Tag: Sammy Shelor

MIXTAPE: High Fidelity’s Traveling Music

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

Flatt & Scruggs – “Earl’s Breakdown”

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

Don Reno – “Coffee Cup”

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

Lonesome River Band – “Say I Do”

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

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

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

Tim O’Brien – “Wind”

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

Punch Brothers – “Boll Weevil”

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

Jim & Jesse – “Did You Ever Go Sailing”

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

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

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

Sarah Siskind – “Lone Tree”

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

Homer & Jethro – “Tennessee, Tennessee”

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

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

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

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

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

Kilby Snow – “Close By”

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

United Sacred Harp Convention – “Sherburne 186”

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

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

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

Photo credit: Amy Richmond

Mountain Heart: The Evolution of a Bluegrass Band

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I met Josh Shilling on January 5, 2007, the afternoon of the day on which he’d later make his first appearance with Mountain Heart. On the Grand Ole Opry. Singing a song he’d written. At 23.

A lot has happened since then, but in the world of bluegrass, where one eye—at least—is always looking back, it’s worth looking back even further, because Mountain Heart had already been a hard-working, award-winning band for nearly a decade. I wrote the liner notes for their 1998 debut and I’d followed them ever since. When they invited me over to that pre-Opry rehearsal, I knew Mountain Heart as a ferociously talented band that knit together a diverse set of influences—diverse, that is, within a thoroughly bluegrass framework; a distillation and extension of important ‘90s musical trends carried forward and elaborated upon in a new decade.

It was obvious, though, that Josh was bringing something different to the band, even before he brought his piano—and as the years have passed, that’s become a central element. Some bands have different members pass through, yet retain a trademark sound; some keep the same personnel, but move from one sound to another. Mountain Heart has been unusual in that it’s done both—none of the founding members remain, and in many respects, neither does much of the original sound. Yet its evolution has been, if not preordained, organic and thoughtful, and a good chunk of the responsibility for that belongs to Josh, who’s both a musician’s musician and a performer who can connect with thousands at a time.

When we got together to talk about the group’s stunning new album, Soul Searching—the title track written by Shilling and the Infamous Stringdusters’ Jeremy Garrett—that passage of time was an obvious starting point.

You’ve been with Mountain Heart now for….

Eleven years.

I’d say there are a lot of more recent fans of the band who see Mountain Heart as coming out of bluegrass, and so they assume that you came out of bluegrass as well. But you had a whole other thing going before you ever started with the band.

Yeah. I grew up at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains—I lived right up the street from (banjo player) Sammy Shelor, I was 45 minutes from the Doobie Shea studio with Tim Austin, Dan Tyminski, Ronnie Bowman—all those guys were up there. So I was around bluegrass, and my dad loved it, but I was drawn to the piano, and so I would always just sit at the piano and figure out simple songs. And then I was drawn to Ray Charles, the Allman Brothers, Leon Russell and people like that. That’s what really pulled me into music. When I started playing live, my first bands were country bands, and then little rock bands, and then all of a sudden, within a year or two, I was in a straight-up r&b band, singing Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles. So that was where I kind of homed in on my vocal style and chops, and learned a lot of chords and all that.

When you go to adding that to a band like Mountain Heart, it really opens things up. I’m sure it freaked some people out ten years ago, but these days, we’ve been yelled at enough, and now I feel like our crowd is way more diverse, and younger. One of the things that’s allowed the band to exist for 20 years this year is turning the pages, bringing new faces. When I joined, it was [fiddler] Jimmy VanCleve, and [mandolin player] Adam Steffey, and [bassist] Jason Moore, and then Aaron Ramsey came right after me, who is just one of the finest players alive. And then we’re talking [guitarist] Jake Stargel, Cory Walker, Molly Cherryholmes, and Seth Taylor and Jeff Partin, and on and on and on. We constantly get incredible players, and I feel like the songwriting’s getting better each record, and that’s what’s allowed us to keep doing it.

Looking at it from the outside, it seems like one of the things that Mountain Heart does is, it takes these great bluegrass musicians, and lets them play other stuff besides bluegrass.

Not only that, I’ve seen a lot of these guys kind of find themselves, and we nurture that. The current guys definitely don’t try to control the way a musician plays. When Seth Taylor joined the band, his guitar hung down to his knees, and he played way out over the hole, and it was the most unconventional, not-Tony Rice-looking guitar style I’d ever seen. But we didn’t try to change that, and he went from amazing to just a force of nature over the course of a couple of years. When I first met Aaron, he was staring at the floor; you could tell that in his brain there was a metronome going, and he was just chopping [mandolin], staring at the floor, and that was it. And within a year or two, this guy was a rock star—he was out front, he was the show. And he still is a huge part of the show.

I’ve seen the band be that for everybody—we don’t try to control anyone, and we definitely do push each other. It’s awesome, the way we all kind of piggyback off each other. And there’s a competitive edge, to keep up with each other, but there’s also a respect in that band. Even on a bad night, everyone’s like, “you’re my favorite.”

So we have parameters, but we push those. We kind of know how the song starts and how it ends, and we all know the main melody and the arrangement. Like with “Soul Searching” or “More Than I Am”—live, they might have a two minute intro. It allows us to be expressive each night. But at the same time, if we go play the Opry, we can simplify and just play a three-and-a-half minute version of that song.

How long did you guys work on this new record?

Between the writing and the A&R and thinking through general ideas, this project started several years ago. But Seth and I had played a lot of these tunes into voice memos for probably a year and a half, and they would develop a little each time. Songs like “Festival”—it was a really slow song, and we all liked the message, but it was never good enough to put on a record. And then one day I imagined the bass line being like “Day Tripper” or “Low Rider”—this really bass-centered groove. So we tried that, and everybody immediately said yes, this is gonna work perfect.

So there were lots of times when we’d meet and talk through the songs, and then eventually we booked the studio time and went to rehearsal. We ran through the songs for two days as a band—singing lead through a PA and everything. Recorded everything, found the tempos we liked, wrote the tempos down, wrote the keys down, made signature notes on what we knew we were going to grab, and what instruments, and if we were gonna have percussion or drums. And then we went into Compass and cut all eleven songs and all the lead vocals in three days. Pretty much everything I sang on there was live, to the point where, when we went in to edit, you couldn’t edit anything.

We cut all of the band’s parts in three days, and then we had Kenny Malone play some percussion, Scott Vestal came down and played some banjo, Ronnie Bowman sang harmony on one, [fiddle player] Stuart Duncan came in one day. And so essentially, it took about three years of A&R and talking, about three days of recording, and then we literally catered the last few days, got some drinks and watched our heroes play along with our tracks.

It’s a band-produced project; we did the art work—we took a stab at it with a couple of different artists, and could not land on what we wanted. And Seth actually drew this herringbone frame on a piece of paper, took a picture of it and sent it to my wife, Aleah, who’s a graphic designer and develops software, and she pulled it into Photoshop—and a lot of this was made on a cell phone. So we all took part in the entire design, from the photography to the design, to the A&R, the writing, the mixing. Garry West was involved for sure as co-producer, and Gordon [Hammond] did a great job of mixing, Gordon and Sean Sullivan tracked a lot of this stuff, Randy LeRoy did a great job mastering.

We’re talking about the next one already, but we may do it all ourselves next time—make it a point that every piece of this is gonna be put together by hand in some form or fashion. I think these days fans like that; they’d rather have…already, with a lot of our presales and a lot of our CD orders, we send out drawings and stuff. I think people really appreciate those things.

Photo by Sebastian Smith

CONVERSATIONS WITH… Sammy Shelor of The Lonesome River Band

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Each year, the Bluegrass Association of Southern California presents a world-class bluegrass group at the Ford Amphitheatre in Hollywood.  And this year is no exception: on Sunday, August 12, The Lonesome River Band will take the stage.

The band (which is currently celebrating it’s 30th year) is helmed by banjo legend Sammy Shelor, four time IBMA banjo player of the year, and winner of the 2011 Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass.  According to a New York Times interview, Martin claimed that Shelor ‘did not necessarily need further recognition from his musical peers, as ‘he already is somebody” in the bluegrass scene.

Lucky for us, The Sitch got to chat with that very special somebody prior to his arrival in the Golden State…..

What’s your history with The Lonesome River Band?

I started in September 1990 and have been with them for over 22 years.  When I started it was Tim Austin (who left the group in 1995), Dan Tyminski, and Ronnie Bowman.  After Ronnie left the group, I took over.  I never set out to be a bandleader, I just became one by default.  But I love the music and I love the band so it was natural that I take the role.

What are your roots in the bluegrass genre?

I grew up — and still live — in Meadows of Dan, Virginia.  In this part of the country you grow up living around the music.  It’s all around you.  My grandfather was a banjo player, and I started on it when I was 5 years old.  When you grow up in that atmosphere — amongst that wealth of talent — you just learn those songs automatically.

Last year, you were awarded the second Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass.  What did that award encompass and what did it mean to you?

That award is a great sign of generosity by Steve and his wife Anne.  When Steve got back into the scene a few years ago, he realized the musicians in our genre weren’t getting the support and honor they deserved.  To be honored with that — to get to be in New York, spend time with Steve, be on Letterman — it was amazing.  Something I can really cross off my bucket list.  And one of the most amazing spotlights we could have provided for the band .

How has the genre shifted since you’ve been on the scene?

There are a lot of people — and I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say this myself — but a lot of people say our 1991 album Carrying the Tradition changed the track of the bluegrass genre.  It was — and still is — traditional bluegrass with a rock and roll downbeat.  When J.D. Crowe & the New South came out with their [self-titled] 1975 record, that band opened the door to the music I wanted to play.  I feel like I’ve found my own niche — finding exactly what I wanted to do — and that has in turn given me and the band a musical identity.

To me, there are two kinds of music:  good music and bad music.  If it has heart and soul and feeling and it’s played in time, I’m going to listen to it.  No matter the instruments.  No matter the style.

What are your favorite festivals and venues to play?

One of my favorite festivals is Rudy Fest in eastern Kentucky.  We became the host band this year.  And that’s been going on for the past 10-12 years, but it’s just special because of the guys who run it and the charity it’s held for.

Going to California, Grass Valley or Victorville is always great.  West Coast crowds are always appreciative of what we do because we have a very different sound than a lot of bands out there.

Have you played LA before?  What are your impressions of the Southern California music scene?

I believe we did the Jerry Lewis telethon in 2003, and I played the Forum once back in 1992, backing a country band, but that’s about it.  Everyone seems so supportive of what we do, and that’s what we feed off of.  That has always been the case anywhere we play in California, and I’m sure will be no exception in LA.

 

Sammy and the rest of the Lonesome River Band appear at the Ford Amphitheater on Sunday, August 12.  Opening the show is local bluegrass group Lonesome Otis (there’s a whole lotta lonesome in the house that night…).  Tickets are available here.