bluegrass vacation apologia

Here are some micro-details on my new bluegrass thing, more than anyone could possibly want.

I wrote about how I first got into this music on the album cover. (Go buy it!) Besides the prime mover Bill Monroe and the equally iconic Flatt and Scruggs, the artists that are highest in my pantheon since youth are Jim and Jesse, the Osborne Brothers, The Country Gentlemen, and Jimmy Martin. (I know, I know, but for some reason the Stanleys weren’t on my radar until much later.) Next in line are Del McCoury and all the various and sundry “longhairs”: Sam Bush and his confreres, Tony Trischka, the Circle album guys, Grisman, Norman Blake, Tony Rice, and Ricky Skaggs (his hair got long late). Doc Watson, with one foot in bluegrass and about four feet in other places, was a lodestar ever since I can remember, and John Hartford was another uncategorizable who became an obsession after I saw him live, when I was 10.

In the 1980s I got so hooked on the second version of New Grass Revival that someone really ought to have staged an intervention. I won’t bear any shame for this, though. You can look at the videos online and see how intensely and hyper-creatively these four played — it holds up, no explanatory context needed. The intensity was ludicrous! If the poofy Styx fashion irks you and the songs sound too country-radio-conscious, you’re not paying attention to the right stuff. I went to see this band play all I could, sometimes travelling to cities far from where I lived, in the way sad-sack unemployables would track the Grateful Dead. Before my own gigs, I’d put on headphones and listen to their records, to get me pumped and dancing and to drill into me what the highest standard was. When I joined Special Consensus, at 24, I tried to push Greg’s band in the direction of NGR, with poppy arrangements of songwriter-ish songs, not to mention mullets and shrieking and stage-diving. Very inconsiderate of me. I got my young son in on the cult mentality, too, and to this day we exchange youtube links and marvel over bluegrass’s Fab Four. You get the idea. The serious and musical point in all this, apart from my fanboy pathology, is that the three soloists all offered differing directions in grammar and technique, solid enough to make a lifelong object of study. Pat Flynn’s mind-blowing cross-picking, Sam’s beautiful compositions and extraterrestrial timefeel, Béla’s…let’s say, mental energy. Beyond li’l ole me, they altered the minds of everybody after them who has tried for a mainstream brand of “acoustic” country — Alison Krauss, Dixie Chicks, Nickel Creek, Sierra Hull, and all the jam-band types. Unfortunately for NGR and their pocketbooks, they were years ahead of the curve. One obvious index of that is that it’s easy to find banjo in commercial country these days, where it was pretty much anathema back then. 

Once on the road and doing the thing, I got to interact with some sterling people. Folks like Tim O’Brien, Danny Barnes, Alison Krauss, Charles Sawtelle, Jeff White, and Dan Crary helped inch me slo-o-o-wly away from record-obsessed fantasyland and toward the realization that the acoustic Olympians weren’t gods but mortals — and by a clear margin, grounded and amicable people. I think this helped turn me into someone who, when meeting celebrated figures in more popular realms of culture who act jerkishly or superiorly, rolls his eyes and strolls away. I mean, if Sam Forking Bush doesn’t feel empowered to treat me like a lump of dirt, surely no one else should, and if they do that’s for them to work on and me to laugh at. The genre doesn’t hold out the promise of celebrity, which is a drag in some respects, but also has this positive effect, that bluegrassers are perhaps better situated to cultivate good character, to learn how to endure the attention of strangers while not behaving like pricks. So I’ve been grateful to have many non-pricks to model. There are some grouchy hominids and hard-eyed hillmen out there, for sure, but in my experience, as long as you bring something to the table musically, you’re rewarded with collegial respect.

On the slim chance that someone is reading this without knowing a lot of these names, and is curious about the genre, just start there. And for the hell of it, here are a few more figures I’m very fond of, a smattering of people who embody the older style: Johnson Mountain Boys, Jim Eanes, Bill Harrell, Red Rector, Benny Martin, Delia Bell and Bill Grant, Vassar Clements, Wade Mainer, Lonesome Pine Fiddlers, J.D. Crowe and the New South, Buzz Busby, Jimmie Arnold, Nashville Bluegrass Band, Kentucky Colonels, Don Rigsby, James King, Longview, Reno and Harrell, Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper…

People have asked why this now, and there’s no brilliant answer, but if you’ve followed my thing for the last ten-plus years, you know I’ve been leaning in this direction for most of that time. The touring rock-band model I used through most of the 1990s and aughts was wearing me down toward the end. Once I left that for microphones, rotating accompanists, and seated audiences, in 2009, I felt happier at once; the mics sounded better and let me play better, the audience attention boosted the old ego, and the player variety lent more adventure and surprise to performance. Soon after, I started doing shows with deep cats like Mike Bub, Todd Phillips, and especially Shad Cobb, who has heavily influenced me musically and meditatively. Along the way I also learned a ton about groove and listening close at low volume from Robbie Gjersoe and Jenny Scheinman. The result of all this exposure to strong acoustic-ish minds was that my own mind and playing were significantly stronger at the end of the teens than they had been at the end of the aughts — a happy and unexpected outcome for a fellow approaching his dotage. Moreover, I was getting better networked among the grassers. I noticed that if someone recorded one of my tunes, it was usually a bluegrasser, which got me to thinking that I could make a contribution to the genre — everybody played and sang great, obviously, but most wrote lyrics a little unsurely, in my view. It entered my thinking that if I delayed doing a bluegrass project for many more years, chances were I would be diminished in my skills, and others dead. Come to think of it, that animates most of my projects: what resources are to hand right now that might not be later? Relationships wax and wane, people give up music and go into retirement or start preaching, vocal ranges constrict, and so forth.

Bluegrass Vacation was like the Heaven’s Gate of records. It went way over in both money and time, mainly because of sars-cov-2, which descended about two months before we were scheduled to start. It turns out that LA and Nashville are very far apart. Travelling back and forth, rescheduling sessions cancelled at the last minute, and collating the A-players’ schedules made for woeful inefficiencies. A darker reason for the slow pace: some of the early tunes we tracked were…well, the word “dead” comes to mind, particularly since Alison Brown said it while hearing a song played back. “What do you hear as the problem with this?” I asked the players in the control room. “It’s dead,” she loudly volunteered. Bearing up under blunt criticism isn’t always instinctual, but putting more dead music into the world is just uncalled-for, so I received the analysis gladly; I needed to correct course, for I had created a small pile of corpses. Sometimes I had written a bad song without knowing it. Other times I had directed a good song into a cul-de-sac, and the whole thing needed a do-over with different casting and more sensitive (or laconic) direction. It’s wild how much of the basics you can still be learning, forty-plus years after entering your first recording studio. Every time I try making a record, fresh problems arise that I never anticipated, and this time they sprouted up like weeds. So much didn’t proceed as planned. Air fare, hotels, time, money…hopefully the Coen Brothers will use “Silverlake Reel” to underscore a comic chase scene and I’ll be back in the black.

I had written three songs with the tenor singing of my friend Ron Spears in mind. Scott Simontacchi and I drove out to Ron’s place in Joelton and got the arrangements going, but soon afterward Ron fell ill and was hospitalized. At that point I scotched two of the tunes, which to me were inconceivable without him, and asked Randy Kohrs to come in and sing on the third. (Thanks, Randy.) Right before release, Ron died. The usual thing to do here is say, Therefore this is dedicated to Ron Spears. But that dedication is actually going to land on another project coming out soon, a tenth-anniversary edition of my record Gone Away Backward. 

Summing up: global pandemic, non-local recording, scheduling challenges, artistic screw-ups, death. And one more goddam thing: the label that was going to put this out dropped away midway through, so I had to refigure the release platform, on the fly. (Thanks, Alison.) If you take three years instead of the usual six months to make a record, a lot of the world will just change around you as you go, seems to be the lesson. Martin Amis’s remark that on a book tour you’re an employee of your former self always rang true with me. Under normal conditions, going out to sing songs written four or more years prior and recorded bit by bit over a three-year period would require a rather determined adjustment of consciousness. Here in April 2023, though, I’m so bored of sitting home and avoiding social contact that the prospect of a run of shows is positively energizing, almost regardless of what the songs are.

Helping me through the fog was the veteran engineer Dave Sinko. Dave started out doing live sound for Don Williams and (assuming he dies doing it) will finish with the Punch Brothers. I tried a song with him a few years back for a Mose Allison tribute record, recording at Jack Clement’s historical spot, now called Sound Emporium. I was very happy with the room and the mix and the speed of everything, and returned to the Emporium + Sinko combo model to work on Brennen Leigh’s record Prairie Love Letter in, I think, 2018. That chain of events reminds me a little of 2003, when I had worked on a Johnny Paycheck tribute record in Nashville with King Williams engineering and heavy guys like Lloyd Green and Redd Volkaert playing; afterward I couldn’t stop thinking, Man, I want to do that again, but with me writing and singing the songs. Selfish! Anyway, that was close to what happened again here. After making music with Dave at the board and with Dennis Crouch, Shad Cobb, Matt Flinner, and Noam Pikelny accompanying me, I wanted to repeat the fun but without material written by Mose or Brennen, as good as those songs are. When you go off to try and write songs, anticipating that sort of player firepower really “puts a boot in your ass,” to quote Toby Keith in an altered context.

One Glass of Whiskey is a light tune carried by loosely connected thoughts and I don’t think I can say much about it beyond that. Love all the playing here, particularly Ronnie’s easygoing-yet-driving right hand and Dennis’s ride up the neck on the 4th verse. A lot of the magic and mystery of bluegrass is in the oft-mentioned drive. Past the lifetimes of guys like Monroe and Crowe, it’s folkloric knowledge that lives on in the bodies and impulses of people like the ones playing here. I wrote “One Glass” not long after moving to Los Angeles where, in contradiction of the stereotypical view of LA held by people like I was before moving there, I sit on my porch many mornings and watch horses run across a field with a view of the mountain behind them. Originally I had the bridge lyric as “I reach for the first man I see.” But when I played the tune in NYC in March 2020, in a fetid basement venue with the pandemic looming, Madeleine Peyroux said the line sounded fishy to her. So I changed “man” to “friend,” a change for the better and thank you Ms. P. 

The storyline of Molly and the Old Man was a flight of fancy with a moral thrust. I had a friend in high school called Jesse Thompson, whose dad Tommy played in the Red Clay Ramblers, a band everyone loved. Jesse’s mom had died young, and Tommy’s house was a place where, as I remember anyway, the door was always unlocked and instruments were always easy to grab. Jesse and I sang duos together now and then, especially Jimmie Rodgers’s “Any Old Time.”

Now, scene change to thirty-some years later on the main island of Hawaii, where I was talking to a middle-school class about my musical formation. It both impressed and depressed me to find myself struggling to explain this culture of a shared repertoire and familial living-room singing to Hawaiians — so much incredible music was within easy grasp of these kids, in their heritage and in their midst — while by contrast the class was instantly clued-in when I brought up Michael Jackson of Gary, IN. It drove home for me how fortunate I had been to learn music as an in-person activity, and not just as a passive-listening, hero-worshipping pastime. It also clarified that I should devote my life and work to representing that older way. Back on the mainland, I started focusing a lot more on not thinking about records while playing music, but listening with my ears to what was really happening. This all falls into the category of Obvious Stuff That Chance Events Restore To The Front Of Your Brain.

I tried to make a song out of some of these thoughts with “Molly,” imagining that Jesse and I had grown up and gotten married (sorry Jesse, and sorry Donna) and were passing down to our kid the wisdom and the music that Tommy had given us. So the first half of the tune is mostly true, and the second half’s story events, after the modulation, are all made up. The idea is that people and places disappear, sadly and hauntingly, but meanwhile, music persists as an ongoing, vibrating, connective thread. Nice thought!

There’s an earlier version of Lonely Ain’t Hardly Alive that I recorded for a Bloodshot sampler, but I thought I’d do it again with a different cast (except for the mighty Shad Cobb, who’s on both). I don’t think it leaves any doubt about my affection for Jimmy Martin’s uptempo 3/4 wanna-kill-yourself songs. My good friend Don Stiernberg suggested the 2 minor chord in place of the 4 at the end of the chorus, which makes a nice variation on the norm, and another good friend, Mike Fredrickson, gave me the idea that women rebound from romantic heartache easier than men. It was great to finally do something with the frighteningly gifted Randy Kohrs.

Angels Carry Me has a lot of meaning for me, since it’s largely autobiographical. I wrote the first verse on a songwriting getaway in the desert, and it stared back at me combatively: "Anything to add, genius?” When a verse ends “And that’s how I became…” the path forward is hard to see. I was just just four lines in and already had three huge, disparate themes in play: rural loneliness, rock-star worship, and father-son tension. My heart sank as I imagined trying to keep these unlike balls in the air for three more minutes; I couldn’t imagine how to unite the themes or steer toward some endpoint. But after a few weeks of two-steps-forward-one-step-back, pushing through three verses, two bridges, and epilogue (a sectional piece I had never tried), I have to admit I fell in love with the song. The moral in the last line is so apt that it surprised me to think I didn’t have it pre-made and in view while I was writing the rest of it. Two songs helped me move forward when I was stuck: Jesse Winchester’s recording of Stoney Edwards’s “Seems Like Only Yesterday” (with its fast-changing slides of farmhouse scenes) and Paul Simon’s masterly song “Darling Lorraine,” which varies between tender and tough movements to tell a decades-long, emotionally multihued story. I should have mentioned that as I headed to the desert, I listened to Sierra Hull’s records, with the deliberate intention to write a song that she would feel and color in like no one else — in that way, too, the song fulfilled my hopes for it.

Longhair Bluegrass is another real-life song. I didn’t realize back when I idolized NGR that it was a band with a leader. But of course it was, and that Sam’s path and mine have intersected once every few years for the last 25 (usually, when I pay him to come play with me) has been one of my life’s great pleasures. The scene overall has gotten a lot less parochial — kinder and gentler, I’d say — since I was the age in this song. Sam and his Boomer brethren irritated some of the first-generation players, with their fresh take on the music, and their, uh, grooming. But they played and sang with such prodigiousness that no one could expel or deny them. Sharp skills (measured by fluency, speed, and historicity) on one of six different instruments are a ground-level criterion for entry into the field, and for that reason among others, bluegrass emphasizes how you behave and look way less than how you play and sing. Surely every meaningful music style has that selection mechanism whirring within it somewhere. So unfortunately for the first-generation skeptics, the internal logic was all in Sam’s favor. It’s obvious that the force of his huge personality, infectiously full of brains, humor, and loving attention to other humans, has done a whole lot to loosen up and expand Bluegrassland, maybe more than any other single personality has. Alison Brown plays banjo on this one. She has that calmer-than-a-Hindu-cow approach to banjoistic envelope-pushing that has been a thing since Béla Fleck, since Bill Keith before him really, and I love how she expresses her reckless edge here without breaking a sweat.

Backwater Blues is one of those lightweight tunes that I sometimes write as a release-valve while working on harder songs. The inspirations that got me off and running are absurdly unrelated: a Dave Edmunds riff, an Emily Dickinson poem, and a retired guy’s house in Florida where Shad and I played in 2020. (Emily has been a staunch go-to for me for many years — the first line of this song is a direct steal.) I knew right away I wanted to play it with Chris Eldridge and Todd Phillips; they’re great at helping me sound groovier than I am.

Titles that are women’s names come easy to me, and Sweet Li’l Cora-Mae is the latest of those. I also enjoy singing duos with women, with their encouraging attitudes and their high voices. Nora O’Connor and Brennen Leigh are two of my faves. It’s hard to feel discouraged, or to sing very out-of-tune, with them around. I did one “Cora-Mae” with Nora and Robbie Gjersoe for my thumb-drive release Revenge of the Doberman, and this somewhat different two-banjo version with Brennen here. I can’t think of very many recordings with two clawhammers working together, and I’m not sure how it would work if one wasn’t Fred and the other Ginger, so to speak. There’s limits to the possible moves, and a lot of ways you can step on each other. On this one, I’m Ginger and Shad is Mary Ann. 

Some original bluegrass instrumentals with flat-3s, B-section modulations, around-the-horn progressions, and other modest kinks started popping up around the late Fifties — a gesture away from the blues and toward Tin Pan Alley, perhaps, or just a more experimental attitude. I’m not a musicologist so don’t quote me on that. I’m thinking about Jesse McReynolds’s “Stoney Creek,” and Frank Wakefield’s “New Camptown Races,” stuff like that. These were in my mind when I made up Silverlake Reel, over in Dan Harmon’s office at the Starburns building in Burbank. Starburns was the production house of my friend Dino Stamatopoulos and I thank him for letting me squat in the building for a season.

It was a thrill getting to meet Jerry Douglas the day we recorded “Silverlake.” His flurry of notes on the 9th bar of his break on Ricky Skaggs’s version of “Little Cabin Home On The Hill” blew my mind in 1979. Nobody in our extended family except me and my dad were into the grass and so I have very specific memories of 4 or 5 occasions when I’d put on a record and galvanize the grays. When I cranked up Ricky’s Sweet Temptation LP my grandparents filed like sheep into the living room and sank into the sofa, flummoxed. It was Ricky’s unbelievable voice, of course, but also the solos of Tony Rice and Jerry, who were both like Chuck Yeager, breaking the sound barrier. There are these ultra-rare instrumentalists before whom a way and speed of playing seem impossible, and after whom it seems self-evidently doable, with a number of people doing it and taking it even further. 

Nashville Blues is the only thing on the record I didn’t make up, and to be frank, even though the Delmores are on the copyright, they didn’t exactly make it up either. Going back to Arkansas and somebody stole that gal I had are what the eggheads call common tropes, and I think this was true in 1936 too. What was original to the brothers, and a sort of originality more important in music than word-strings, was their style — their delivery (jazzy yet deadpan), their extreme creativity in vocal harmony (thirds, fifths, unison, crossovers, the works), and Rabon’s fast ’n’ fluid 4-string guitar playing. Tim O’Brien and I talked a little about the particular pattern of responsorial and simultaneous singing they used on “Nashville Blues,” but we ended up mindlessly doing something a little different…which is basically the folk method, right? Mindlessness. What a blast to play music with these two! David’s solo is one of my favorites of his on any record — so glad it ended up on mine. I asked him between takes what kind of pick he used, and he said, “A pick that somebody dropped behind a dressing-room couch.” Doc Watson was my gateway to the Delmores, as to Burnett & Rutherford, Carson Robison, Mississippi John Hurt, and a number of others. My conception of all those people’s music, whether I’m playing it or thinking about it, is filtered through Doc, whose style started worming into my grey matter a couple days after I was born, once I was over my pique about having the tip of my penis cut off. The folk method can be quite cruel.

Momma’s Eyes is a type of song I’ve felt more at liberty to try my hand at as I’ve grown older — a sentimental ballad about family, change, and loss. Ten years ago I started to notice how many people around my age were dealing with their parents’ slowly fading away, and how the sadness and stress affected all involved. Inferring from my personal circle, I figured about every tenth or fifteenth person out there has been saddled with this situation. It sounds to me like my singing betrays some self-consciousness, as I faced my friend Brennen and sang these naked lyrics. I like how Scott played the guitar. I had heard he was a good guitarist, but since he works with me as a mandolinist and singer, I hadn’t heard him play, until we started tracking this. Lucky that worked out.

The narrative (such as it is) of Let The Old Dog In has just enough relation to real life to be alarming. Before Covid-19 I had a small habit of returning a little loopy in the wee hours from this bar in Los Feliz called The Drawing Room, where I’d go Sunday nights to sing karaoke and goof off with friends. Donna really would’ve been justified in bolting the door, but she never did. Because of downstream covid effects (i.e. the songs I had slotted and the cast I had in mind to play them were disrupted shortly before the session date), I had this incredible group of players providentially in place, and ended up tracking “Old Dog” and the Silverlake instrumental instead of what had been planned. It was a triumphant day for me (you can hear some of my elation during the soloing) because it now seemed clear that despite all the setbacks, I was working on a good record. As I said to Critter later that night (he was there that day mostly because “Old Dog” was too fast for me to play), I hadn’t felt such a jolt of pure delight at playback for many years. Recordings like this are for me expensive souvenirs of memorable occasions.

It was pretty late in life that I started frailing. About 15 years back, while traveling through North Carolina, I stopped in the town of Zebulon at a banjo shop I’d heard about. There aren’t many all-banjo shops, and this one went out of business a few years later. It was like a dream — dozens of beautiful handmade banjos from makers all over the US hanging on the walls. I had a price ceiling in mind of $2,000. After an hour of playing it came down to two instruments, a bright-sounding low-set one made by Doc Huff of Dallas, Oregon and a mellower, higher-set one with a deeper scoop made by Chuck Lee of Ovilla, Texas. I settled on Chuck’s (with case it was just a bit over my price ceiling) and soon began torturing those around me, including paying audiences, with my clumsy beginner playing. I wish I could have spared everyone and begun at an intermediate level. The only way to proceed was to keep at it and set goals — learn tunes, practice patterns, and test myself by occasionally playing in public. For lessons I used DVDs and banjo-playing friends. Ed Tverdek said, “Imagine you’re cradling an egg.” Danny Barnes said, “The one big rule is, no upstrokes.” Michael Miles said, “Make a skeleton of the tune, don’t go crazy filling it in.” Mike Merenda, a noted liar, said, “You’re doing fine.”

Scruggs-style and clawhammer have zero in common in right-hand technique, and the left-hand commonalities reduce a bit too, once you take it out of open-G tuning. I had some three-finger from an early age, but that was of little use now. To get the hang of the right-hand clawing motion took four or five years of embodiment, of reducing the role of the conscious mind. It also took some trial-and-error to figure out what to do about my right-hand index nail, which was short and recessed from flatpicking. These days, when I have a period of banjoing ahead of me, I go to the salon and get an extension, sitting there among the desperate housewives of suburbia. The nail lasts about six weeks, during which flatpicking is slightly cumbersome but frailing is much easier. Isn’t this interesting?

I’ve written only three or four songs on my Chuck Lee, and Old Time Music Is Here To Stay is one. The melody seemed to emerge naturally from C-tuning; I don’t think I’d have made it up on guitar, or in open G on banjo, either one. The main 8-bar cadence interested me as soon as I heard it, I think because of the concept of contour, which stayed in my head after reading This Is Your Brain On Music many years back. A gently sloping series of notes, like the shape of a mountain ridge. Prokofiev positioned staff notes in a visual pattern corresponding to mountain silhouettes when he was scoring Alexander Nevsky. Following intuitions of math embedded in nature is one way to make music happen. I think it’s also a helpful way to keep the abstractions that infest musical thought rooted in the observable world, since things like contour, pitch, and cyclical events are natural phenomena, not just arid music-school concepts. (Not that those concepts, arid or otherwise, are available to an unschooled guy like me.)

This is another real-life song — the thoughts and opinions and memories are mine. I mean, I didn’t literally plug my ears and run away from banjos when I was a teenager, but I did have the unproductive idea that I’d learn to play electric guitar and join my peers in going ga-ga over the popular music of the moment. It was unproductive because it was a herd instinct that led nowhere in particular; I never got too good on that pricey Telecaster which now gathers dust in my closet. I’m actually better at clawhammer banjo, and I’ve only been doing that for 15 years now. Something’s the matter with me — I just can’t get comfortable with the Rolling Stones or U2 or hiphop the way I can get with banjo music. But if “Old Time Music” is right, who knows, maybe in 200 years people will be relating to “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes” and “Blue Ridge Cabin Home” more than to “Brown Sugar” or Pink Lady. Electric guitars might give way to computers, as seems to be happening now, but the mountains will still be right there.