Artist:Cameron Knowler Hometown: Yuma, Arizona & Houston, Texas Song: “Done Gone” Album:Places of Consequence Release Date: July 16, 2021 Label: American Dreams
In Their Words: “‘Done Gone’ exists as a mission statement for the album: examining early fiddle music etymologically, rendering it meditatively, with a slow tempo and low tuning. In some ways, this is meant to problematize the history of flatpicked guitar, wherein guitarists learn fiddle tunes from other guitarists as opposed to fiddlers. This version borrows from a number of early fiddle sources while paying homage to my hero, Norman Blake, whose guitar playing is a broad synthesis of early country music, while pushing far beyond the scope of the genre’s canon. Recorded on a late ’30s plywood guitar, I hope the listener is directed toward the inconsistent and unwieldy qualities of the instrument, a factor that shapes the performance just as much as my sources. This track is in conversation with an Easter egg found on the record.” — Cameron Knowler
Every week for the past few years, we’ve brought you a radio show, and now podcast, revisiting all the great music recently featured on the pages of BGS. This week, we bring you a special episode for our Duos of Summer series — a musical recap of our 2019 collection of the 22 Best Bluegrass Duos.
We’re listening to some of these classic duos, and exploring bluegrass’ longstanding and continuing tradition of wonderful duet harmony, be it sibling or otherwise. And while most fans of the genre may recognize names like Flatt & Scruggs or the Monroe Brothers, here you’ll also find newer acts that are following the path laid by those hall-of-famers.
Head to the original story to explore the full list while you listen!
Artist:Shay Martin Lovette Hometown: Boone, North Carolina Song: “Parkway Bound” Album:Scatter & Gather Release Date: May 14, 2021
In Their Words: “This song is a tip of the hat to the Blue Ridge Parkway that runs from Great Smoky Mountains National Park on the western edge of North Carolina near Cherokee, to Shenandoah National Park at Rockfish Gap. I consider myself lucky to live near the Blue Ridge Parkway in Boone, North Carolina, and find myself in constant awe of the landscape that this region offers. In ‘Parkway Bound,’ I wanted to capture the natural beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the dead of winter. To me, the hiking trails and scenery in this area offer a means of escape from the confines of normal life and as I got further along in the writing process, I was drawn to the imagery of someone leaving their troubles behind and setting out for the Parkway as I have done so many times. The music could be said to be influenced more by great narrative writers like Norman Blake and Slaid Cleaves than your standard folkies, but there’s a little Townes Van Zandt and Gram Parsons in there.” — Shay Martin Lovette
The soundtrack to O Brother Where Art Thou? was a phenomenon in the early 2000s, turning bluegrass musicians into superstars and creating an instant mainstream market for old-time music — from folk to gospel to children’s songs to prison chants to blues and everything in between. To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of its astonishing success and to wrap up our Artist of the Month series, we spoke to several musicians about the impact O Brother and its subsequent tours had on their lives and livelihoods.
Sierra Hull: “I grew up in a little town with maybe 900 people, and there used to be a poster section at the Walmart the next town over. You could flip through the posters and there would be pop stars like Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys. I was always convinced that one day I would find an Alison Krauss poster in there. She was as popular in my little kid brain as Britney Spears. So it was cool when O Brother came out and elevated some of those people who were already giants to me, like Alison and Dan Tyminski and Ralph Stanley.
“I was already playing, but I was too young to be touring yet. By the time Cold Mountain came out [in 2003], I was part of that tour. Alison was part of both soundtracks, and she invited my brother and me to go on that tour. So we got to help celebrate that second wave. I was 12, and it was really the first time for me to be out on tour, travel to so many different places, and play Red Rocks and the Beacon Theater in New York. Standing at the side of the stage and listening to Alison sing to hundreds of people every night every night was one of my favorite memories.
“It was amazing to watch people go crazy over Ralph Stanley every night. He had this dazzled suit jacket that he wore every night. Sometimes he would sit his banjo down while his band played and take that jacket off and throw it to me at the side of the stage. I would get to wear that dazzled jacket at the end of the show when everybody came out on stage. It’s one of the most special musical experiences I’ve ever had.”
Sara Watkins: “O Brother was something we somehow became affiliated with. Nickel Creek had just released our band’s first record on Sugar Hill, after years of doing just little homemade projects. Alison Krauss produced it, which had been out maybe a year and a half when O Brother came out. She was a big part of that soundtrack, of course, so our band was gaining a little bit of notoriety. I remember reading a huge New York Times spread, and we were listed among the people on that scene. We were part of that conversation, despite not having been part of the soundtrack in any way. We were just at the right place at the right time, and the awareness of the bluegrass scene just exploded. We were able to reach a different level very quickly. It was a huge advantage to our career. We already had some momentum, but the soundtrack really put the wind in our sails.
“T Bone Burnett [who produced the album], one of his brilliant skills is finding the right people for the right song. He brought in some incredible musicians in a way that really showed the musicianship in our community and made everyone really proud of our scene. We saw our heroes up there, and it was gratifying to see them celebrated by a huge audience. I remember feeling a new respect for Ralph Stanley with that vocal [on ‘Oh Death’]. That actually turned me on to shape-note singing. Someone told me his delivery was reminiscent of those old communities that did shape-note singing and those old preachers who used to sing that way. I’d never heard anything like it. And to this day, whenever I see Dan Tyminski, I make a point to stick around until he plays ‘Man of Constant Sorrow.’ No way I’m leaving before then.”
Dave Wilson (Chatham County Line): “I remember going with our old bass player to see O Brother in the theater. We snuck a bottle of whiskey in and sat in the back row and just laughed and drank. I remember thinking, ‘Bluegrass has arrived!’ We were already a band and playing small gigs around town, but we weren’t at a place where we had dedicated our lives to it. So it was kismet for us. That record came out, and the scene just exploded. Suddenly we had this huge advertisement out there in the world for the style of music we were playing. We definitely noticed a change. There were more strangers coming to see us play gigs, and they were really excited about it. One side effect was people would yell out for us to play ‘Man of Constant Sorrow.’ They did it enough to make me wonder if they had heard the soundtrack or just seen the movie. But we never played it. We didn’t know how! It would have probably shut them up if we had!
“I really got into the record. There are some badass arrangements on there. And it’s not corny. It’s not super traditional. I love that they reached out to the right people. It could have been bad. They could have gotten Toby Keith or someone like that. Oh god, I don’t even want to think about that! One of my favorite parts is that blues song by Chris Thomas King [a cover of Skip James’ ‘Hard Time Killing Floor’]. It makes for such a special moment. Later, they booked that concert film [Down from the Mountain, recorded at the Ryman Auditorium] at our old classic movie theater here in town, and I remember the boys going to see it and we were all just floored. That was almost bigger than the movie as far as having an impact in the folk music scene.”
Sam Amidon: “People in the folk world can be very protective of the music, which I think is valid. But my inclination is that if I find something I’m excited about, I want to share it. I want people to know about it. To have grown up in a world knowing a lot of the corners O Brother explores, it was beautiful to think about how many people all of a sudden were going to discover these field recordings and these great musicians. And I was thankful because until then, portrayals of traditional music in the mass media had just been so bad and so clichéd or so simplistic. Nothing had depicted this stuff on this scale before. Before then, if you told somebody you played banjo, they would think Deliverance. That was their frame of reference.
“For O Brother to do it without messing it up was a miracle. To see these different corners of American music — beyond just blues and bluegrass as the two major industry terms — was a very positive thing, especially because ‘folk music’ can be such a heterogeneous category. Nobody would even really know what you were talking about if it wasn’t bluegrass or blues. O Brother pointed to all of these different areas. It’s singing games and banjo songs and all these different things. O Brother is weirdly inclusive. It cast a wide net. Nowadays it’s easy to go to the soundtrack and hear more problematic elements of the whole Americana genre thing, but I think it’s good to remember that when it first came along, it was much more nuanced compared to what had come before.”
Woody Platt (Steep Canyon Rangers): “It’s interesting that the twentieth anniversary of O Brother is fairly parallel to the twentieth anniversary of our band. We formed in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, when we were seniors in college, right when the movie came out. We all had been exposed to bluegrass and old-time just by being Carolinians. We all had that music around when we were growing up, but none of us in the band really dove into it until we were in college. We’d only been following that music a few years when the movie came out. I’m not sure we were aware at the time of the impact that the movie and the tour had on bluegrass, old-time, string band, mountain music, but we could feel some excitement when we were playing bars on Franklin Street, which is the main drag in Chapel Hill. But we didn’t really have anything to compare it to. There was no before or after. It was just what we were doing, and that’s all we knew.
“I really enjoyed the movie, but I was a big fan of the album. Hearing Ralph Stanley’s voice in a film, or Dan Tyminski’s, or just seeing people I admired in that movie was pretty incredible. Looking back on it, it was good timing for us to be getting off the ground, and we were having so much fun and finding so much joy in it. The music we were playing had been a small niche, but all of a sudden it had this national interest. I have no doubt in my mind that the awareness of the music was fueled by the movie. It’s a fascinating phenomenon to think about, because it wasn’t marketed in any significant way. It just happened. It was just this thing where people were suddenly into this music.”
Molly Tuttle: “The movie came out when I was seven years old, and I remember my dad showing it to me when I was in grade school. I loved it, and the music really stuck with me because I already had an affinity for bluegrass and old-time music. Seeing it performed in a movie was new and exciting. My dad teaches bluegrass for a living, and when the movie came out, he had an influx of new students.
“It’s had a lasting impact on the popularity of bluegrass music. But I was so young that I didn’t know many of the musicians on the soundtrack by name, so it introduced me to a lot of artists who later became my favorites. And the Down from the Mountain documentary further familiarized me with people like Emmylou Harris and Alison Krauss. Many of those artists, like Gillian Welch and John Hartford, have been big influences on me, and that was my introduction to their music. I’ve performed ‘I’ll Fly Away’ and ‘Angel Band’ a number of times, and I got to do ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’ with Dan Tyminski at the IBMA awards one year.”
Dom Flemons: “I actually saw Ralph Stanley on the O Brother tour in Flagstaff, Arizona, in the year 2000. It was at this random high school. I saw the poster on a telephone pole when I was going to college there. I’d started playing the banjo by that point — six-string and four-string banjo, guitar, and harmonica. I remember the place was really packed out, and he gave this amazing performance. I just loved watching the man at work. When he sang ‘Oh Death,’ he pulled this piece of paper out of his pocket, put on his glasses, and made a joke about how old he was. And he just sang it off this piece of paper and blew our minds.
“O Brother was very interesting, and I think it’s still a milestone album for several generations. A lot of the old folks who played those old styles and sang those old songs were starting to pass away, so the soundtrack ended up being a perfect vehicle for getting younger people into the music of the ‘20s and ‘30s. It reminded people of the really good old recordings that were available. That’s where I went. I found the old RCA Victor and Columbia recordings, and that was it for me.
“It’s a perfectly structured record, opening with the prisoners on the chain gang and then it goes to that beautiful ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain.’ And then you get into “You Are My Sunshine” with Norman Blake, and then Chris Thomas King presenting ‘Hard Time Killing Floor.’ That in itself was a revival of Skip James. People talk about Ghost World and Devil Got My Woman, but I think O Brother got it going. People just started casually bringing those songs back in at shows and festivals, and it seemed like a lot more people knew them. Of course they would sing them like the recordings on O Brother. Those are just things I observed before I was a professional musician, and it was amazing to see.”
The O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, which was just starting to pick up momentum twenty years ago this winter, was both a forethought and an afterthought. The Coen Brothers had an idea for a film and even a title borrowed from Preston Sturges’ 1940 comedy, Sullivan’s Travels, but no screenplay. They commissioned T Bone Burnett to assemble a sprawling playlist of old-time music for them to use as writing prompts — original recordings from the first half of the twentieth century as well as new recordings of old songs. He gathered some of the finest vocalists and players, including Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, Alison Krauss, and members of Union Station, as well as Norman Blake, Sam Bush, and John Hartford. In various combinations they produced around sixty tracks covering hillbilly plaints, gospel numbers, Protestant hymns, children’s songs, labor songs, even prison songs.
From that pool the Coens selected a handful of tracks that served as the skeleton for their screenplay, which became a Deep South retelling of The Odyssey. As three yokel chain-gang fugitives wander the backwoods and cotton fields and gravel roads of Depression-era Mississippi, they inadvertently become country stars thanks to a hasty version of “Man of Constant Sorrow,” originally recorded in 1917 by Dick Burnett and re-recorded for the film by Dan Tyminski. Along the way they encounter a parade of white-clad Christians singing “Down to the River to Pray,” a blues singer who regales them with a campfire rendition of Skip James’ “Hard Time Killing Floor,” and a KKK klavern performing a Busby Berkley routine in white sheets and hoods.
Whittled down to eighteen tracks, the soundtrack hit stores just a few weeks before the film, and it seemed designed to stand alone as an upscale release. As Luke Lewis, formerly chairman/CEO of Universal Nashville, told Billboard in 2015: “When we were putting it together, a bunch of us said, ‘This is probably going to be a coffee table kind of a CD, where people will leave it around and be proud to have it.’ That turned out to be pretty much true… A lot of people that don’t buy records at all, or buy one a year, bought that record.”
Still, no one figured it would sell any more copies than your typical soundtrack, and certainly no one predicted it would so completely eclipse the film. Its success has been astounding: It has sold nearly 9 million copies, hung around the upper reaches of the Billboard Top 200 for several years, won the Grammy for Album of the Year (beating out Bob Dylan and Outkast, among others), spun off a sequel, inspired a series of tours and live albums, and redefined a massive market for traditional music in America.
Twenty years later, the gulf separating film and soundtrack remains remarkably wide. The former is glib to the point of nihilism, as though every line of dialogue and every camera angle is surrounded by quote marks. The soundtrack, by contrast, is sincere to the point of evangelism, as though these old songs were pieces of secular scripture. The music plays everything straight, while the film can’t keep a straight face. The soundtrack became a phenomenon, while the film sits in the lower tiers of its auteurs’ sprawling catalog.
Both are products of a very particular time: They were released during that short window between two defining events — the hand-wringing spectacle of Y2K and the horrific televised tragedy of 9/11. With the benefit of twenty years’ hindsight, they represent a pop-cultural pivot from the irony that defined the 1990s and much of the Coens’ output to the “New Sincerity” that defined the 2000s.
Why did this niche soundtrack become such a massive hit? Some have credited the popularity of O Brother to fin de siècle jitters and a desire to return to a rosier, more comfortable American past (never mind that the past, especially the 1930s, was never rosy or comfortable). Others have chalked it up to a rejection of the late ’90s pop music excess embodied by Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys.
Perhaps the best reason for its success is also the most obvious: This is a good album, and an accessible one. It’s a well-curated tour through old-time music, a sampler of rural American traditions that serves as a primer on the subject without sounding like a textbook. All of these different styles are presented with an eloquence that is homespun yet modern: a balance that highlights rather than dampens their charms.
Burnett puts such an emphasis on the human voice that even the instrumental tracks sound a cappella. He wants you to hear the exquisite grain in the voices of Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, and Alison Krauss on “Didn’t Leave Nobody But the Baby” as well as the weight pressing on Chris Thomas King as he moans through “Hard Time Killing Floor.” Curiously, Dr. Ralph Stanley had to convince the producer to let him sing “Oh Death” without banjo, which was absolutely the right call. His voice is high and keening, a serious a death, shaken by the very subject he’s singing about.
If there’s a breakout song on O Brother — something resembling a hit — it was this very intense performance, which remains one of the finest renditions of this very odd and oft-covered song. Stanley was 73 years old when the album was released, had been playing since 1946, and was already celebrated as one of the fathers of bluegrass, but O Brother gave his career a considerable boost, introducing him to a significantly wider audience. (That said, it always struck me as deeply disrespectful that the Coens have a Klansman lip-synching Stanley’s performance in the film, as though they feared the words might actually mean something.)
Stanley performed the song a cappella at the 2002 Grammys — imagine anything a cappella at such a glitz-bound ceremony — not long before the soundtrack won Album of the Year. It might have been the climax of the soundtrack’s shelf life, but it kept selling and kept selling. It created an instant audience for old-time music, and upstart string-bands found themselves with readymade audiences, many of them shouting “Man of Constant Sorrow” the way they once might have yelled “Free Bird!” Every artist on the album got a boost, especially Alison Krauss & Union Station, who crossed over from bluegrass to pop and launched a series of hit records with the aptly titled New Favorite in August 2001. Similarly, Welch, Harris, and even Stanley enjoyed boosts in album and ticket sales in the wake of O Brother.
As with any sweeping change, there are new opportunities as well as new losses. The alt-country acts of the 1990s had already lost much of their luster, but roots suddenly had no room for punk anymore. Gone were the dark, twangy experiments like Daniel Lanois’s Americana trilogy — Harris’ Wrecking Ball in 1996, followed by Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind the next year and Willie Nelson’s Teatro the year after that. All three proved that roots music could accommodate new sounds, that it could look to the future without completely letting go of the past, and all three stand among the best entries in their artists’ remarkable catalogs.
But O Brother seemed to wipe most of those new avenues away, turning roots music into something largely acoustic, uniform, polite, conservative — beholden to the past and largely dismissive of the present. Watching certain acts riding that wave was like watching Civil War reenactors march on a makeshift battlefield, and ten years later groups like Mumford & Sons and the Lumineers were using roots music to sell arena-size sentiments.
Another aspect of old-time lost in the O Brother wave: politics. Previous folk revivals had a populist bent, extolling the music as the sound of the people and as an expression of a specifically American community. Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger were branded subversives and communists, while Dylan and his early ‘60s cohort found radical possibilities in Harry Smith’s legendary Anthology of American Folk Music. But no one on O Brother is in any danger of being branded a pinko. The film itself nods to issues of race and class, but without really commenting on them in any serious or specific way. The soundtrack, by contrast, foregrounds songs about yearning, about breaking free of turmoil and hardship to find peace and contentment. Often that can be humorous, as on Harry McClintock’s fantastical “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” but more often it’s poignant, as on Krauss and Welch’s “I’ll Fly Away.” It’s a collection more concerned with needs of the spirit than of the flesh, so any earthly implications are largely ignored.
The roots market that sprang up in the soundtrack’s wake was consequently blanched of anything resembling social commentary, despite there being so much to comment on. That wave of bands might have provided a counterpart to the entrenched political conservatism that defined mainstream country music of the early 2000s, but instead it offered merely escapism.
A few artists did manage to question this rosy thinking about the past, in particular the Carolina Chocolate Drops. They traced strains of Black influence, craft, and contribution to old-time music, which is generally considered to be white, and therefore expanded its historical scope and current impact. As players, however, they injected their songs with no small amount of joy, as though taking great delight in what these old forms allowed them to express. The group’s three primary players — Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens, and Justin Robinson — have carried that particular balance into their solo careers.
Any of the soundtrack’s shortcomings weren’t the fault of the musicians, who play and sing these songs much more beautifully and sympathetically than the film ever demanded. Nor is it the fault of the songs themselves, which obviously spoke to people as clearly in 2001 as they did in 1937. And it continues to speak loudly in 2021: The coffee table product wasn’t designed to bear the burden of the market it created, but the songs still inspire subsequent generations well into a new century, with its own tribulations and hardships.
Twenty years ago, in 2001, the music of O Brother, Where Art Thou? captivated America and, suddenly, bluegrass appealed to pretty much everybody. We could all sing at least a few words of “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow,” though admittedly not sound as good as Dan Tyminski or the Soggy Bottom Boys. Roots music heroes Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss, and Gillian Welch added more positive press to their résumés, and before it was all over, the generation-spanning collection won multiple industry accolades, inspired a national tour, and even led to the first-ever Grammy Award for Dr. Ralph Stanley.
The song choices were largely well-known to dedicated bluegrass listeners, but even so, chestnuts like “I’ll Fly Away” don’t routinely end up on albums that sell eight million copies. Legends like Norman Blake and The Fairfield Four shared the spotlight with rising talent such as Chris Thomas King and The Peasall Sisters. Two decades later, The Whites still perform their version of “Keep on the Sunny Side” on the Grand Ole Opry at nearly every appearance, and to be sure, the audience smiles and applauds to hear it again.
This month, we’ll look at the legacy of that landmark album as an inspiration to a new generation of acoustic musicians, along with an interview with family members of John Hartford, whose name is back on the Grammy ballot this year for the collaborative album, The John Hartford Fiddle Tune Project, Vol 1. We’ll also have a special edition of our Roots On Screen feature about the film. Plus, check out a special IBMA Awards show performance of “Down In the River To Pray” and an archive edition of The Breakdown. And to finish out the month, we asked a crew of young bluegrass and Americana stars what the film means to them. While you’re at it, put down the Dapper Dan and turn up the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack below.
Artist:Thomm Jutz Hometown: born in Neusatz/Germany, living in Nashville, TN Latest album:To Live in Two Worlds Vol.2 Personal nicknames: TJ
Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?
At this point in my life, I’d have to say that Norman Blake has influenced me the most. Not just as an instrumentalist, but also as a songwriter. When he started writing original material in the early ’70s he came out of the shoot with a distinctive songwriter’s voice. Unlike Kristofferson, Hartford, and Dylan, all of whom he had worked with, Blake’s focus was not on his inner world but on the old rural America that he’d grown up in. He applied his huge knowledge of railroad history to his writing. His songs were based on local characters that he’d grown up with or places that were meaningful to him. I like to write about historic events or characters from the past and I owe the inspiration for that to a large part to the great Norman Blake.
What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc — inform your music?
Literature has a great influence on my music. I read all the time. I try to keep something historical, a story and something philosophical or inspirational going at all times. The more I read, the more I write. Sometimes images from books come to me after years and I start writing about them. I also love to read cookbooks. In recent years I’ve really been into the novels of North Carolina writers Ron Rash and John Ehle.
What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be a musician?
When I was eleven years old I saw Bobby Bare on TV. He hit me square between the eyes with his singing, the way he held the guitar and his cooler than cool attitude. My soul connected with the archetype of the wandering minstrel at that moment and has not let me go since. I never felt like I wanted to do anything but a musician and songwriter. I got to work with Bare a couple of times. He was every bit as great as I wanted him to be.
What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?
I can’t say that I struggle too much with songwriting. I believe that if you have a good idea and put in the time and co-write with the right people, your craft should make it possible for you to at the very least come up with something decent every time. One song idea that I had and didn’t know how to approach for over a year was for a song called “Help Me to Hold On” that I co-wrote with Milan Miller and that was recorded by Balsam Range. Every morning when I walked with my dog that idea was in my head, but I couldn’t some up with an angle to approach it. I still remember where I was out here by Percy Priest Lake when all the pieces came together. We wrote it the following Saturday and it didn’t take more than an hour to get it done.
Since food and music go so well together, what is your dream pairing of a meal and a musician?
I listen to a whole lot of Norman Blake’s music when I’m cooking dinner with my wife every night. Another really good pairing is when my friend and fellow songwriter Jefferson Ross comes to visit from Atlanta. We stand around the kitchen or the grill with a beer, cook together and talk about books, music and vintage guitars.
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.
Do you remember the soundtrack to your earliest childhood memories? Do you remember the songs that wafted from the car radio to the backseat as you rode along the highway, en route to a family reunion or summer vacation? My earliest memories of seemingly interminable, minivan-filled-to-bursting road trips are often scored by solo acoustic guitar. My older brother, a fingerstyle enthusiast and acolyte, had an equally interminable collection of Phil Keaggy albums. At one point, I could tell you the exact title of the tune that was my favorite to fall asleep to on the road — though by now I’ve long forgotten which one.
Guitarist and Nashville transplant Jordan Tice counts many a virtuosic, acoustic guitar aesthetician (cutaway or not) among his influences, from Norman Blake to Mississippi John Hurt — two pickers Tice references as direct inspirators of his upcoming solo album, Motivational Speakeasy. The record was written pre-pandemic and, despite its “stripped down” nature, feels impetuous, mischievous, and adventure-ready, even in a song as languid and buttery as “Stratford Waltz.” Named for Stratford Avenue in Nashville’s Inglewood neighborhood, the tune immediately recalled to mind the family road trips of my childhood, my brother’s CD carrying case, and my sleepy head bonking against the back window in our circa 2004 Chevrolet Astro Van.
The intimate setting of the album — it’s just Tice and his “beloved and well-worn Collings guitar,” as a press release puts it — and the subtly lush reverb magnify the gentle, magnetic momentum of “Stratford Waltz.” With that motion and the sly adventuresome spirit we know from Tice’s writing, both lyrical and instrumental, it’s no wonder a mind might leap immediately to the open road, with hundreds of miles ahead. And personally, it’s certainly fitting because, nowadays, when I turn off the highway and head south on Gallatin Pike in Nashville towards my current home, my most direct route is down — did you guess it? — Stratford Avenue
In Their Words: “This one fits in a genre I like to call Cowboy Existentialism. You’ve got imagery like buffalo, coyotes, hobos, and trains. The cheerful mood of the song belies themes of economic inequality, and the burden of worldly possessions, summed up in lines like ‘it’s mighty hard to catch your meal when you ain’t had enough to eat.’ The melodies and cadences of this song are derived, intentionally or not, from old American fiddle tunes like ‘Roll Boys Roll’ and ‘Booth Shot Lincoln.’
“I originally wrote it with clawhammer banjo as the accompaniment, but I had really been searching for a song to do with two guitars as a faster breakdown to showcase the style of flatpicking I love to do. We’re really emulating the two-guitar style of Norman and Nancy Blake here. They have always been a major influence on us. Norman is one of my favorite guitar players, along with Doc Watson and Michael Daves. I’m not a big fan of the more modern bluegrass guitar players; I gravitate toward those whose playing is more rooted in the old-time square dance fiddle style — very rhythmic, very driving, a little dirty.
“Playing a ’33 Gibson L-00 helps me get the sound I want too. Nothing like the growl a well-loved Gibson has to it. This guitar also fits my body better. I’m not a large person, and although I love dreadnaughts, a 00 body size is way more comfortable for me.” — Mark Kilianski, Golden Shoals
Photo credit: Kyle Wolff
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