishi came on stage to sing “Salty Dog Blues” with him. 

During my times around the stage area, I had a chance to talk with Monroe and with some of the musicians I’d gotten to know during my years as a backstage regular at Bean Blossom, like Birch Monroe, Joe Stuart, and Roland White.

I arranged with Birch, who was busy helping Bill run the festival, for an interview, to take place later in the week at his home in Martinsville, Indiana.

Joe Stuart offstage at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Saturday, August 12, 1972.

Joe told me about his experiences playing bluegrass in Canada with Charlie Bailey. He’d even appeared in Newfoundland.

Roland, whom I’d known since his days as a Blue Grass Boy, was now playing with Lester Flatt. He told me they were working solid, playing festivals every weekend.

Here’s what I wrote about the audience:

Audience — bluegrass die-hards from Ohio, Ky., D.C., Carolinas. Few freaks. Appear to be about 50% campers, 50% local people. Certainly no more than 1500-2000, on Saturday, though figure of 3000 was bandied about. Bill moved his Ky festival to Jackson from Ashland this year because the turnout at Ashland was dropping. Fact, bluegrass ain’t as popular in Kentucky as it is elsewhere — Ohio, D.C.

Audience on the hillside natural amphitheater at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Saturday, August 12, 1972.

The festival closed with a finale, orchestrated by Monroe. At the first festivals in the mid-60s, which were created to honor Monroe, such events were somewhat spontaneous, but by now, seven years after the first one, these events were highly ritualistic. By the time it happened, I noticed that the Kuykendalls had left. They were not the only ones.

The finale performance at the Second Annual Kentucky Bluegrass Festival, Jackson KY, Sunday, August 13, 1972. At the center, in white suits, are Bill Monroe and Lester Flatt. Here are a few of the other performers, left to right: Curly Ray Cline (on the ramp), Melvin Goins (guitar, facing camera), Kenny Baker (fiddle, white hat, wearing a suit), Joe Stuart (just behind Baker, partly hidden), Buck Ryan (fiddle, white belt), Jack Hicks (banjo, white hat, wearing suit), Paul Warren (fiddle, white hat, at microphone), Vic Jordan (banjo, facing forward), Ralph Stanley (banjo, dark suit, hidden behind McCormick), Haskell McCormick (banjo, in profile), Monroe and Flatt with Don Reno (wearing white) partly hidden behind them, Raymond W. McLain and sister Alice McLain (hidden behind Flatt), Jesse McReynolds (mandolin, wearing striped jacket), Ruth McLain (bass, behind McReynolds), Raymond K. McLain (guitar, no hat), Roland White (mandolin, white hat), Rex Parker (mandolin, striped shirt), and Monroe Fields (leaning on van).

We packed up soon after and headed west for Lexington. I was hoping to interview J.D. Crowe.

[To be continued]

Thanks to Akira Otsuka and Carl Fleischhauer

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

Photo of Neil V. Rosenberg by Terri Thomson Rosenberg.

Edited by Justin Hiltner

Danny Paisley & Southern Grass Find a Family Blend on ‘Bluegrass Troubadour’

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After nearly 50 years in bluegrass, Danny Paisley has reached something of a breakout moment. He won Male Vocalist of the Year honors at the 2020 IBMA Bluegrass Music Awards — his second time in the past five years and his third IBMA trophy overall.

Paisley started performing bluegrass music as a teenager when he joined the Southern Mountain Boys, a band his father Bob co-founded with Ted Lundy. Lundy’s sons, TJ and Bobby, played in that group too, and now are in Southern Grass, the band Danny now leads. The lineup also features his son, Ryan, giving this traditional bluegrass group a unique two-family, three-generation legacy. Earlier this month, the band released Bluegrass Troubadour, their first album for Pinecastle Records. They recorded it last fall with producer Wes Easter, whom Paisley praises for his good ideas and good vibes, sharing that “after every session we were just happy and couldn’t wait to go back the next day.”

Speaking to BGS from his home in Landenberg, the southeastern Pennsylvania town where the singer-guitarist grew up, Paisley talks about how his not-strictly-traditional sound was shaped by that area’s rich musical history and how the new generation is rethinkng bluegrass.

BGS: You’ve been a bluegrass professional almost your entire life. When did you join your father’s band?

Paisley: I started playing with my father and traveling the rooms around 1974-75. Ted Lundy and my dad had a band for years. Ted’s sons, TJ and Bobby, started playing and I started playing, so we became a family group within the two families. Totally like a big family. Their mom is like my mom. And they call my mom “mom.” We grew up together. Basically all our lives we’ve been playing music together. That pretty much carried all the way through, because the Lundy brothers are back playing with me.

How was it being in a band where your dad was the boss?

Sometimes I would say to my dad, “I have this great idea.” Ever patient as he was, he always knew how to handle every situation. He’d always look at you and go: “That’s great, that’s great, when you get your own band you can try that.” To this day, I laugh about that. And I use that, too, on my son.

Now you have a similar situation with your son Ryan in Southern Grass. Does he bring a different generational perspective?

He wants to do more things [with technology], where I’m still old school and like to do things my way. He has good ideas and it makes me have to rethink… Young minds are sometimes way better than old minds. It’s hard for the younger generation today — for the third generation of bluegrassers to relate to the “Blue Ridge Cabin Home on the Hill.” They love the song, but not that theme of the cabin on the hill and things like that from the old days. I have heard of that from my grandparents. Now with the next generation, it is washed down even more.

The area where you grew up seems to have been a great musical influence.

I was very lucky. I grew up in a place here where there was a country music park, Sunset Park. On Sundays, they would have a major country or bluegrass artist… Bill Monroe, Mac Wiseman, Osborne Brothers… I got to see all of my heroes within five miles of my house. Down the road about 15-20 miles was another park called New River Ranch. It had the Stanley Brothers, Jim & Jesse, Reno & Smiley. Any given Sunday within 20 miles, you could go somewhere and hear some incredible music.

When I was very young, Flatt & Scruggs came and everyone was there to see Earl Scruggs. He was god to every banjo player and rightfully so. I remember that day leaving with this impression of Lester Flatt — just how calm he was and how he talked from the stage. He was in control of the whole thing so easily. … Del McCoury lived the next county over from me, so we often played shows with him. I loved his rhythm guitar playing and his voice. He could play that rhythm guitar and keep that band in time – he’d drive that band with that guitar. There was nothing like hearing him live.

Your music has been associated with “Baltimore Barroom Bluegrass” What was that scene like?

When I got older, there were all these bars and clubs in Baltimore, which is about 30 miles from home. I ended up playing in these clubs, four or five nights a week… you’d played from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m., sometimes four or five sets. You got your chops in. You had a broad repertoire and you were playing to people who knew the music because Baltimore became a hub for Southerners who moved up from Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky for work. They were hard-living, hard-drinking, and hard-driving bluegrass fans. There’d be fights. There’d be carrying on, but boy you could have fun!

And another regional musical influence on you was the Galax sound, right?

Galax is a town in southern Virginia, on the state line of North Carolina and Virginia, and the Old Fiddlers Convention there draws thousands from all over the world. The Galax sound features a lot of fiddle — maybe not your standard bluegrass fiddle tunes, but a lot of different fiddle tunes that made their way into bluegrass music. …

Their banjo players had a certain sound to their playing. Ted Lundy had it. He came from Galax and my dad’s family came from over the state line in Ashe County, North Carolina. So naturally they would be drawn together when they got up here. Ola Belle Reed, who wrote “High on a Mountain,” lived a few miles from where I’m at here. She was from that same region. The driving banjo — there is a certain style in their hands and in their noting. You can tell they are from the Galax area. I play [guitar] with a thumb pick where a lot of the bluegrass guys play with a flat pick. That was from my dad also.

So Southern Grass’ driving rhythms are like a handed-down legacy?

Yes, of that area and of our fathers. We keep the rhythm sort of pumping, but you’ve got to play to each song. We’ll work the song. As the singer eases off singing, the rhythm will pull back, too, and then you can build back up. We do a lot of stuff like that dynamic. That’s what I like about my style of music, knowing and feeling the song.

Bobby Lundy used to play the banjo in the band and decided he needed some time off. When he said he was able to play, I needed a bass player. I call him my utility man of bluegrass, like he could play any position on a baseball team — he’s that talented. Because he has known me for so long, he knows what I am going to do on a guitar. He knows what I am going to do singing. He can walk me right into the singing with his bass. He can lead me right into the voice. He can just push the band and keep that timing from not going too fast or too slow. He can just keep it rock steady.

How did you pick songs for your new album?

Two of them [“He Can’t Own Them” and “I Never Was Too Much”] were written by Eric Gibson of the Gibson Brothers. He’s always one of my favorite writers. He sent a gang of songs he had not recorded. Every one of them was a great song. Those were the two that fit my style. Brink Brinkman — another excellent bluegrass songwriter — told me, “I have a song that I’d like you to hear.” As soon as I heard it [“Date With an Angel”], I wrote back: “I want it!”

“May I Sleep in Your Barn, Mister,” I learned from a guy named Cullen Galyean, a banjo picker and a great mountain singer from down in the Galax, Virginia, area. “Eat at the Welcome Table” is an old-timey spiritual song. When my dad moved up here to Pennsylvania, his neighbors were an African-American farming family. They had an old-timey string band and played gospel songs. They would sing that song. We put our own spin on it.

The album has an interesting mix of songs that come from different styles and influences.

That’s how music generally works for me. I love it all, and then I make it my own. My band is rooted in traditional music and traditional ways, but that shouldn’t hamper or restrict you. So, I keep my ears open to all kinds of things. You can sometimes take an idea from a non-bluegrass artist and use it in bluegrass.

It’s that way with my singing. I listen to everything from George Jones, Jerry Lee Lewis and Vince Gill to opera singers like Pavarotti – these guys all amaze me. How they control their voice and present it with such tone. For me that was lacking in my singing and I had to work at that… I learned to sing a little different as I got older – to take the edge off the high tenor part a bit. Things like that, and I noticed that people were responding better.

Congratulations on winning your second IBMA Male Vocalist of the Year win. Was the victory sweeter the second time around?

The first time I was so shocked. Any category when you are up there with Russell Moore, Del McCoury — all these guys that I enjoy. You’re shocked that people would appreciate what you do. The second time, it was like, “Oh my goodness.” It didn’t really set in until the next day or so. I love to go out and play to make people happy. I never thought of being something like Male Vocalist of the Year. It’s always the dream for everybody. It’s always a dream to play the Grand Ole Opry, but you’ve got to keep it realistic. A life lesson early on that I got from my dad: never get to where you think you’re better than anybody else. Because as soon as you do that, you’ll realize that you’re not.

Photo of Danny Paisley and Ryan Paisley courtesy of Pinecastle Records.

New Grass Revival: Sam Bush and John Cowan on the Early Years (Part 1 of 2)

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One of the most celebrated and innovative bands of the 1980s, New Grass Revival will be inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame during the IBMA Bluegrass Music Awards on October 1. As part of our coverage of the 75th anniversary of bluegrass music, BGS caught up with founding member Sam Bush and vocalist/bass player John Cowan to talk about the early years in this first of two stories exploring their remarkable discography. Read part two of the story here, featuring insight from Béla Fleck and Pat Flynn, as well as Bush and Cowan.

The four founding members of New Grass Revival are Curtis Burch on guitar and Dobro, Courtney Johnson on banjo, Ebo Walker on bass, and Sam Bush on mandolin. They had all played together in the five-piece band, Bluegrass Alliance.

Sam Bush: We wanted to fire our [Bluegrass Alliance] fiddle player Lonnie Peerce, and when we told him this he said, “You can’t fire me, I own the name of the band.” So we said, “Let us put it this way: we quit.” We were already influenced by the Country Gentlemen and the Osborne Brothers and Jim & Jesse and the Greenbriar Boys and a really great record by the Charles River Valley Boys called Beatle Country. That’s one of the reasons we called ourselves New Grass Revival — we were trying to point out that we were reviving a new bluegrass that had already been invented by those people. We were only hoping to further the progressiveness we already dug.

Bush had been friends with Courtney since he was a teenager, when the banjo player was lead singer in a band playing Stanley Brothers tunes.

SB: We had no particular plan to play differently but our very first practice I remember Ebo hitting a bass lick in D minor that we later discovered he got from Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.” We played licks back and forth over it and all of a sudden Courtney went into the melody of “Lonesome Fiddle Blues” by Vassar Clements. That’s how we came to work up “Lonesome Fiddle Blues” for our first album. It was like a band epiphany, that we could improvise over a riff the way rock ‘n’ roll bands did. We were just playing it the way we felt it.

Courtney and Curtis were steeped in traditional bluegrass, but Bush was a musical sponge, soaking up everything from Homer and Jethro to Jefferson Airplane to the Rolling Stones to French jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty. The band’s first, self-titled album, from 1972, included covers of Leon Russell’s “Prince of Peace” and Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire.“

SB: This is the days before cars had cassette players, so Ebo had a tiny cassette player we took with us on the road, and we’d made a tape we could listen to. One side was John Hartford’s Aereo-Plain. And on the other side we had Leon Russell and the Shelter People. Without John Hartford there would be no newgrass. Growing up close to Nashville, I would watch him on local TV, and one night he did a bluegrass version of “Great Balls of Fire” on the Glen Campbell show, and I recorded it from the TV — that was the one we learned. Courtney even played his chromatic run the same way John did it.

While making their first album Bush encountered the man who would be his songwriting partner, Steve Brines.

SB: We lost our Louisville club gig when we ended Bluegrass Alliance, so in order to make a living that first winter in ’70-’71 I ended up playing electric bass with a folk group called the Cumberlands: Harold Thom and his wife Betty, and a banjo player called Jim Smoak. Jim had co-written a couple of songs with this poet-lyricist over in Lexington called Steve Brines and we played one on that early album — “Cold Sailor.” After I made his acquaintance Steve and I started trying to write together. Steve lived up in Lexington and I lived down in Barren County, and he’d send me five to ten sets of lyrics in the mail and I’d make up music, put it on a cassette and send them back. Our rule was I wouldn’t change one word, if he didn’t change one note.

It was a productive partnership – Bush and Brines wrote half the songs on their second album, Fly Through the Country. By then, Walker had left the band and they had gained a new player: John Cowan.

John Cowan: I joined in 1974. I did not grow up in bluegrass. I was a rock ‘n’ roll kid playing in local garage bands. But I had an awareness of New Grass Revival because I lived in Louisville, which was their home, and the woman who became my wife once dragged me to go see them. I didn’t want to go, but I was blown away. Six months later I got a phone call from Sam living down in Western Kentucky with Courtney and Curtis and he said he got my number from this guy, and would I be willing to come down and audition for us?

SB: He was a city guy, and when he pulled up and saw us, it was like “Oh my god what have I got myself into?”

JC: Courtney and Curtis were truly unique individuals. They were from South Georgia, super country dudes, born and raised playing bluegrass. I was wild-eyed and “What is all this stuff?” To their credit they welcomed me with open arms.

SB: We played some tunes together and asked him to join the band and he said, “I sing too — do you mind if I sing a song?” And in the tradition of Barney Fife I puffed up my chest and said, “Well, I’m the lead singer but yeah, go ahead.” And he sang “Some Old Day” in the same key as John Duffey did it in, only with this powerful voice and this beautiful vibrato. At the end of it I said, “John, I used to be the lead singer, now you are.”

JC: The day they hired me we rehearsed with the drummer. The next morning I got up and he was gone! I was like, “Where did Michael go?” Courtney said, “Oh hell, we fired him. We don’t need him with you!” I felt kind of bad about it, he was a really nice guy.

Soon the band’s rock ‘n’ roll influences were coming to the fore.

JC: They were already experimenting with jamming on traditional instruments over songs and it was right up my alley, because I was also a big prog rock fan. I was obsessed with Yes. On the title track of Fly Through the Country, Sam played this little thing that looked like a can of Spam — it was a resophonic mandolin, he played slide on it. When Béla joined, he said the big joke was that you could listen to the first part of the song, go out for lunch, come back, and you’d still be playing it.

SB: People would call us “The Grateful Dead of Bluegrass” because of our long tunes and our experimentation. We had to put it in our contract that we wouldn’t be billed like that, because then we had Deadheads coming expecting us to play their songs, and we didn’t do any.

JC: Our touchstone was the Allman Brothers. Their live album At Fillmore East came out three years before and we both knew it by heart; to this day I could sing every note and every solo. So that was a crucial record for our band. Sam exposed me to Jack Casady’s [of Jefferson Airplane] bass playing. When I joined the band I was 21, and Courtney was already 38, I was so out of my element. I’d only ever played with guitars and keyboards and drums, and I was smart enough to at least say, “I don’t know what I’m doing, you guys have to help me.” They’d give me a joint and say, “Go listen to this stuff — here’s John Hartford, here’s Norman Blake, here’s the Dillards….” It was so foreign and beautiful to me.

SB: One of the first songs John taught us was “These Days.” He sang like Gregg Allman when he first arrived, and his voice and vocal style changed to fit into what he had joined.

JC: I would imitate him [Gregg Allman], Lowell George, Stevie Wonder. But when I got in that band, now what do I do? I was smart enough to realize it wasn’t going to work for me to try and sing like Ricky Skaggs or Bill Monroe, that’s not in me. But Sam was very encouraging to me and the more I sang the more I developed my own voice.

SB: Garth [Fundis, the band’s producer] had introduced me to a piano player, Chuck Cochran, and Chuck played electric piano with us on “These Days” at the end of the Fly Through the Country. It was the last song we recorded, and we went, “Huh… We can make this fusion of more instruments into our sound.”

Their next album, When The Storm Is Over, went further, incorporating more of Cochran’s keyboards, as well as drums and percussion.

SB: We wanted to augment our sound and appeal to a wider audience, and Chuck and Garth introduced us to the great drummer Kenny Malone. He played on our next three records and I started producing the records myself. Stephen and I continued to write. The subject matter of our songs was totally different than bluegrass-style songs. I’ve always just said newgrass music is contemporary music played on bluegrass instruments.

JC: Sam’s going to solo for eight minutes, then he’s going to toss it to Courtney, then Curtis, and I’m the guy who’s in charge of keeping the train on the tracks and keeping the coal in the engine. That was my job and I loved it. To this day, when you’re playing that kind of music and all the players are in sync spiritually and musically and emotionally there’s nothing like it. To me that’s what punk music is: just this tremendous energy of people.

In 1977 their first live album, Too Late to Turn Back Now, was recorded at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival.

JC: It was such a fruitful time for music and we were in the middle of it. Jackson Browne, Miles Davis, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, John Coltrane, Little Feat…. Those people were our models, we listened and listened and it came out in our music. At Telluride we took this Willis Alan Ramsey track off this one solo album he made, the song “Watermelon Man,” and to me that was us doing Little Feat. That’s “Dixie Chicken.” That’s “Fat Man in the Bathtub.” There was a lot of Little Feat groove in what we were doing.

SB: We were trippier on stage than on most of our records, but you can hear it on that live record. Our association with Leon Russell — we’d opened for him in 1973 — had opened the doors. I don’t know that we were psychedelic exactly, but I was trying a phase shifter on my fiddle, like Jean-Luc Ponty, and Curtis would play lap steel with distortion.

JC: We had all grown together. Sam and I were fixated with Delaney & Bonnie at the time. We played “Lonesome and a Long Way from Home,” which Delaney co-wrote with Leon Russell, and we were so obsessed with them vocally that we talked about this: “I’m going to do Bonnie, you’re going to be Delaney.”

The band’s popularity was growing and they were finding their audience, thanks to the support of fellow musicians like the Dillards and Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. In 1979, Leon Russell had dropped in on the band’s soundcheck when they played at the Apollo Delman Theatre in his hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The band released the album Barren County that same year.

SB: Leon saw our name on the marquee and hadn’t seen us for years so he stopped by. We went back to his house that night, we jammed all night, and then we went and recorded with him in Nashville and in Hollywood where his studio was. It was really cool. We were teaching Leon bluegrass songs.

The result was the album Rhythm and Bluegrass, Vol 4, which Russell recorded in 1980 under his country alter ego, Hank Wilson. However, the project stayed unreleased until 2001.

SB: We were always most proud of that record. I co-produced it, I just didn’t know that’s what you called it. Leon had a bluegrass songbook and he’d say, “What do you think, should we do this one?” And I’d say, “Nah, let’s try this one.” So that’s how we started as his backup band. For two years! John and I had so much fun singing harmony with him. I love singing baritone, and vocally we were glued to him. And the way John and I did call-and-response in our singing was very influenced by the way Leon and Mary [his wife] did it on their records.

A live album, recorded in 1981, captures the spirit of their collaboration with Leon Russell.

SB: There were shows where you’d see him bounce up and down on his piano stool and that’s when we knew we were going to go into this Pentecostal church service with him, and the songs would just keep speeding up and speeding up and the audience was getting more and more excited. It was amazing, the rock ‘n’ roll hysteria. We learned a lot about show business from him.

Russell played keyboards on Commonwealth, which was Johnson and Burch’s last album with the band.

SB: Listening to the solo that I played on “Deeper and Deeper” [on Commonwealth], having not heard it for years, that one I managed to go to place I hadn’t planned on. Of course you have a game plan and an outline of what you want to achieve with a solo, but that solo was one of the happiest surprises.

(Editor’s note: Read part two of our oral history of New Grass Revival.)

 

First Generation: Meet the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame’s Earliest Inductees

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Though it’s not that hard to find some who will argue the point, bluegrass is widely held to have originated when banjo phenom Earl Scruggs joined Grand Ole Opry star Bill Monroe’s band in early December, 1945. Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys — the possessive wasn’t just there for show — were already among the anchors of the radio show’s cast, but contemporary accounts (and a handful of bootleg recordings) make clear that, to the ears of an almost instantly enraptured audience, Scruggs’ rapid-fire banjo playing elevated the group’s sound to a new level.

Almost instantly, groups sprang up — or reoriented themselves — in pursuit of the new sound, and although banjo players and fiddlers were the most obvious converts, the truth is that virtually all of the intricacies the band brought to their sound were soon emulated. By the time Scruggs and guitarist/lead singer Lester Flatt left the Blue Grass Boys at the beginning of 1948, the quintet’s live performances and a handful of recordings had already inspired some notable followers, who, out of artistic desire and commercial necessity, quickly busied themselves in developing their own distinctive takes on the sound of the “original bluegrass band.”

As we near the 75th anniversary of this foundational origin story, BGS will be looking back across the sweep of those years — and first up, of course, a clutch of true pioneers that share a common accomplishment: they are the acts honored by induction into the IBMA’s Hall of Fame in its first five years and their plaques proudly hang at the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum in Owensboro, Kentucky.

Bill Monroe (inducted 1991)

A complex personality with a skill set that included equal measures of innovation and synthesis, the mandolin-playing Monroe (b. 1911) moved from a mid-1930s duo with his brother to assembling a hot string band during World War II to fronting that original bluegrass band — an achievement which earned him his “Father of Bluegrass” title. Though it’s easy to discern the elements he brought together in that music — old fiddle tunes; Scotch-Irish ballads; African-American blues, jazz and gospel; western swing and more — his creativity extended beyond simply stirring them together and kept him a central figure from its inception until his death in 1996.

Indeed, while his early classics are essential to the bluegrass canon, even his late-life instrumental compositions have enjoyed a growing influence among today’s hottest young players. In fact, he collected his first Grammy for 1988’s “Southern Flavor.” Monroe was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1970, and as the composer of “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” he joined the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1971, received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Grammys in 1993, and entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an early influence in 1997.

Representative tracks: “Blue Yodel No. 4,” “I’m Going Back to Old Kentucky,” “Lord Protect My Soul,” “Midnight on the Stormy Deep,” “Southern Flavor”

Earl Scruggs (inducted 1991)

Though he wasn’t yet 22 years old when he joined Monroe’s band at the end of 1945, Earl Scruggs (b. 1924) was ready to step into the spotlight, and, with the exception of a stretch of ill health in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, he never relinquished it until his death in 2012. Unlike many instrumentalists who change their approach according to musical context, Scruggs believed that his picking style — built around right-hand patterns called “rolls” — could fit anywhere, and after his groundbreaking years with Monroe and then Lester Flatt, his career seemed devoted to proving the point.

Having created much of the musical vocabulary for bluegrass banjo picking, he moved on to playing with his sons in the Earl Scruggs Revue, a country-rock-bluegrass fusion band that was arguably more successful — at least in commercial terms — than Flatt & Scruggs had ever been. In the 21st century, Scruggs championed a broad variety of younger musicians while continuing to play those same sweet rolls he’d created as a young man. He was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Grammys in 2008.

Representative tracks: “Blue Ridge Cabin Home” (Flatt & Scruggs), “Foggy Mountain Chimes” (Flatt & Scruggs), “Travelin’ Prayer” (Earl Scruggs Revue), “The Engineers Don’t Wave From the Trains Anymore” (with Tom T. Hall), “The Angels” (with Melissa Etheridge)

Lester Flatt (inducted 1991)

With an expressive, emotive voice and an impressive array of demeanors that ranged from dry and sly to devout and down-home, rhythm guitarist Lester Flatt (b. 1914) was the perfect musical complement to Earl Scruggs, and their 1948-1969 output was at least as influential as Monroe’s. Flatt & Scruggs won a 1968 Grammy for their classic recording of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.”

But where Scruggs was not only interested in playing with his sons, but also interested in putting his banjo into a wider range of contexts, Flatt preferred sticking to the country side of bluegrass. In the aftermath of their breakup, Flatt’s drawl deepened and slowed as he presided over a series of gifted lineups that included peers like Josh Graves and Vassar Clements, alongside young up-and-comers from banjoist Kenny Ingram to a teenaged Marty Stuart. Flatt & Scruggs were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1985.

Representative tracks: “I’ll Never Love Another” (Flatt & Scruggs), “I’ll Go Stepping Too” (Flatt & Scruggs), “On My Mind” (Flatt & Scruggs), “You Are My Flower” (Flatt & Scruggs), “Gonna Have Myself a Ball”

The Stanley Brothers (inducted 1992)

The career of Ralph Stanley (b. 1927) and Carter Stanley (b.1925) illustrates both the profound impact that the original bluegrass band had on their peers, as well as the complementary artistic and commercial drives that impelled those successors to create their own unique style. In their first recordings, made while Flatt and Scruggs were still Blue Grass Boys, you can hear the Virginia-born Stanley brothers revamp their old-time string band approach into an approximation of the pioneers’ sound, yet within a matter of months, they had found a compelling variant.

The Stanley sound was built in part around Ralph’s stolid but driving banjo and soulful tenor singing, but even more around Carter’s mournful lead vocals and powerful songs. Over the years, while they moved from the Nashville-based Columbia and Mercury labels to scrappy (and multi-racial) Cincinnati indie, King, their sound became even more recognizable, as owner Syd Nathan hectored them into de-emphasizing the fiddle and leaning more into the innovative work of flatpicking lead guitarists like George Shuffler. The brothers’ partnership came to an end in late 1966 with the early, alcohol-related death of Carter; Ralph would continue on with his own twist on the Stanley Brothers’ sound until his death in 2016.

Representative tracks: “The Lonesome River,” “Our Last Goodbye,” “Let Me Walk, Lord, By Your Side,” “I’ll Just Go Away,” “Pig in a Pen”

Reno & Smiley (inducted 1992)

The first banjo player to follow Scruggs, albeit briefly, in the Blue Grass Boys, Don Reno (b. 1926) deliberately sought to create a distinct and instantly recognizable style of his own on the instrument. By the time his partnership with singer-guitarist Red Smiley (b. 1925) had settled into regular recording for King Records in the early 1950s, he had succeeded completely, and for good measure had done the same with flatpicked guitar solos, too. As Grand Ole Opry announcer Eddie Stubbs once put it, Reno & Smiley were a country band with a banjo instead of a steel guitar.

Though Reno could and sometimes would blister a banjo solo, many of the band’s signature numbers were heart songs, country shuffles, earnest gospel outings and more, including occasional flashes of rockabilly and jazz. Reno wrote many of them, sang tenor and occasional leads, and shared the instrumental limelight with their steady fiddler, Mack Magaha, and occasionally with one or another mandolin player, including his son, Ronnie. The partners split for a few years in the mid-‘60s, then reunited for a brief period before Smiley’s death in 1972. Reno continued to record and perform with partners ranging from Bill Harrell to his sons until he passed away in 1984.

Representative tracks: “I’m Using My Bible for a Roadmap,” “I Know You’re Married,” “Little Rock Getaway,” “Please Remember That I Love You,” “Just About Then”

Jim & Jesse (inducted 1993)

Though Jim McReynolds (b. 1927) and Jesse McReynolds (b. 1929) were born just a few dozen miles from the Stanley Brothers, the music of Jim & Jesse could hardly have been a more different kind of bluegrass. The duo’s singing was smooth and refined — especially guitarist Jim’s silvery tenor — while the instrumental sound was driven by Jesse’s innovative mandolin cross-picking and their overall approach by the latter’s eclectic tastes and influences (he appeared, for instance, on The Doors’ 1969 album, The Soft Parade).

The brothers were comfortable in reaching for a more countrified sound, helped by banjo players like Allen Shelton and Carl Jackson, who were adept at playing radio-friendly licks on a dobro-banjo as well as ‘grassier fare when that was called for. Smart businessmen as well, the duo were among the first to appear on television in the early 1950s, recorded an entire album of Chuck Berry songs in the mid-1960s, started their own label in the early 1970s, and remained a popular fixture on the Grand Ole Opry until Jim’s death on the last day of 2002. As of this writing, Jesse McReynolds continues to perform — and to innovate, too, with releases like a 2010 Songs of the Grateful Dead collection.

Representative tracks: “Pardon Me,” “Are You Missing Me,” “She Left Me Standing on the Mountain,” “Cotton Mill Man,” “Memphis”

Mac Wiseman (inducted 1993)

Nicknamed “The Voice With a Heart,” Virginia’s Mac Wiseman (b. 1925) was a founding member of Flatt & Scruggs’ Foggy Mountain Boys in 1948, but soon left to join Monroe (and Don Reno) in the Blue Grass Boys. By the early 1950s, he’d started his own career, recording for Gallatin, Tennessee’s Dot Records — and then going to work for the label. A consummate professional, he also served as a musicians’ union official for a time, and was a founding member of the Country Music Association. He frequently recorded material other than bluegrass, especially when rock ’n’ roll and the pop-country Nashville sound beckoned in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and throughout his career, he was never afraid to use a variety of instruments besides the archetypal bluegrass ones.

Still, as a performer, bluegrass was his bread and butter from the mid-1960s on, and rather than carry a band, he would recruit players from other acts (and occasionally skilled amateurs, too) and lead them on stage with a heavy guitar strum and a quick “watch me, boys!” Wiseman’s songbook included old folk numbers, songs he heard on the radio as a polio-stricken child, big band tunes, Music Row compositions and much more. In later years, he recorded several memorable projects that highlighted songs his mother had taught him and songs that told his life story, before his death in 2019.

Representative tracks: “I Still Write Your Name in the Sand,” “I Wonder How the Old Folks Are at Home,” “Mother Knows Best,” “My Little Home in Tennessee,” “’Tis Sweet to Be Remembered”

The Osborne Brothers (inducted 1994)

Bobby Osborne (b. 1931) and Sonny Osborne (b. 1937) were among the first of what might be called “semi-second generation” bluegrass artists; unlike those who preceded them in the Bluegrass Hall of Fame, neither had performed professionally before 1950. By 1954, though, they’d hooked up with Jimmy Martin for a memorable set of recordings, and 1956 found them signed on to MGM on their own. Together with singer-guitarist Red Allen, the Brothers — Bobby singing lead and playing mandolin, Sonny singing baritone and playing banjo — had come up with an inventive new vocal arrangement that put the spotlight pretty much on them alone.

Lest that sound too cold, it should be noted that they deserved it, for not only was Bobby a formidable lead singer and Sonny brilliant in the support role, but their fearless, try-anything (the two recorded separately with avant-garde jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton in the mid-’60s) instrumental skills were profoundly original. The Brothers joined the Grand Ole Opry and signed with Decca Records in 1964, and spent the next decade fusing bluegrass and country in a way that eventually earned them a CMA Vocal Group award. Irascible, opinionated, and both artistically and commercially successful, the Osborne Brothers were at the forefront of the music until Sonny’s 2005 retirement — and while Bobby continues to perform to this day, the influence of their duo continues to grow, too.

Representative tracks: “Once More,” “The Cuckoo Bird,” “Tennessee Hound Dog,” “Pathway of Teardrops,” “Sweethearts Again”

Jimmy Martin (inducted 1995)

East Tennessee native Jimmy Martin (b. 1927) hungered to perform with Bill Monroe as a youngster, then got his chance in 1949 when Mac Wiseman quit the Blue Grass Boys. As lead vocalist and guitarist, he helped to make some of Monroe’s most memorable recordings, then partnered in various settings with Bobby and Sonny Osborne before taking the helm of his Sunny Mountain Boys in the mid-1950s. A brash, colorful guy who could boast with the best and then back it up, Martin served in the cast of the Louisiana Hayride (alongside Elvis) and the Wheeling (W.V.) Jamboree before a growing bluegrass festival circuit threw him a lifeline in the absence of a Grand Ole Opry membership.

Among early Hall of Fame inductees, he may be considered more influential than most of his peers. Service in his Sunny Mountain Boys constituted the training ground for several generations of musicians, from banjo man J.D. Crowe to newgrass pioneer Alan Munde to Americana favorite Greg Garing — and his appearance on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken was legendary. Martin was an unstoppable force of nature who knew exactly what he wanted from a musician, yet was unable to clearly explain it. Still, he did well enough that his records are instantly recognizable, even when you’ve never heard them before.

Representative tracks: “That’s How I Can Count on You” (with the Osborne Brothers), “Rock Hearts,” “You Don’t Know My Mind,” “Tennessee,” “Freeborn Man”

Pictured above, first row (L to R): Bill Monroe, The Osborne Brothers, Mac Wiseman, Jim & Jesse; Second row: Reno & Smiley, The Stanley Brothers, Jimmy Martin, Flatt & Scruggs

MIXTAPE: High Fidelity’s Traveling Music

Posted on by Editor

While High Fidelity is known for representing a specific niche in the bluegrass music landscape from the 1950s and early ‘60s, each member brings a diverse palate of musical tastes and styles. This playlist is a fine example of some of the diverse listening one might hear on our travels. Some of us remember making mixtapes of our favorite songs and tunes in the days of the cassette. Well, our van still has a cassette player in it! I hope you’ll enjoy listening to some of the music that inspires us, and maybe I should run off a tape of this for our next trip! — Jeremy Stephens, High Fidelity

Flatt & Scruggs – “Earl’s Breakdown”

This is probably the first song that really lit a fire under me to love and play bluegrass music. I first heard it on a red 8-track tape. I was absolutely drawn to Earl’s banjo playing and the famous section of the song where he tunes the second string down a whole step and then brings it right back up. Honestly though, the part of the tune that tore me up and still tears me up is Everett Lilly’s mandolin break. When I first heard that break, I thought it was the most incredible thing ever. Still is the best 15 seconds of mandolin playing on record. — Kurt Stephenson

Don Reno – “Coffee Cup”

I love “Coffee Cup,” because it showcases Don Reno’s banjo playing and creativity to the max. Though Reno didn’t write the song, he had a masterful arrangement of it. I believe it demonstrates nearly every signature technique that is unique to Don Reno. Each solo (they’re all banjo solos) is an adventure, and a fun one at that! — KS

Lonesome River Band – “Say I Do”

I always credit Lonesome River Band with sparking my interest in contemporary bluegrass sounds. My first LRB album was One Step Forward and my favorite song on the album is “Say I Do.” I love the groove, the harmonies, the chord structure, and especially the musical groove. Kenny Smith plays an incredible and beautiful guitar solo, which is followed by a banjo solo from Sammy Shelor. That particular banjo solo taught me so much about dynamics; especially in regards to coming out of a solo and leading in to the vocal. — KS

Reno & Smiley – “Country Boy Rock ‘N Roll”

I’m a country boy and I like to rock and roll, so this song fits. I remember picking up the album that included this song at a flea market when I was about 12 or 13, and it was my very first introduction to Reno & Smiley. — Daniel Amick

Tim O’Brien – “Wind”

I like this song because it’s a good song. It speaks to my soul. We have wind at my house. — DA

Punch Brothers – “Boll Weevil”

As a farmer sometimes I deal with crop failure, bugs, and drought. The goal is of course to problem solve and see beyond the failures to the success just on the other side, but seeing this as a story from the bug’s perspective is pretty interesting. — DA

Jim & Jesse – “Did You Ever Go Sailing”

The In the Tradition album by Jim & Jesse is the first album I remember consciously listening to, the first instance I remember understanding what an album was and what it meant to be an artist. When I would go to 3-year-old preschool, I listened to this on cassette continually and just wore the tape out. My first favorite song was this one. I still love everything about that album and this song! Glen Duncan’s fiddling, Allen Shelton’s banjo playing, and of course Jesse’s mandolin playing are just the cream of the crop, with the added bonus of Roy Huskey Jr. on upright bass. Jim is featured here singing lead on the verses and jumping to harmony on the choruses, making for an all-around awesome arrangement! — Corrina Rose Logston

Red Smiley & the Bluegrass Cut-Ups – “It’s Raining Here This Morning”

Tater Tate’s fiddling has been a huge influence on me, and it’s something I go back to over and over again for inspiration. This particular cut features Tater front and center just wearing it out! I love a song in the key of F like this, and this cut is just exceptional. Red Smiley’s flawless lead singing is like golden drops of honey. Billy Edwards’s playing out of open F on the banjo is the epitome of my happy place. It just doesn’t get much better than this for me! — CRL

Sarah Siskind – “Lone Tree”

It might surprise fans of High Fidelity that most of my “newer” music listening is outside the realm of traditional bluegrass. In fact, outside of the High Fidelity setting, my own solo artistry and songwriting is like a musical amalgam drawn from many diverse sources throughout my life. I love Sarah Siskind’s artistry and draw so much inspiration from her music. It’s hard to pick favorites but this particular song is pretty high up on the list for me! And, fun fact, Jeremy Stephens was staying with Sarah’s mom and dad the year that Jeremy and I met each other at SPBGMA in 2009! — CRL

Homer & Jethro – “Tennessee, Tennessee”

I knew I wanted to include a Homer & Jethro number, but I didn’t know just which one. I’ve always admired their ability to integrate belly laugh-inducing lyrics to some serious mandolin precision. “Tennessee, Tennessee” is one that I’ve always wanted me and Corrina to cover. That last verse makes me lol every time. — Vickie Vaughn

Tim O’Brien & Darrell Scott – “Walk Beside Me”

This is the opening song to my desert island record. I just need one and this record, Real Time, is IT. That GROOVE, though. I’ve listened to this song at least a hundred times and the repeating mandolin hook paired with the mandola toward the end of it makes me feel like I. CAN. DO. ANYTHING. Thanks for that confidence, Tim & Darrell. — VV

Jim Oblon (with Larry Goldings & Jim Keltner) – “Copperhead”

I’ve known Jim for a while. I met him here in Nashville before I even knew what he was musically capable of. Friends later told me that he was Paul Simon’s drummer. Now we’re old friends and I try to be cool when I see him now and again at the gym and I try to refrain from nerding out over yet another musical discovery I had while listening to his records. Get a load of this RIFF on “Copperhead.” Not showcased on this recording is Jim’s incredible vocal prowess. Make sure you take time to find a song of his to hear that. You’re welcome. — VV

Kilby Snow – “Close By”

I’ve loved the autoharp since my Mamaw got me one for my sixth birthday from the secondhand store she worked at. I didn’t start playing it seriously until I saw my banjo mentor, Troy Brammer, playing autoharp when I was in my early teens. I’ve gone quite a few years without playing it seriously, but since we’ve all been shut in at home, I’ve been playing autoharp almost exclusively around the house for a couple months now. My favorite of all the autoharp players is Kilby Snow from Grayson County, Virginia. He played autoharp left-handed upside down, and did these open-bar “drag” notes to make it sound like the roll on a five-string banjo. This is a great Bill Monroe number played by Kilby on the harp, and it’s one I’ve found myself playing quite a bit lately. I learned to play his style right handed from his son Jim when I visited him in Oxford, Pennsylvania, in 2006. — JS

United Sacred Harp Convention – “Sherburne 186”

I first heard sacred harp shape-note singing on a 78 RPM record at Kinney Rorrer’s home. Kinney is a serious record collector and has been a mentor to me in the history of old time music. After first hearing the singing on that 78, I was hooked, and I couldn’t get enough of Sacred Harp. I learned to read and sing the shape notes and listened to many recordings of Sacred Harp conventions. Of all my listening, this recording of this tune has stood out to me, and I wanted to include it here. Hope y’all like it! — JS

Reno & Smiley and the Tennessee Cut-Ups – “Mountain Church”

There is no set of recordings that I have returned to over and over for more than 20 years, except for Reno & Smiley’s 1953 and early 1954 recordings. The tone, feel, playing, and singing of these 24 sides sum up everything that I really love about Reno & Smiley’s corner of bluegrass music. This era of their work has greatly informed what I bring to the table stylistically with High Fidelity. “Mountain Church” is one of my favorites of Reno & Smiley and we perform it occasionally in High Fidelity. — JS

Photo credit: Amy Richmond

Jesse McReynolds – Toy Heart: A Podcast About Bluegrass

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

Host Tom Power talks to Bluegrass Hall of Fame member Jesse McReynolds of Jim & Jesse and the Virginia Boys about his career in bluegrass.

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One of the last founding fathers of bluegrass, Jesse McReynold’s story is the story of bluegrass — a music that emerged out of the country, into rural schoolhouses, onto rural radio, finding sponsorship along the way, enmeshing itself into the mainstream of American culture.

McReynolds tells the story of his grandfather, who played in the first recorded country music session, talks about being offered a gig with the Stanley Brothers, serving with the armed forces in Korea and singing alongside Charlie Louvin. He relates hunting down record deals and successes with his brother Jim, starting their own label, being sought out by counter cultural icons like the Grateful Dead and The Doors. Now nearing the age of 91, McReynolds spends some time reflecting as well, on his brother Jim’s death, his own struggles with the Opry, and how he feels about his legacy in the music. This is an icon of American music whose story isn’t often told, and we’re honored to play a part.

Junior Sisk Hitches His Wagon to the Stars of Traditional Bluegrass

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Junior Sisk is on a mission. Although he’s been a fan of traditional bluegrass since childhood, he’s now fully focused on keeping that history alive. That passion for tradition is evident in Load the Wagon, the award-winning vocalist’s first release since disbanding Ramblers Choice.

“The Stanley Brothers, Flatt & Scruggs, Jim & Jesse, and all of them had big hits, but they also had hidden treasures on all those LPs. A lot of them that were never played and they’re not a jam tune. That’s what I’m looking for,” Sisk says. “It’s going to be like new tunes to a lot of folks. That’s what I’m after – to still pay tribute to the founding fathers of traditional bluegrass music, but in the Junior Sisk style.”

The Virginia musician’s recovery mission has unearthed a number of gems on Load the Wagon, like Flatt & Scruggs’ little-known “Lonesome and Blue” and the heartfelt “Lover’s Farewell,” a Carter Family gem suggested by his new bandmates Heather Berry-Mabe (guitar, vocals) and Tony Mabe (banjo, guitar, vocals). Jonathan Dillon (his mandolin player from Ramblers Choice), Gary Creed (bass, vocals), and Douglas Bartlett (fiddle, vocals) round out the lineup.

Sisk also re-cut the song that remains his most requested number, “He Died a Rounder at 21,” from his time with Wyatt Rice & Santa Cruz in the mid-‘90s. Leading up to a show at Station Inn, he invited BGS on the bus for a chat.

BGS: The first song on this album, “Get in Line, Buddy,” will be a familiar tune for fans of the Country Gentlemen. What made you want to record it here?

Sisk: Me and Bill Yates got to be good friends there for a long time right toward the end, and every time we’d play together at a festival, I’d always get together with him and ask him to do “Living on the Hallelujah Side” that he’d done with the Country Gentlemen, and this one right here — “Get in Line, Buddy.” Those are a couple that he sang solo on. It was just great, great singing.

It’s like what I’m trying to do right now. I’m in line with Flatt & Scruggs, the Stanley Brothers, and all that. I’m way down the line, but I’m in line anyway. And it still rings true today when you come to Nashville. When you walk the streets, you see them on the streets. You see them in all the clubs and everything. Everyone’s standing in line. I feel like I’m still standing in line for traditional bluegrass music.

With “Get in Line, Buddy” and “Best Female Actress,” there’s a sad story there, but you find a way to put humor into those songs. It’s not an easy thing to pull off. How do you approach that?

Well, when I go into the studio and start to record, I’ve always done a lot of tongue-in-cheek songs. I’m noted for that, but I sing with a lot of emotion. I sing with a lot of feelings. That’s why a lot of times I’ll lose my voice, to tell you the truth, because I’m singing so hard and with as much feeling as I can.

I love to look out in the crowd and see them either crying, if I’m singing a pitiful song, and if I’m singing a tongue-in-cheek song, I like to see them laugh and carry on. It just makes for a good show, I think. And Charlie Moore has been one of my favorites. He’s one of the most underrated bluegrass artists ever. He’s a great singer.

You also have some songs on here, like “Just Load the Wagon,” which are plain-and-simple funny. I’m curious, where did you get your sense of humor? Was there someone in your family where you picked that up?

Yeah, my dad. He’s a songwriter. He’s probably got a thousand songs at the house for me to choose from. But every song he writes, at the top of the page he writes the date he wrote it, and he writes, “Sing in the key of D and sing like Carter Stanley.” [Laughs] I said, “Dad, you can’t sing ‘em all like Carter Stanley and they can’t all be in D!” But if he had his druthers, that’s what it would be. That’s pretty much me, too. I was raised, born and bred, on the Stanley Brothers’ music.

This one here, I thought the folks would really enjoy, and now that I’ve gotten rid of the Rambler’s Choice name and went to the Junior Sisk Band, I’m trying to pay tribute to traditional bluegrass music, so we brought back the old-style banjo, the mountain-style banjo-playing with the clawhammer on this one. And it’s turning out to be one of my favorite tunes that we’re playing now. It’s a lot of fun and the crowd can react to it. It’s a toe-tapping tune.

You mentioned that the Ramblers Choice name is gone. Why was that an important move for you to shift to Junior Sisk Band?

Well, Jason Davis, Kameron Keller, and a couple of guys left. My dad always says when wintertime comes around and things start getting slow, somebody blows a whistle and everybody switches. It’s pretty much like that. If you don’t have any work, I’m going where the work is. But I was actually straying away from my heart – I was straying away from traditional bluegrass music a little bit. I just did not want to do that. I finally came to the conclusion that what I’m going to do until the end of my career is pay tribute to traditional bluegrass music, and try to keep it alive as long as I can. That’s what we’re trying to do today, is keep it straight-ahead bluegrass, right in the middle of the road, and turn the younger fans onto traditional bluegrass music.

Why is it important for you to carry that torch for traditional bluegrass?

I’m just tickled to death to see the young’uns out here today that come to our shows, or to see them out jamming at festivals and playing the old-style music. You don’t see that a lot anymore. It seems that the younger generations is trying to play every note they know. …When I hear somebody with real emotion, and real feeling, who’s a traditional young’un coming up, I love it. Because we’ve lost so many — Ralph Stanley, James King, and a lot of traditional artists here lately. I think I’m a torch holder and that’s what I hope to be until the end of my career. As long as I’m able to breathe and sing, I’m going to keep their music alive.

It hurt to lose James King, didn’t it?

Oh, it was hard. I was there holding his hand on the day he died, in the hospital. I was on one side and Dudley Connell was on the other. And we told him we would keep his music alive. I’m getting chills now, but it meant the world to me, just to be there. He was a torch holder as well.

You re-recorded “He Died a Rounder at 21” from your days with Wyatt Rice & Santa Cruz. What’s it like to sing about that guy now, 24 years later? Does it bring out a different emotion in the song for you?

It’s still the same. The story in that song is awesome. I’ve grown up with a lot of folks in the bluegrass industry and I’ve seen a lot of ‘em pass away from alcoholism and just the hard life, the bluegrass life. People around home say, “Wow, you’ve got it made. You go on stage and play 45 minutes…” They don’t know about the 15 hours you travel to get there. It’s a hard life. You don’t eat right. You don’t take care of yourself. And I can understand where this guy came from. He only lived 21 years – but 21 years was like a thousand years in his time. I understand that, and that’s why I put everything I got in that song. Because it rings true.

Was there a pivotal moment for you when you decided to go into bluegrass full-time?

In my early teens, I lived and breathed it. I sat at the end of the bed in my mom and dad’s room with an old LP player and played Dave Evans, Larry Sparks, the Stanley Brothers, just trying to learn everything George Shuffler ever did on guitar. I was in it hot and heavy, and eat up with it.

In the early ‘80s, I moved up around the DC area and that’s when the Johnson Mountain Boys came on the scene. I followed them everywhere they went. They brought me back to life, and still today if I get to feeling sad, or get down about the music, I can put a Johnson Mountain Boys DVD in, and it will bring me right back. There was so much excitement and energy, they just tore me all to pieces. That’s what it’s all about.

Photo credit: Susie Neel

The Breakdown – Jim & Jesse, ‘The Jim & Jesse Show’

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

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Season 2 of The Breakdown continues with an in-depth exploration of Jim & Jesse McReynolds’ 1975 live album, The Jim & Jesse Show.

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Bluegrass and Japan are like peanut butter & jelly – it might not seem the most obvious match up, but boy, does it work. Patrick and Emma talk to Jesse McReynolds, one of the oldest living Opry members, about Jim and Jesse’s 1972 trip to Tokyo – and the awesome live album it resulted in.

Season 2 of The Breakdown is sponsored by The Soundtrack of America: Made In Tennessee. Visit TNvacation.com to start planning your trip.

22 Top Bluegrass Duos

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Everyone knows that in the early days of bluegrass, before that term was even coined, all you needed to make a “band” was two people and two instruments. Fiddle and banjo? Sure. But in those days, they’d take whatever they could get. Duos are still a strong presence in the music today, in brother/sibling duos, spouse-led bands, and legendary collaborations.

Check out these twenty-two bluegrass pairings — and their accoutrement — on BGS:

Bill & Charlie Monroe

Before Bill Monroe, the Father of Bluegrass, made his indelible mark on the genre (quite literally giving it its name), he was already a popular performer with his brothers Charlie and Birch. Birch left The Monroe Brothers in the mid-1930s, and Charlie and Bill went on to enjoy success on the road, in the studio, and on the radio — until rising tensions and a fateful fight in 1938 caused them to split ways. But, without that fight, we may not have “bluegrass” at all.

Flatt & Scruggs

December 1945. The Ryman Auditorium. Nashville, Tennessee. Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys stepped on stage for the Grand Ole Opry with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs among their ranks for the very first time and bluegrass as we know it today was born. Flatt & Scruggs left Monroe in 1948 to join forces and went on to become one of the few ubiquitous, household names of bluegrass.

Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard

Undeniably trailblazers, Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard are widely regarded as the first women in bluegrass to capture the “high lonesome” sound popularized by Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, and others. They toured across the U.S., often supporting causes that benefited forgotten, downtrodden people from all backgrounds and walks of life. They were inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2017.

The Stanley Brothers

Natives of the music-rich southwest corner of Virginia, Carter and Ralph Stanley were prolific recording artists and touring musicians in bluegrass’s first generation. Countless songs written and/or popularized by the Stanley Brothers and their backing band, the Clinch Mountain Boys, are staples of the genre today. Carter passed in 1966 and Ralph continued until his death in 2016 with the Clinch Mountain Boys — who still tour today with Ralph’s son, Ralph II.

Don Reno & Red Smiley

Unsung trailblazers of the first generation of bluegrass pickers, Reno & Smiley were tireless innovators with a jovial, sometimes silly flair to their songs and instrumental prowess. Their duets are simply some of the best in all of bluegrass. The duo performed together off and on from the early 1950s to the 1970s — but both passed away much too young, Smiley in 1972 at the age of 46 and Reno in 1984 at the age of 58. Reno’s frenetic, electric and pedal steel guitar-infused licks remain unmatched in banjo picking today.

Jim & Jesse McReynolds

With matching suits and impeccable pompadours brothers Jim and Jesse McReynolds often brought rockabilly, rock ‘n’ roll, mainstream country and pop sensibilities to their take on sibling harmonies and bluegrass brother duos. Jesse’s crosspicking on the mandolin was — and continues to be — absolutely astonishing. Jim passed in 2002, Jesse continues to perform on the Grand Ole Opry to this day. At the time of this writing, he is ninety years old.

Laurie Lewis & Tom Rozum

Laurie Lewis often takes top billing — as leader of the Right Hands and before that, the Bluegrass Pals, and others — but since 1986 her musical partner Tom Rozum has almost constantly been at her side on the mandolin and harmonies. Their duo recording, The Oak and the Laurel, was nominated for a Grammy in 1995. Here is the album’s title track:

Bill Monroe & Doc Watson

What is there to say? Two of the folks who paved the way for this genre, laying a foundation so strong and far-reaching that we still can’t fully comprehend its impact. Bill and Doc collaborated on more than one occasion and we, as fans and disciples, are lucky that so many of these moments are captured in recordings and videos.

Del McCoury & David “Dawg” Grisman

At face value, an unlikely combo, but their friendship goes back to the early 1960s and their musical endeavors together began soon after. As Del slowly but surely became a bastion for traditional bluegrass aesthetics applied broadly, Dawg embraced jammy, jazzy, new acoustic sounds that sometimes only register as bluegrass-adjacent because they come from the mandolin. Opposite sides of the same coin, their duet makes total sense while at the same time challenging everything we think we know about the music. In this clip, Dawg sings tenor to Del — not many would be brave enough to try!

Ricky Skaggs & Keith Whitley

They got their start together in the Clinch Mountain Boys with Ralph Stanley, making some of the best recordings in the history of the band’s many iterations. Before they both struck out on wildly successful, mainstream careers they recorded a seminal duo album together, Second Generation. It remains one of the most important albums in the bluegrass canon — especially as far as duos/duets go.

Norman & Nancy Blake

Norman is well known for his flatpicking prowess, which has graced recordings by John Hartford, Bob Dylan, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and so many others. He and his wife, Nancy, were married in 1975 after having begun their musical forays together a year or so earlier. Nancy’s command of many instruments — cello, mandolin, and fiddle among them — balances neatly with Norman’s jaw-dropping, singular style on the flattop. Their inseparable harmonies and timeless repertoire are merely icing on the cake.

Jimmy Martin & Ralph Stanley

How their first album together, First Time Together (cough), is not more well-known is truly impossible to understand. The King of Bluegrass and the Man of Constant Sorrow twining their extraordinary voices must have been ordained by a higher power. It’s a good thing they answered the call. Be careful, Jimmy’s percussive G-runs feel like a slap in the face — in the best way.

Darrell Scott & Tim O’Brien

Their live albums together and their co-written masterpieces belong in every museum and shrine to roots music around the world. Both of these triple threat (Quadruple? Quintuple? When do we stop counting?) musicians are rampantly successful in their own right, but together they are simply transcendent. Their cut of “Brother Wind” deserves a listen right this instant and “House of Gold” gives you the harmony acrobatics gut punch you need every time. It was nearly impossible to choose just one, but here’s a hit that was recorded once by a little group called the Dixie Chicks.

Ricky Skaggs & Tony Rice

Again, words fail. Skaggs & Rice is a desert island record. Each and every time these two have graced a recording or a stage together, magic has been made, from their days with J.D. Crowe & the New South and on. We only wish that they could have done more together.

Vern & Ray

Vern Williams and Ray Park were California’s original bluegrass sons. Though they were both born and raised in Arkansas, they relocated to Stockton, California, as adults. They’re often credited with “introducing” bluegrass music to the West Coast. They disbanded in 1974 (both passed in the early 2000s), but their influence is palpable to this day, even if they’re sorely unheard of east of the Mississippi. This deserves correction! Immediately!

Eddie & Martha Adcock

Eddie is a pioneering banjo player who’s a veteran of both Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys and The Country Gentlemen, two decidedly legendary and influential acts. His style is somewhat wacky, certainly singular, but effortlessly bluegrass and traditional as well. He married Martha in the late 1970s and the pair have toured prolifically as a duo. In 2008, Eddie underwent brain surgery to correct debilitating hand tremors. He was kept awake, playing the banjo during the procedure — and there is jaw-dropping film of this online!

Dailey & Vincent

When Dailey & Vincent burst onto the scene in the mid-aughts after both having notable careers as sidemen, the bluegrass community rejoiced at the reemergence of a wavering art form within the genre — traditional duo singing. However, Jamie and Darrin, whether they knew it at the time or not, had their sights set much higher. Now more of a full-blown stage show than a bluegrass band, their recordings and concerts are a high-energy, charismatic, and downright entertaining mix of classic country, Southern gospel, quartet singing, and yes, bluegrass.

Kenny & Amanda Smith

Husband and wife Kenny and Amanda first recorded together in 2001, going on to win IBMA’s Emerging Artist of the Year award two years later. They’ve now cut eight albums together, all clean, clear, crisp modern bluegrass that centers on Amanda’s impossibly bright vocals, which maintain a personal, country hue alongside Kenny’s fantastic flatpicking. SON!

Tom T. & Dixie Hall

Two of the most recent inductees into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame, Tom T. and Dixie Hall wrote hundreds and hundreds of songs cut by country, bluegrass, and Americana artists alike. Tom T.’s reputation and chart-topping originals tend to eclipse Dixie, but he is unyielding in his efforts to point that same spotlight at his beloved wife instead, who passed away in 2015. Though she never performed — definitely not to the extent that Tom T. did — the marks she left on bluegrass, country, and her partnership with her husband are indelible. This number was co-written by the pair:

The Louvin Brothers

Recipients of IBMA’s Distinguished Achievement Award in 1992, the Louvin Brothers are another example of early bluegrassers who enjoyed the amorphous, primordial days of the genre before it became more and more sequestered from mainstream country and country radio. Their duets are iconic, with counter-intuitive contours and lines that bands and singers still have difficulty replicating to this day. Their most famous contribution to the American music zeitgeist, though, might not be their music, but the spectacular cover art for their 1959 album, Satan Is Real. If you haven’t seen it, Google it right now.

Delia Bell & Bill Grant

Natives of Texas and Oklahoma, respectively, Delia Bell and Bill Grant met through Bell’s husband, Bobby, in the late 1950s. Between their band, the Kiamichi Mountain Boys, and their duo project they recorded more than a dozen albums together through the 1980s. Famously, Emmylou Harris became a fan when she heard their cut of “Roses in the Snow,” which Harris went on to record on her eponymous bluegrass record. Bell died in 2018.

The Osborne Brothers

Though they popularized a style of three-part harmony that had never been heard before — the infamous “high lead” harmony stack — their band, no matter who it may have included over the years, was undeniably helmed and anchored by Bobby and Sonny. (Which does explain the name.) You may remember “Rocky Top” and “Ruby” first and foremost in their discography, but the hits they’ve contributed to the bluegrass songbook are innumerable. Here’s one such classic.