I can’t understand why so many “traditional” bluegrass bands insist on lifeless, juiceless, pale imitations of the classics, when the first generation bluegrass pioneers were anything but.

The pioneers gave it everything they had, whether they were sick, hungry, cold, tired, or playing to the only two old folks who’d showed up to hear them at the old school house. “Singing hungry” they called it, and the pioneers sang like they were hungry, whether they’d eaten that day or not.

That’s the kind of singing that drew people to bluegrass music. “From my heart to your heart,” Bill Monroe once said, desperate to make that emotional connection.

The Bluegrass Brothers haven’t forgotten that. They hit the stage singing hungry, and there’s so much life in their shows that you forget you’ve heard the songs a million times before. That is, simultaneously, art and emotional truth. To my mind, that makes The Bluegrass Brothers a kind of collective genius.

Here they are with, “Worried Man Blues”.