Vintage Weekend Listening

Here’s some gorgeous listening: Emmylou Harris and Ricky Skaggs, their sublime duet vocals, a well-chosen selection of country and bluegrass songs, and minimal acoustic accompaniment. When two singers are this brilliant, this emotionally raw, who needs anything else?

Multiple Meanings

Songs can have a lot of different meanings.

Ricky Skaggs, who wrote this one, sings it about a crisis of faith within himself. Others would see it as the story of their faith journey, with all its ups and downs. A lot of conservative  evangelicals would use it as a warning non-believers, sort of in the mold of  "The goblins gonna gitcha if ya don't watch out."

Sigh.

Yeah, sometimes the people who would most like to ditch Jesus are the ones who brag the loudest about loving Him.

This is Ricky Skaggs with a deeply-introspective and haunting tune called "You Can't Shake Jesus".

Just look at those two kids!

Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley were teenagers when they joined Ralph Stanley’s Clinch Mountain Boys. They were still teens when they recorded this, their first and only record as a duo, but you wouldn’t know it by listening.

“My deceitful heart keeps changing its mind,” they sing, “Hurting everyone but me”. Yet, they sing as though they’re in as much pain as the targets of their harmful flirtations.

From a psychological perspective, whether these boys knew it or not, that’s the absolute truth. That’s what makes this such a brilliant performance.

This is Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley with “My Deceitful Heart”.

A powerful reminder that one of the most-recorded songs of the 1960s had deep roots in … bluegrass.

That’s the composer – the late, great John Hartford – on banjo. He’s joined by Glen Campbell and Ricky Skaggs at the Grand Ole Opry for “Gentle On My Mind”.

I’ve posted clips before but here, at long last, is the full set. From 1975, J.D. Crowe & The New South – Tony Rice, Ricky Skaggs, Jerry Douglas, and Bobby Slone.

Highlights include the opening track, “Rock, Salt, and Nails”; “The Old Home Place” (always a staple of Crowe’s New South sets); “Ten Degrees and Getting Colder” (Tony Rice was the premier bluegrass interpreter of the songs of Gordon Lightfoot) and, of course, “Sin City”, which I believe I’ve reblogged individually more than once. Even so, this performance of it is especially powerful.

How To Keep Bluegrass Exciting

Among bluegrass musicians, the typical argument for taking their music in a less traditional direction is that bluegrass will stagnate if they don’t change it up.

I think it’s more accurate to say that their bluegrass has stagnated — not the genre itself. Why make all of bluegrass music liable for one’s artistic process?

That said, I think it’s vital for those bands to explore new musical avenues. If you’re not having as much fun with bluegrass as this band is, it’s time to do other things — if only temporarily.

That’s exactly what this band has done in recent years, and their departure is a mark of great artistic integrity on the part of their boss man. When they come back to full-time bluegrass, those 60-year-old tunes will sound just as fresh and exciting as they do in this 2006 concert by Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder.

Prepare to have your socks knocked off.

There aren’t too many singers who can hold an audience’s attention with a solo, a cappella performance. Ralph Stanley is one. Ricky Skaggs, who, during his time with The Clinch Mountain Boys,  learned a thing or two from the good Doctor, is another.

Here’s Skaggs, hypnotizing the “Nashville Now” audience with “Talk About Suffering”.

Keeping Bluegrass Alive

This is a song written by an old man about an even older man.

This is a song about the way country music used to sound, a song originally performed in the way that country music came to sound — years before anyone dared to call it “blue grass”, after the songwriter’s band.

Long after it was forgotten by anyone but the old man’s friends and fans, this song unexpectedly came to prominence once again. New fans of the song had no idea that it told a major part the story of how bluegrass music came to be, but they loved it anyway.

So many of them bought it — and the other hits from the singer who re-popularized it — that the singer was financially able to keep a promise he made to the old man when that great songwriter lay on his deathbed: Keep this music alive, the old man said, more or less. Start playing bluegrass music again.

Ricky Skaggs kept his promise to Bill Monroe.

Here’s Skaggs, playing bluegrass once again, with the long-forgotten Bill Monroe tune that Skaggs turned into an 80s country hit – “Uncle Pen“.

Facts taken from Richard D. Smith’s superb, exhaustive Bill Monroe biography, “Can’t You Hear Me Callin’?”

Here’s yet another concert from that storied line up of Ralph Stanley’s Clinch Mountain Boys: Skaggs, Whitley, Centers, Cooke, and Cline. This show took place about 10 months prior to the one I posted on January 25, 2015.

If anything, this one’s a better show, but maybe that’s because I’m in love with this set list: “Ridin’ That Midnight Train”, “Stone Walls and Steel Bars”, “Green Pastures”, “Black Mountain Blues” — excellent songs, brilliantly performed. Roy Lee Centers sounds particularly strong.

Enjoy this set from one of the greatest bluegrass bands to ever grace the stage.

An Influential Album

Some bluegrass purists scoff at Emmylou Harris’s groundbreaking 1979 album, “Roses In the Snow”, but like The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s “Will the Circle Be Unbroken”, it introduced bluegrass musicians, singing style, instrumentation, songs, and songwriters to an uninitiated audience — through mainstream country radio at that.

“Roses In the Snow” remains one of my favorite albums. I have owned it on vinyl, cassette, and CD. I still remember trying to nail down Ricky Skaggs’s Stanley-style melismatic vocals. I learned how because of this record.

Here are Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, and Ricky Skaggs from a 1979 tribute to Mother Maybelle Carter, with the final track from “Roses In the Snow”. This is “Gold Watch and Chain”.

Doc Watson wrote this tune, covered here by Ricky Skaggs and Marty Stuart – a consummate storyteller who offers a starry-eyed account of the first time he ever heard the “Watson Blues”.

Boone Creek, the short-lived group featuring Ricky Skaggs, Jerry Douglas, and future Doyle Lawson banjoist, Terry Baucom. This is yet another example of progressive bluegrass done right.

Listen to the pure country sweetness of Douglas’s break on “Me and Bobby McGee”, followed by Ricky Skaggs who doesn’t seem to know if he’s Bill Monroe, John Duffey, or jazz-rock guitarist, George Benson.
You may not love it, but you can’t classify it as anything but bluegrass – the drive, timing, vocal style, and subject matter see to that, along with the specific selection of acoustic instruments. Tear down the walls and incubate a new strain, by all means. Just make sure that your bluegrass says “bluegrass” with something more than the instrumentation.

When you’re talking about J.D. Crowe & The New South, this was the lineup: Ricky Skaggs, Tony Rice, Jerry Douglas, and Bobby Slone.

You know the reputations and the brilliant work of all these musicians and singers, I hope. If you don’t, here’s a little factoid to give you an idea of how influential this lineup was and is to this day: Their first album is so legendary that it’s known, not by its name, but by its number: 0044.

Legends aside, drunk looks like shit – and sounds far worse – on a certain mandolin player who’d just turned 21. Matter of fact, it doesn’t serve a certain superstar guitarist very well either. The good news is that these days, they both give themselves fully to the music, and their occasions in the spotlight are all the better for it.

This song has never been considered a gospel song. It certainly isn’t a hymn. But it’s as reflective of Jesus’s preaching and teaching as anything you’d hear on Sunday – more so, in many cases. The second verse is about Bobby Kennedy and talks about his assassination. It’s as sad to contemplate today as it was when it was written. The futility is palpable, both in the lyrics and in this performance.

J.D. Crowe and the New South gave us some stunning interpretations of the songs of Gram Parsons and The Flying Burrito Brothers. This is one. It’s called “Sin City”. And yes, that’s Ricky Skaggs and Tony Rice up there with J.D.

Ralph Stanley is joined by two former Clinch Mountain Boys for a Stanley classic. Larry Sparks will break your heart with that lead vocal, and the trio harmonies are perfectly balanced. Ricky Skaggs on mandolin, and the amazing Art Stamper on fiddle keep the heartbreak coming on “Lonesome River”.

The sound is wack but, oh, this music is good. Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder give “Road To Spencer” a workout, underscoring the Scots-Irish origins of bluegrass.

One Great Train and Two Cabooses

First of all, those of you who know bluegrass music, consider this lineup of The Clinch Mountain Boys:

・Ralph Stanley (Banjo, Vocals)
・Roy Lee Centers (Guitar, Vocals)
・Keith Whitely (Guitar, Vocals)
・Ricky Skaggs (Mandolin, Vocals)
・Curly Ray Cline (Fiddle)
・Jack Cooke (Bass, Vocals)

Now, imagine that two out of the three who could be called internationally-famous are relegated to the back of the line. Yup, that’s what happens to Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley who, as teenagers, had joined the band just a year or so before.

That said, their featured number, “Don’t Cheat In Our Hometown” is one of the highlights of the set. Jack Cooke’s plain-spoken take on “Sittin’ On Top Of the World” is another.

The real standout is fiddler, Curly Ray Cline, who closes the set with “Orange Blossom Special”, fiddling the ode to that mighty train like it was the grandest, most terrible thing he had ever seen.

Who knows? Maybe it was.