#matt flinner

It Must be Near St. Patrick’s Day

- “Danny Boy” is Darrell Scott’s latest “It Must be Sunday” offering

When music lands in that space between melancholic and mood-lifting, music is at its best.

Darrell Scott found the sweet spot Oct. 5, 2025, in Vermont with his instrumental arrangement of “Danny Boy,” out as the St. Patrick’s Day-minus-two edition of his ongoing “It Must be Sunday” video series.

Playing electric guitar and accompanied by Matt Flinner’s mandolin and John Mailander’s violin, Scott keeps things languid and tender as he and his compatriots hand off low-key solos smoothly with a glance.

This is a deliberate piece of music, each musician aware of his respective role in lead and support capacities and committed to threading the needle between a lump in the throat and a smile on the face. In more than 100 years, “Danny Boy” has never sounded quite like this; Scott in his genius has come up with an arrangement that deserves to be preserved and interpreted by others.

Namesake String Band Celebrates a “Kentucky Morning” on Darrell Scott’s Latest “It Must be Sunday” Offering

When a performance outshines the medium on which it’s captured, music makers and music lovers must sometimes sacrifice quality in one for quality in the other.

Such is the case with the Darrell Scott String Band’s Aug. 31, 2024, version of “Kentucky Morning” in Tennessee. Shot on a cell phone or small single camera, the recording suffers from muffled sound until Scott cuts into an acoustic-guitar solo after the first verse and things straighten out a bit.

Flanked by Shad Cobb on fiddle, Matt Flinner on mandolin and Bryn Davies on bass and harmony vocals, Scott tells the story of the rural narrator who gets a good-paying factory job in the city only to find that’s not the life for him.

Oh, your bright lights don’t shine like a Kentucky morning/you can’t hear a whippoorwill out on the street/give me a good piece of land and an old cane back rocker/while life goes on and on and on, Scott and Davies sing.

The quality of the recording is marginal. But the quality of the performance outweighs any negatives.

Song Review: Darrell Scott - “Helen of Troy, Pennsylvania” (Live, 2019)

Maybe it’s true; maybe it’s not. But Darrell Scott’s story about “Helen of Troy, Pennsylvania” is a teenage boy’s fantasy come true.

Wildly inappropriate - and depending on the kids’ ages, potentially illegal - the tale of the high-school footballers’ afternoon with a divorced woman twice their age makes for a scintillating song.

Performing on a just-released video recorded at the 2019 Green Mountain Bluegrass and Roots Festival with banjoist Matt Flinner and standup bassist Bryn Davies, Scott, on acoustic guitar, punctuates the bluegrass instrumentation with funky measures and jamband sensibility to show off a small slice of his all-encompassing musical menu.

And it is simply a nibble, as Scott is preparing an album of Hank Williams covers, which he previewed with a low-down-and-dirty rendition of “My Sweet Love Ain’t Around” on New Year’s Day.

Grade card: Darrell Scott - “Helen of Troy, Pennsylvania” (Live, 2019) - A