The Great Interpreter

There aren’t many live recordings of legendary singer/guitarist, Red Allen, available so I’m glad to see his recorded work on YouTube. Red was one of the greatest interpreters of songs in bluegrass, and this performance is no exception.

The album this comes from, Keep On Going: The Rebel and Melodeon Recordings is an essential compendium of his work. Bonus: It features the work of some stellar sidemen including fiddler, Scotty Stoneman and banjoist, Porter Church.

The song is “Hello City Limits”.

Decorated Veterans

What did it take to sing tenor to Jimmy Martin?

When he left Bill Monroe for a solo career, Jimmy Martin had to answer that question with a tenor whose power equalled Monroe’s. Martin found the perfect foil in Paul Williams.

A few years ago, Williams got together with two other Martin alumni – Doyle Lawson (who plays guitar here), and banjo man, J.D Crowe. They’ve made a couple of well-received albums, but when they hit the stage, they blow the roof off the dump.

In this clip, they’re joined by Jason Barie on fiddle and Dale Perry on bass – both of whom were members of Lawson’s band, Quicksilver, at the time. And though everyone is in top form, it’s hard not to single out Crowe’s return to a more traditional, blues-based style (He has said he learned a lot from Fats Domino’s piano playing) for his work with this group. This is his best picking in years!

Here they are with Williams out in front, singing one of his signature numbers, “The Hills Of Roane County”.

Bluegrass With A Bakersfield Accent

Yet another clip from Austin City Limits, this one with Ralph Stanley and his long-time lead singer, Charlie Sizemore. This must’ve been right around the time Sizemore was studying for his law degree at the University of Kentucky.

Yeah. Imagine being this talented in two areas of endeavor.

I've talked before about how Buck Owens sounded as much like bluegrass as Bakersfield. This clip has Charlie Sizemore walking that line, too, accompanied by Dr. Ralph’s mountain tenor (is it any wonder Dr. Ralph’s been called “The Man With the Hundred-Year-Old Voice”?)

This is a medley of “If I Lose” and “The Kitten and the Cat”.

Bill Monroe's Playful Side

Kenny Baker set the standard for every bluegrass fiddler who came after. So, why have I picked this obscure performance to highlight his genius?

I picked it because Baker’s kickoff here is one of my top five bluegrass kickoffs of all time. I picked it because it’s sassy and playful – attributes never associated with Monroe, but often with Baker (although “sprightly” is the adjective more often applied in Baker’s case).

I picked it, because the creativity and playfulness never let up – just listen to Baker’s backup, Lonnie Hoppers’s banjo fills.

Speaking of creativity, Monroe introduces his break by quoting the final notes of “Taps” at a tempo that makes it sound more like “Reveille”. After all, everybody needs an army to protect their playhouse, er, stillhouse. The original lyric says “stillhouse”.

Monroe, who had been beaten and bullied by an alcoholic older brother, would have none of it. And that makes the whimsy driving this track all the more remarkable.

This is Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys, featuring bluegrass fiddle pioneer, Kenny Baker, with “Darling Corey”.

How Bluegrass Grew

If a couple of college students named Mike Seeger and Ralph Rinzler hadn’t prodded Bill Monroe out of his bluegrass depression-era funk, moments like this might never have happened.

As it was, Monroe transformed himself over the years into a benevolent-ish bluegrass patriarch, sharing his musical wisdom with the generations that followed during post-show jams and random yet momentous encounters.

What was a dying, regional musical style became a movement, paving the way for musical pyrotechnics like this.

The Del McCoury Band, featuring mandolinist, Ronnie McCoury, joins Marty Stuart for a blistering version of Bill Monroe’s “Rawhide”.

Pure Bluegrass, Poisonous Times

How can you make a case for the exceptional quality of one recording when every recording made by this lineup was exceptional?

There was nothing good about Monroe’s life in this period: woman trouble; the bluegrass depression; the bookings in smaller, dreary venues; the hastening obscurity and increasing combativeness of the man that nobody had yet acknowledged as the father of bluegrass music – all of it was garbage.

Except the music.

During this period, Monroe made the most painful, incandescent, and enduring music of his life. It helped that he had an equally-troubled duet partner in Jimmy Martin (No, that’s not Martin in the video still, but Bill’s older brother, Charlie – speaking of problematic relationships).

This is “Poison Love”.

Swinging For the Fences

“It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing”. Not a rule normally associated with bluegrass, but it should be. Just listen to how hard Monroe and his band from 1941 are swinging on this one; it’s like a master class on bluegrass timing.

It’s funny: So much is made of Monroe’s 1946 band that nobody remembers that he and his musicians were geniuses way before that.

This is their take on Jimmie Rodgers’s “Blue Yodel #7”.

Two Ways To Play

Having only heard Del McCoury’s version of this old song, I was curious to see how Jim and Jesse interpreted it.

Where McCoury is rueful, seeing the humor through the pain, the McReynolds brothers feel the sting keenly. The picking is just a bit angry, and the poignant harmonies cut like a knife. Oddly enough, I like them both.

Here are Jim and Jesse with “She Left Me Standing On the Mountain”.

Invasion of the Hicks From the Sticks

On the eve of this show, gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen famously warned New Yorkers to flee the city because “the hicks from the sticks” were about to descend on Carnegie Hall. Apparently, she hadn’t heard that banjo pickin’ college students had commandeered Washington Square Park, ushering in the Folk Scare years before.

Flatt and Scruggs were warmly received. This album became foundational for any bluegrass music library. Bluegrass musicians kept invading Carnegie Hall.

And they lived happily ever after. With the possible exception of those folks who are horrified to find genuine country music in the blogosphere.

Here are Flatt and Scruggs with “Little Maggie”.

An Unexpected Pleasure

Critics loved it; fans hated it. The fans were expecting more psychedelia; what they got was … this.

Generations of country rock and bluegrass lovers – artists and fans alike – have been grateful to The Byrds ever since. Sweetheart of the Rodeo has been an incalculable influence on countless artists from Emmylou Harris to the Eagles.

Some might even blame this seminal album for the dilution of today’s bluegrass and country with rock and pop. They shouldn’t. Just listen to this straight-up, bluegrass version of Woody Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd”.

Local Color

More evidence that Ralph Stanley is the hardest of hardcore bluegrass artists: drankin’, ridin’ fer pleasure, and sheriff-shootin’, plus prison and court systems so merciless that one descriptive line about each suffices to ensure the sympathy of savvy locals.

This is “Old Richmond Prison”. And no, the irony is not lost on me: This story will only seem glamorous and romantic to many, simply because the perpetrator is W-H-I-T-E.

Union Man, Scammed

The Downhill Bluegrass Band wrote this one in honor of union organizer, songwriter, and fellow Swede, Joe Hill, who was executed for murder on the basis of evidence that was later disproved.

The lyrics are based on Hill’s last will, which he sent to Ethel Raim, founder of The Pennywhistlers.

This is the Downhill Bluegrass Band, with the song they’ve simply entitled, “Joe Hill”.

Jimmy Martin Sneaks Past the Censors

A good ole goodun from Jimmy Martin. Pretty sure the quaint lyrics got him past the censors, but Martin is laughing all the way to the bank.

Everyone is in top form here. This was banjo picker J.D. Crowe’s first Decca session, and he hit the ground running with this track. Earl Taylor, who was far more effective as a sideman than he ever was as a frontman, gets that high, stinging tenor part just right.

This is “Dog Bite Your Hide”.

Attitude

A tear-stained heartbreaker from the pen of the late, great Jimmy C. Newman.
 
It was The Johnson Mountain Boys who introduced this number to the bluegrass canon. Here they are with “Let the Whole World Talk”.

Just Like Old Times

Considering the epic feud -- or, was it? -- between these two, it's a wonder they ever got back together.

OTOH, perhaps it was inevitable. Many of the bluegrass faithful -- musicians, fans, and historians alike -- consider the Monroe/Flatt/Scruggs iteration of The Blue Grass Boys to be the first-ever bluegrass band.

Bill Monroe disputed that claim. Nevertheless, bluegrass bands revisit and remake the repertoire of this lineup more than any other. And, despite the brilliant lineups that came after, the only one that would cover as much artistic ground was the one featuring Jimmy Martin.

Unfortunately for the music, it is that feat of warp-speed artistic development that the bluegrass community has sought to emulate over the last 30 years -- so much so that most seem to have forgotten what real bluegrass sounds like.

Here, then, is an always-timely reminder: Lester Flatt with Bill Monroe, singing a bluegrass classic that they co-wrote – “Will You Be Loving Another Man?”

Just Another Misogynistic Wag

The other day, I heard a guy drop a corrosively-insulting acryonym in conversation, just as casual as you please.

The term he used was one I hadn't heard before -- WAGs, for "wives and girlfriends", he said.

As though any and all women in straight relationships can be lumped together. As though, once a man condescends to be in relationship with a woman, she has no uniqueness; she is no longer special and lovely.

In other words, this guy was saying, wives and girlfriends are all alike.

It shouldn't surprise anyone to hear that the guy in question has been married thrice, divorced twice, and on track for divorce number three.

Hazel and Alice have the perfect answer to all those who insist that women are all alike  -- and easy, at that -- when it's the critics themselves who are indulging in cheap, indiscriminate hook-ups (Lookin' at you, gay male misogynists; and also at trans women, who are some of the worst misogynists in the bunch).

Hazel and Alice with "Don't Put Her Down, You Helped Put Her There".

Staring Back

Sometimes, you just shake your head over how good a song is. This is one of those songs.

The recorded version (from Stanley’s wonderful, award-winning double CD, “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning”) is slower, with the lilting rhythm of half-spoken, half-sung children’s taunts. This version -- from the must-see bluegrass documentary, Gather At the River -- is faster than any of those speeding bullets, suggesting that maybe the family ran away from the hate to greener pastures.

Then again, maybe they just learned to stare right back at the bigots who so scornfully referred to them as “Mountain Folks”.

Destination: Delusion

The first thing you hear is the bass, and it is mixed way too hot. That determined lack of subtlety is strange for a song whose lyrics have to be puzzled out in the quiet of the mind.

It wouldn't be the first time a lyricist had used the seasons and the elements to convey emotional states. The genius here is that the metaphors are so slippery and tentative, you don't realize until the last verse what's happening:

I want to go home though the party's not over
Don't want to go back to no ignorant lies
For when I go I intend to believe
That the sun rises and sets in your eyes

This is willful escape into a world of fantasy, as seductive as the approach of summer itself. Who knows how long she'll go on before she realizes that the object of her affection hasn't joined in the fantasy? Who knows how long she'll will herself to hear whispers of summer, even as winter tightens its grip?

This is Eliza Carthy with "Whispers Of Summer".

A Ph.D. In Bluegrass

Before he joined his dad’s band as a full-time lead singer and guitarist — he’d been occasionally joining in onstage since grade school — Ralph Stanley II studied his dad’s records like he was studying for his Ph.D.

Of his dad’s lead singers, Keith Whitley and Charlie Sizemore were Too’s favorites. Too has carried in in the Whitley/Sizemore tradition, first in his dad’s band, and now, as a solo artist.

Ralph Stanley II has another thing in common with Whitley and Sizemore — an ear for exceptional material, like this song from Fred Eaglesmith about a friendly but combustible romantic rivalry. This is “I’m Wilder Than Her”.

What the Founders Knew and the Young Punks Don't

Is it any wonder that Jimmy Martin – and Bill Monroe, too, to some extent – forbade his sidemen from jamming with other bands at festivals, preferring instead that they stick with him and improve their grasp of his music?

Former Sunny Mountain Boy, Bill Emerson, quotes Martin in the documentary, King of Bluegrass: “You ought to be back in the dressing room … practicing my stuff, ‘cause if you think you’ve got it right, you don’t.”

Jimmy Martin was right.

The vocal jump from m3 to M2 is wickedly hard to hear over those major chords, but emblematic of bluegrass singing as Bill Monroe designed it. The microtonal slide that is often used to make the jump has inspired some to compare bluegrass to the classical music of India. It may sound out of tune, but it is a by-product of precise and painstaking technique.

Here are Bill Monroe and Jimmy Martin, proving that precision + soul = bluegrass. The song is “Letter From My Darling”.