Tag: nitty gritty dirt band

With Dylan Tribute, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band Is Bringing It All Back Home

Posted on by Editor

Nitty Gritty Dirt Band frontman Jeff Hanna goes way, way back with the music of Bob Dylan — to the very first time he ever saw him more than half a century ago. It was December 5, 1964, at Wilson High School in Long Beach, California.

“Yeah, $3.50 advance, $4.50 at the door, just Bob with an acoustic guitar and harmonica rack,” says Jeff. “It was after ‘Another Side of Bob Dylan,’ so the tail end of all-acoustic Bob, right before the electric stuff. He was on the cusp of making a change in musical intent and boy, was it great. Quite a thing for a 17-year-old kid.”

A bit more than two decades later, Jeff’s son Jaime had his mind similarly blown with his first Dylan experience at the ripe old age of 14.

“Red Rocks in Colorado, 1986 with Tom Petty,” says Jaime. “My little brother and I went with dad, sat at the soundboard where there was this lunch-bag full of joints. It was pretty cool and iconic to be there at that moment. And you could say it was my dad’s fault! He knew seeing him would be important for me.”

Dylan remains a multi-generational touchstone six decades after he broke onto the scene, and the Hanna men’s viewpoints through time help animate Dirt Does Dylan. A 10-song tribute to the Dylan songbook, it’s the Dirt Band’s first studio album since 2009’s Speed of Life. It’s also the group’s first album to feature its new lineup, in which Jaime has joined the family business as singer/guitarist and occasional drummer. Also new to the lineup are bassist Jim Photoglo and fiddler/mandolinist Ross Holmes, joining longtime drummer/harmonica wizard Jimmie Fadden and keyboardist Bob Carpenter alongside Jeff Hanna on vocals and guitar.

This isn’t the first time the Dirt Band has covered Dylan. 1989’s second volume of the long-running Will the Circle Be Unbroken series featured Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” with Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman reprising their roles from the iconic version on the Byrds’ 1968 classic, “Sweetheart of the Rodeo.” But Dirt Does Dylan is a deep dive into all things Bob, with versions of some of the great bard’s definitive songs — “I Shall Be Released,” “She Belongs to Me” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” among them. The latter song features an all-star cameo guest list of Rosanne Cash, Steve Earle, Jason Isbell and The War and Treaty all taking a verse.

“That one’s generational, back to that 1964 Wilson High School gig for me,” says Jeff. “As you know, Bob has never wanted to be labeled as a ‘political’ or ‘protest’ writer. But as an observer of history and society and culture, he’s always so brilliant. He wrote that one at the apex of the Civil Rights movement, which it fit right into, and yet it’s still timeless with a consistent message across the ebb and flow of the world and society and humanity. Jason and Rosanne and everybody else all brought something unique to the tune, yet it hangs together in a beautiful way.”

Other highlights include the rousing sing-along version of “Quinn the Eskimo (Mighty Quinn),” a Dirt Band soundcheck standard since Manfred Mann had a hit with it in 1968; “Girl From the North Country,” based on the 1969 Nashville Skyline version; and “I Shall Be Released,” best-known for the classic version sung by The Band keyboardist Richard Manuel on “The Basement Tapes.” Then there’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” 1963 B-side to “Blowin’ in the Wind” and even more of a back-pages trip for Jeff Hanna than most of these songs.

“Me and Jimmie (Fadden) and Bruce (Kunkel) were like folk puppies, and our hangout spot was McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Long Beach,” says Jeff. “We’d go there after school, grab a guitar off the wall and play. That fingerpicking pattern to ‘Don’t Think Twice’ was tricky and real cool, and learning it was like a rite of passage. It was all part of the folk process to learn that tune.”

Father-son dynamics played into “Forever Young,” with Jeff taking the first verse and Jaime the second (and Carpenter the closing third verse). That seemed fitting, given that “Forever Young” was a song Dylan reputedly wrote for his son Jakob, a future pop star as leader of The Wallflowers. The Hannas singing to each other makes it a touching intergenerational moment.

“Since it started as a song Bob sang to his son, us doing it as a father-son thing, too, came out really cool,” says Jaime. “Dad singing to me, ‘May your wishes all come true’ and then me singing, ‘May you have a strong foundation’ to him. Yeah, Dylan, he’s a pretty good writer, that guy.”

As was the case for so many projects, the coronavirus pandemic upended the planned timeline for Dirt Does Dylan. After whittling a list of around 80 possible songs down to several-score tunes to attempt in the studio, they did most of the recording in the spring of 2020. First up was the Nashville Skyline song “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You,” which also wound up in the pole position on Dirt Does Dylan — eventually. The virus shutdown suspended work for about a year, and then it took another year after that to get all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed. Ray Kennedy, whose best-known credits include Lucinda Williams and Steve Earle, co-produced at his Room & Board Studio in Nashville.

“Ray’s like the mad-scientist dude from Back to the Future in a lab coat and chef’s hat,” says Jeff. “His whole sonic scene is a throwback to all this amazing analogue stuff. He’s got an incredible collection of instruments and microphones in his studio, and we used ’em all. He’d say things like, ‘Beatles records sounded pretty good, didn’t they? This is the mike they used.’”

Now that Dirt Does Dylan is out in the world, maybe it will somehow lead to another in-person encounter with the man himself. Jeff has had a couple of experiences over the years, most memorably in early 1990. It was right after the Dirt Band’s second Circle album won three Grammy Awards, and Al Kooper guided Hanna backstage to usher him into Dylan’s presence.

“We walked through this maze of tents, velvet ropes, bodyguards,” Jeff recalls. “The last rope lifted and there’s Bob in this big chair in a room tricked out with lamps and scarves. Al and Bob go way back and he introduced me, set it up nice: ‘This is Jeff Hanna who just won a Grammy, he’s a good friend and would love to meet ya.’ And I told him his music has meant so much to me — the wrong thing to say because it never lands. Then I said we’d just won a Grammy for an album with ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,’ he looked at me for a second and said, ‘Yeah, you sure did, didn’t you?’ He had a smile on his face, but…what did that mean? Like everybody else when it comes to Dylan, I’m still analyzing. Anyway, that was it, somebody took me by the elbow and we were out. ‘What just happened?’ I asked Kooper. And he said, ‘You just met Bob Dylan, and that’s how it goes.’”

Photo Credit: Jeff Fasano

How the Byrds’ Classic 1968 Album Shaped Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Iconic ‘Circle’

Posted on by Editor

It’s fitting that the track list for Dirt Does Dylan, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s new Bob Dylan tribute album, includes “Forever Young.” Coming up on six decades since they formed as a group of young folk enthusiasts, the Dirt Band still sounds plenty spry. Revisiting the songs of Dylan, an artist who is very much part of their collective DNA, was an opportunity for the Dirt Band to reconnect with their own roots — especially the loose-limbed rundown of “Country Pie,” the penultimate track on Dylan’s Nashville Skyline album from 1969.

“We started out as a jug band in 1966, and the approach to that one was very much like that, kind of warts and all,” says Dirt Band frontman and co-founder Jeff Hanna. “We didn’t have a washboard or a jug, but Jimmy Fadden was playing a tape box with brushes and had on a harmonica rack. We were all gathered around a Telefunken mike from 1947, and Bob Carpenter started everybody whistling, too. Pretty cool, like we’re a Dixieland jug band. People like to dissect Dylan, but I’m pretty sure ‘Country Pie’ is just about pie.”

Somehow it’s been 13 years since the Dirt Band’s prior studio album, 2009’s Speed of Life. Dirt Does Dylan makes around 30 albums they’ve released over the years, and it’s the first to feature their current lineup. Along with long-timers Hanna, drummer/harmonica player Jimmie Fadden and keyboardist Bob Carpenter, the 2022 edition of the Dirt Band features bassist Jim Photoglo, fiddler/mandolinist Ross Holmes and Jeff’s son Jaime Hanna as singer/guitarist. Prior to the Dirt Band, Jaime was a sometime member of The Mavericks while also playing in the duo Hanna-McEuen with Jonathan McEuen, son of Dirt Band co-founder John McEuen.

“My brother and I used to sing Dirt Band songs along with the records, and with our dad,” says Jaime Hanna. “All very informal. I didn’t really start singing seriously until after moving to Nashville when I was 19. So my dad and I have sang together for 30 years and we know how to sing with each other since we’re, you know, related.”

“Blood harmony, as they say in bluegrass,” adds Jeff.

Early on, Jackson Browne was in the Dirt Band’s initial 1966 six-man lineup before departing for solo stardom, but the Dirt Band actually had a hit before he did. Released in 1967, “Buy for Me the Rain” just missed cracking the Top 40 of the Billboard singles charts. Continuing forward, the Dirt Band evolved beyond its jug-band roots to the country rock then blossoming in California alongside the Flying Burrito Brothers and Byrds — whose 1968 album Sweetheart of the Rodeo would be formative for generations of artists.

“Sweetheart had a huge impact on everybody, including us,” says Jeff. “So did Buffalo Springfield, and The Lovin’ Spoonful on the East Coast. Our band was right on the cusp of awkwardly transitioning from acoustic jug band to the California country-rock band that made the Uncle Charlie album in 1970, when we put our own spin on it.”

Uncle Charlie & His Dog Teddy yielded the Dirt Band’s biggest-ever hit, a definitive cover of Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles,” which cracked the Top 10 in early 1971. They would come close to matching that a decade later with hits including “An American Dream” and “Make a Little Magic,” a period when they were on the pop charts a lot more often than the country charts.

But over the long haul, country music was where they wound up after the pop hits faded, in part because those roots were so strong. The Dirt Band’s country roots were certainly at the center of their signature album, Will the Circle Be Unbroken, which was released 50 years ago. Featuring a cast of country, folk and bluegrass legends — Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, Mother Maybelle Carter, Roy Carter and Merle Travis among them — Circle was an intergenerational summit that stands alongside Sweetheart as signpost for what came to be Americana music.

“The impact of Sweetheart was a mind-altering gateway for expanding boundaries in acoustic music, and it took us to Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” says Jeff. “That impact turned out to be profound. The festival scene was just starting to broaden. Everybody in the bluegrass world had to keep things traditional. But Circle helped keep open the door that John Hartford, Newgrass Revival and Earl Scruggs Revue had cracked open. It’s humbling to have been part of that.”

One of the most notable aspects of the first Circle album (there have been two sequels) was the between-song interludes of dialogue. Dirt Band manager/producer Bill McEuen kept tape recorders running non-stop during the sessions, capturing priceless spoken-word bits from Carter, Watson, Acuff and others. It made for a complicated and time-consuming editing process at the back end, and was the major reason that more than a year elapsed between the time Circle was recorded and then finally released. But it was worth the wait.

“We were still out there touring for Uncle Charlie and we kept asking when it was coming out,” Jeff says. “Bill would say, ‘Trust me.’ And he did a masterful job editing and assembling all of it. We had no idea what a treasure trove of oral history would come out of that. Just to hear Mother Maybelle, Doc and Earl and Merle Travis and Jimmy Martin talk was remarkable. When Bill finally played it for us, it blew our minds. Then he had to convince the record company that this very expensive three-record package would be viable in the market. It retailed for 12 bucks, a lot of dough in 1972. But…it worked out.”

As designed by Dean Torrence, the Dirt Band’s regular album-cover designer (and also the “Dean” in the rock duo Jan & Dean, of “Dead Man’s Curve” fame), Will the Circle Be Unbroken also had a symbol that would probably not pass muster today. It looks like the cover of a photo-album scrapbook about the Civil War, with a portrait of the obscure Union Admiral David Porter flanked by two sets of flags — American to the right, Confederate to the left.

“There was a metaphor there, about hippies versus rednecks in 1971,” says Jeff. “Now that’s a horrible way to describe our friends from the South. But we were longhairs from California, and none of us grew up playing this music on back porches in Appalachia. So here we were coming to Nashville to record with a lot of folks that appeared to be pretty conservative, although we never talked politics. But there was definitely a cultural and generation gap with the Vietnam War raging, protests in the streets. It was quite a time. And for that time, those flags seemed like an innocent metaphor.”

Photo Credit: Jeff Fasano

Artist of the Month: Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

Posted on by Editor

One trailblazing band is paying tribute to a true folk hero with Dirt Does Dylan, a new album by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. The collection covers 10 favorites by Bob Dylan with guests such as Rosanne Cash, Steve Earle, Jason Isbell, and The War and Treaty. Singer-guitarist Jeff Hanna and drummer Jimmie Fadden, among the group’s co-founders in 1966, are joined by longtime bandmate Bob Carpenter and three new members: fiddler Ross Holmes, singer-songwriter and bass player Jim Photoglo, and singer-guitarist Jaime Hanna (Jeff’s son). They’ve previewed the May 20 project with videos for “I Shall Be Released” (featuring Larkin Poe) as well as a new performance clip of “Forever Young.”

On that poetic track, Jeff Hanna takes the first verse and Jaime Hanna follows with the second. “Since it started as a song Bob sang to his son, us doing it as a father-son thing, too, came out really cool,” says Jaime Hanna. “Dad singing to me, ‘May your wishes all come true’ and then me singing, ‘May you have a strong foundation’ to him. Yeah, Dylan, he’s a pretty good writer, that guy.”

Look for two interviews in the weeks ahead from the Dirt Band, our BGS Artist of the Month in May. First, they’ll discuss their roots and longevity — in fact, 2022 is the 50th anniversary of their seminal album, Will the Circle Be Unbroken. Later in the month, we’ll dig further into Dirt Does Dylan, exploring how that iconic songwriter shaped the band’s music.

Of course, at the Bluegrass Situation, we’ve been fans of Nitty Gritty Dirt Band for the duration. We published a retrospective about the first Circle album in 2016. Then in 2019, Hanna spoke to BGS about Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Volume Two, sometimes referred to as Circle 2. (A third volume followed in 2002.) Naturally we’ve covered Dylan as well, from a look at Love and Theft to selecting 15 bluegrass covers from his esteemed catalog.

We certainly agree with the Dirt Band and Dylan that the times they are a changin’, but we will say that some music never goes out of style. Please enjoy our BGS Essentials playlist for Nitty Gritty Dirt Band below.

Photo Credit: Jeff Fasano

LISTEN: Michael Johnathon, “The Ballad of Bojangles” (Feat. John McEuen)

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Artist: Michael Johnathon
Hometown: Upstate New York
Song: “The Ballad of Bojangles” (Feat. John McEuen)
Album: Cosmic Banjo
Release Date: January 21, 2022
Label: PoetMan Records

In Their Words: “I’ve known John for a long time and worked with the NGDB, so the song has always been important to me. Jerry Jeff Walker wrote the great American classic with ‘Mr. Bojangles,’ but I always felt there was another part of that story, another point of view that would touch the emotion of loss in the character of Bojangles. My song is more than just a rewrite; it is my way of looking at the song with a brand new point of view. I wanted to focus on the character’s sense of complete loss … for his family, his life and his dreams. When John McEuen agreed to be part of the recording, it helped validate the idea of ‘The Ballad of Bojangles.’ It was important that the song be reminiscent of ‘Mr. Bojangles’ and yet completely original at the same time, so I made it banjo-driven and added a 21-piece string section and, of course, John on the mandolin.” — Michael Johnathon

Photo Credit: WoodSongs/Larry Neuzel

Carolina Calling, Shelby: Local Legends Breathe New Life Into Small Town

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

The image of bluegrass is mountain music played and heard at high altitudes and towns like Deep Gap and remote mountain hollers across the Appalachians. But the earliest form of the music originated at lower elevations, in textile towns across the North Carolina Piedmont. As far back as the 1920s, old-time string bands like Charlie Poole’s North Carolina Ramblers were playing an early form of the music in textile towns, like Gastonia, Spray, and Shelby – in Cleveland County west of Charlotte.

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In this second episode of Carolina Calling, a podcast exploring the history of North Carolina through its music and the musicians who made it, we visit the small town of Shelby: a seemingly quiet place, like most small Southern towns one might pass by in their travels. Until you see the signs for the likes of the Don Gibson Theatre and the Earl Scruggs Center, you wouldn’t guess that it was the town that raised two of the most influential musicians and songwriters in bluegrass and country music: Earl Scruggs, one of the most important musicians in the birth of bluegrass, whose banjo playing was so innovative that it still bears his name, “Scruggs style,” and Don Gibson, one of the greatest songwriters in the pop & country pantheon, who wrote “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” “Sweet Dreams,” and other songs you know by heart. For both Don Gibson and Earl Scruggs, Shelby is where it all began.

Subscribe to Carolina Calling on any and all podcast platforms to follow along as we journey across the Old North State, visiting towns like Greensboro, Durham, Wilmington, Asheville, and more.

Music featured in this episode:

Charlie Poole & The North Carolina Ramblers – “Take a Drink On Me”
Flatt & Scruggs – “Ground Speed”
Don Gibson – “I Can’t Stop Loving You”
Andrew Marlin – “Erie Fiddler” (Carolina Calling Theme)
Hedy West – “Cotton Mill Girl”
Blind Boy Fuller – “Rag Mama, Rag”
Don Gibson – “Sea Of Heartbreak”
Patsy Cline – “Sweet Dreams ”
Ray Charles – “I Can’t Stop Loving You”
Ronnie Milsap – “(I’d Be) A Legend In My Time”
Elvis Presley – “Crying In The Chapel”
Hank Snow – “Oh Lonesome Me”
Don Gibson – “Sweet Dreams”
Don Gibson – “Oh Lonesome Me”
Chet Atkins – “Oh Lonesome Me”
Johnny Cash – “Oh, Lonesome Me”
The Everly Brothers – “Oh Lonesome Me”
Neil Young – “Oh Lonesome Me”
Flatt & Scruggs – “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”
Bill Preston – “Holy, Holy, Holy”
Flat & Scruggs – “We’ll Meet Again Sweetheart”
Snuffy Jenkins – “Careless Love”
Bill Monroe – “Uncle Pen”
Bill Monroe – “It’s Mighty Dark To Travel”
The Earl Scruggs Revue – “I Shall Be Released”
The Band – “I Shall Be Released”
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band – “Will The Circle Be Unbroken”
The Country Gentlemen – “Fox On The Run”
Sonny Terry – “Whoopin’ The Blues”
Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee – “Born With The Blues (Live)”
Nina Simone – “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free”

BGS is proud to produce Carolina Calling in partnership with Come Hear NC, a campaign from the North Carolina Department of Natural & Cultural Resources designed to celebrate North Carolinians’ contribution to the canon of American music.

BGS 5+5: Twin Kennedy

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Twin Kennedy
Hometown: Powell River, British Columbia, Canada
Latest Album: Homebound
Personal nicknames: Carli guitar-ly, Julie fidd-ooly

What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be a musician?

Looking through old family videos, we have footage of us singing together as young as 3! We put on living room concerts for our mom and dad and their friends, so we knew from a young age that performing was something we loved to do. We started playing as a family band with our dad and our younger sister, Katelyn, when we were 7 years old, and we were really excited and serious about rehearsing and preparing for shows even at that age. We have always been passionate about music — from creating and writing to arranging and harmonizing. We feel so lucky that we were introduced to all of this in our early days with our family because it’s what made us fall in love with performing, and we knew that we wanted to make music our career!

What rituals do you have, either in the studio or before a show?

Live performance has always been our true love as musicians. We fell in love with being on stage when we were kids, and we have spent many years building practice routines and rehearsal rituals together. As twin sisters, we do have that stereotypical connection of “reading each other’s minds.” We call it “twin-tuition” — we can sense how each other is feeling — and so we make it a priority to focus on creating positive energy before every show. When all of our tour dates were cancelled due to the pandemic, we missed live music so much, and we spent a lot of time talking about what we wanted touring and performing to look like when we could return to that part of our career. For our Homebound Tour dates, our pre-show ritual includes a moment of gratitude. We hug each other and wish each other a great show like we’ve always done, but then we take time to give thanks that we are able to walk on stage again and share music, feel that connection with the audience, and do what we love to do.

What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc. — inform your music?

We love every step of the creative process of building a new musical project — and that comes with many different art forms, from video creation to styling to graphic design to merchandise design. We are so inspired by the artists that we get to work with, from our incredible co-writers, to the photographers and directors! We love when music can be reflected in the artwork on the page, say of an album cover, or in a grand sense, like a music video on a mountaintop. When we’re writing a song, we always love it when we can envision the music video or the single artwork as the song is being written.

If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?

We wrote our mission statement as Twin Kennedy in the first year that we started touring full time, and although it has evolved over the years, the foundation has always remained the same: To spread joy through music. We aim to create genuine connection through songs and performance, and create a legacy of love and positivity both on and off the stage.

How often do you hide behind a character in a song or use “you” when it’s actually “me”?

With this new album, we have been the most open we have ever been as songwriters and artists, and all of the songs come from a “me” perspective. All of the co-writers on Homebound are people that we have worked with for years — friends who we have built a trust and connection with that allows us to open up in the writing room. For us, this kind of “safe space” creates our best music. We are really proud of the diversity of emotion and messages that we share on Homebound, and they all come from a personal place. We hope that people can relate to our lyrics and hear their own stories in our songs!

Photo Credit: Suzanne Sagmeister Photography

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.)

 

Hello, Darling: The Dillards’ Rodney Dillard Brings New Music to ‘Old Road’

Posted on by Editor

With their landmark 1968 release, Wheatstraw Suite, The Dillards opened the doors for the progressive bluegrass and country-rock movements. In August, Rodney Dillard, the band’s sole surviving original member, released a new album by the Dillards, Old Road New Again, that he describes being a “bookend” to Wheatstraw. Although not as artistically groundbreaking as its predecessor, Old Road still features non-traditional bluegrass instrumentation and, probably more importantly, it finds the 78-year-old musician in a reflective mood about how he sees the world today as well as the Dillards’ legacy.

Talking from his home outside of Branson, Missouri, Dillard shares that “before I was just trying to reflect what rural life was like, but I grew up in it. This one, more or less, is more reflecting an old person’s perspective on life.” It’s a point-of-view that can be heard on “Tearing Our Liberty Down” and “Take Me Along for the Ride,” which offer non-partisan statements on the state of the world, while “Earthlink,” “Common Man,” and “My Last Sunset” find a man taking stock of his life.

“My Last Sunset,” with its vocal nod to the Eagles’ “Already Gone,” also represents the album’s full-circle theme; however, the theme is best epitomized on the title track, a rousing telling of the Dillards’ story. The tune also features several guest artists pertinent to that era: Don Henley (a friend and neighbor from Rodney’s L.A. days), Bernie Leadon (who played in Dillard & Clark with Rodney’s brother Doug), and Herb Pedersen (who joined the Dillards on Wheatstraw and has played with Rodney on and off since).

Adding to Old Roads’ ties to the past are appearances by Sam Bush (founder of the game-changing New Grass Revival) and Ricky Skaggs (who went from bluegrass traditionalist to progressive during the ‘70s) as well as Sharon and Cheryl White. In the past, Rodney had been hesitant about having an album feature lots of big-name guests. “I didn’t want to make it like I was trying to make an event out of it,” he explains. “I did it because I was able to have Henley, Ricky, Herb and Sam Bush with me… people who I truly respected before they were stars.”

Rodney offers some especially kind words for Skaggs for appearing on “Tearing Our Liberty Down,” which makes some pointed statements about America without pointing out particular political parties. “He took a big risk, I think, standing his ground with ‘Liberty Down,’” Rodney relates. “I’m just overwhelmed that he would consider doing it. He could have refused to do it, but he didn’t because he stands his ground.”

He also credits Pederson, who plays on most of Old Road’s tracks, with being a key factor in the Dillards’ breakout sound on Wheatstraw, which was Pedersen’s first album with the band. “When Herb came in, he added his harmonies.” Rodney reveals, “It became a different thing. It became Wheatstraw Suite.”

Featuring full orchestration, drums, and electric instruments, Wheatstraw Suite shook up bluegrass traditions while also being an important touchstone in the burgeoning country-rock scene. The album’s innovative sound was a creative decision, not a commercial one.

“It wasn’t about selling toothpaste. It was music,” Rodney shares. “We were selling what we believed in. It was what we thought was fun, creative and maybe had something to say that no one had said (before).” Don Henley, who covered the Dillards’ “She Sang Hymns Out of Tune” on his Cass County album in 2015, and Elton John, who picked the Dillards as his opening act in 1972, have cited Wheatstraw as a highly influential album. In considering the impact of the album and his band, Rodney says, “I’m just very grateful and thankful that I could play just a small part in the history of what music was in the ‘60s.”

One curious thing about Wheatstraw Suite is that it marked the Dillards’ return to Elektra Records, who released their first three albums, after an abbreviated stint at Capitol Records. The band had left Elektra originally because the label didn’t understand the direction that they wanted to pursue on a single entitled “Hey Mr. Five-Strings.” A cover of a ‘50s hit called “Hey Mr. Banjo,” the Dillards’ interpretation, as Rodney described it, “added knitting needles for rhythm played on a fiddle.”

Capitol was supposed to be greener pastures for the group; however, the label proved to be a worse fit for the Dillards than Elektra. “They assigned us this producer Ken Nelson, who was doing country, but he didn’t understand what we were doing. Then they gave us this guy who produced ‘Danke Schoen’ for Wayne Newton. That’s when Mitch and I looked at each other in a conference with this guy and said we wanted out. And we walked out.”

Rodney readily admits that the band should have never left Elektra. He also is very thankful for the help that Elektra’s founder Jac Holzman provided then and ever since. “If it hadn’t been for Elektra I don’t know what would have happened [with the Dillards]. I’m just grateful to have had that label,” Rodney proclaims, adding Jac “has been instrumental in getting [Old Road] off the ground,” as well as contributing to the album’s liner notes.

Los Angeles in the ‘60s was home to a vibrant, highly synergistic music scene, which Rodney remembers as being spearheaded by people with a passion for what they were doing. Peers like Linda Ronstadt, Leadon, and Henley, he mentions, were “all these guys who just loved music.” One popular musician hangout was the Troubadour’s foyer, which was just a folk room with instruments on the wall and people drinking tea.

“We would sit around, and we would just sing. We had a wonderful time… (people) would come up to the house that Doug, Dean (Webb, the Dillards’ mandolin player) and I had together in Topanga, where we’d pick and played music… Gosh, Herb and I would sit in with Clarence White and the guys down in the King’s Lounge,” he says, remembering a venue in Palmdale, outside of L.A.

The Dillards — Rodney and Doug Dillard, Dean Webb and upright bassist Mitch Jayne — left Salem, Missouri, and headed west to Los Angeles in 1962. Rodney says they chose L.A. because they felt Nashville didn’t respect bluegrass music and country music had a sameness to it back then. They also thought people might be more open-minded in Los Angeles. The drive took three months because they had to stop along the way to make money to continue on.

Once in L.A., however, their story resembled a Hollywood movie. They went to the legendary club, The Ash Grove, which Rodney humorously describes as the “petri dish for folk culture.” Setting up in the club’s lobby, the group started an impromptu performance. When club owner Ed Pearl came over, Rodney thought he was going to kick them out. Instead, they were invited to play that night. In the audience at that show were Jim Dickson, who later produced the Byrds, and an agent from William Morris Agency, which represented Andy Griffith and his TV show.

Within a week or so, the band had secured a deal with Elektra Records as well as an audition for The Andy Griffith Show. When Griffith stopped their audition short, Rodney says he told his brother, “They’re kicking us out.” So he was surprised when Griffith said, “You got the job!” They were hired to portray a hillbilly band, The Darlings, for an episode, but proved so popular that they wound up appearing on the show several more times over the years.

Because Andy Griffith was such a hit TV show then (and has remained in reruns ever since), the Dillards — as the Darlings — became quite well-known and brought bluegrass into millions of homes. Rodney praises Griffith not only for having given the group this big opportunity but also for letting them play their own music on the show.

The Darlings’ fame also got the Dillards booked on network TV programs like The Judy Garland Show and The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show. During a Playboy After Dark appearance, the band intentionally played fast to see if the dancers could keep up, according to Rodney: “So you’ll see those people are busting their chops just trying to look like professional dancers, and they just look people eradicating cockroaches.”

Although they played comical hillbillies on The Andy Griffith Show, the Dillards resisted perpetrating Hollywood’s country bumpkins on TV shows. “If they had haybales and painted freckles on the dancers and everybody looked like Daisy Duke,” Rodney states, “we said, ‘Nope, we’re not standing in front of that.’” The band, particularly in their early days, were known for their humor, but it was more sophisticated than typical hayseed variety. Their Live!!! Almost!!! provides a good example of their comedy style, and it’s referenced a bit on Old Road with Beverly Cotton-Dillard’s comical banjo ditty “Funky Ole Hen.”

While Rodney has always pushed the boundaries of bluegrass, he has great reverence for its traditions too. In 2009, the Dillards were inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame. “I love that music,” he states. “I don’t want to see bluegrass die.” But he also says that the music can’t live in the past. “As far as Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, the Blue Sky Boys — all those folks — they did what they did. Any of us who imitate them are just being pastels of what they did.”

Rodney talks excitedly about seeing two kids on YouTube playing old-time music with a contemporary feel. He is happy that younger musicians are interested in bluegrass and roots music and happy, too, that they don’t seem rigid over how to play it. “People now have their own free will over their creativity,” he exclaims.

He references an old Dillards’ tune, “Music Is Music” before talking about how he loves all sorts of music — “if it’s real…if it’s not manufactured.” He mentions how Earl Scruggs, a man he greatly admired, “had no rules. He loved good music; he was not judgmental at all.” Keeping it real and making it good is the type of approach Rodney brought to Wheatstraw Suite back in the day and Old Road now.

Rodney admits that the Dillards have had a rather bizarre career, with people familiar with them from The Andy Griffith Show and those who know them from the band’s work, particularly their trailblazing music on Wheatstraw Suite, along with Copperfields and Roots and Branches. Although the Dillards didn’t have the commercial success achieved by acts like the Eagles, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and New Grass Revival that followed after them, Rodney is quick to note, “I didn’t miss out on being on television and being in somebody’s room every day for 60 years.”

Old Road New Again, which is the Dillard’s first album of new material since 1991, represents Rodney’s long-desired bookend to the Wheatstraw album. And while the title can be interpreted as taking a look back into the past, he also sees a positive, forward-looking sentiment — “I’m an old road but I can still be new again” — in the title’s meaning. The road he’s taken has given him an interesting ride, Rodney says, and he is grateful that Old Road has been attracting some attention because the album “may be my swan song.”

“I’m not trying to be pathetic,” he confides with a spry sense of humor, “but I am 78 years old.”

 

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

Posted on by Editor

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

Ross Holmes, “Overture”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

An instrument as agèd, storied, and established as the violin — henceforth in this piece obstinately referred to as “fiddle” — carries with it vestiges and artifacts of its own history into any/all of its new musical forays. It’s one of the most charming qualities of the instrument, that whether a rosin-laden bow grinds and saws against the strings or whether it floats, gently ringing an intransigent harmonic, a fiddle is still a fiddle. It is the sum of its disparate parts. 

Many virtuosos, hobbyists, and career musicians have staked their entire artistic worldviews on the paradoxes contained within the instrument. We in roots music quite often enjoy the musical aftereffects, songs and compositions that gleefully train magnifying glasses on paradigms such as classical versus jazz, old-time tunes versus minuets and cadenzas, or perhaps a chamber orchestra versus a square dance band. Ross Holmes, a session player, composer, and fiddler (Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Mumford & Sons), counts himself among the violinist vanguard tinkering with the existential building blocks of the violin fiddle – a tradition and subculture he grew up with. “Overture,” an original, grandiloquent composition from Holmes, is something of a manifesto on the concept. (Listen below.)

The nearly fifteen-minute-long piece is performed entirely solo, beginning with a meditative, droning theme that Holmes describes as a “secular prayer.” As he carefully, intricately unspools each melodic turn, infusions from across the map — geographical and genre — are delivered directly from Holmes’ brain-as-musical-sponge to the listener’s ear. Each fluttering bow stroke, aggressive shuffle, and stunning double-stop speaks to the contributions of the fiddle in nearly every culture on earth. Throughout “Overture,” these global influences reflect the United States’ “melting pot” status — the greater piece for which this is the overture, after all, is titled: American Fiddle Suite. (Its remaining movements are a work-in-progress.)

Fiddling, by its nature, will be an outgrowth of all of the history, culture, and art that has flowed through it over the course of its centuries-long existence. What distinguishes Holmes and “Overture,” however, is the intention with which he connects all of these widespread dots. It makes sense, it’s tangible, and at its essence, it’s beautiful. It’s all the more impressive then, that though “Overture” is an entirely composed, ostensibly “classical” piece, not a note is yet written down. Holmes plays it all by memory — his memory, and the fiddle’s, too.

Photo credit: Micah Mathewson