The Bluegrass Situation

Last week, country superstar Keith Urban released his new album, which includes a song called “Gemini.” Supposedly written for his wife, Nicole Kidman, it boasts a line that is the definition of cringe inducing: “She’s a maniac in the bed, but a brainiac in her head,” it goes. Aside from the fact that it’s redundant (you can’t be a brainiac in your leg or your elbow, last time we checked) it’s one of many examples in modern Music Row writing that belittles a woman’s worth while trying to be a tribute to her greatness. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that a woman can be both smart and sexy. But writing about a partner, regardless of gender, shouldn’t be off-limits, either. Romance is a cornerstone of music, and that’s a fine thing indeed — and artists should be able to write tributes to their lovers or loved ones without shades of sexism.

Who invented rock ‘n’ roll?

Don’t answer that: It’s a trick question. Rock ‘n’ roll, like most complex sounds and genres and world-conquering forces, wasn’t actually invented. Instead, it germinated and mutated and mushroomed and erupted. It’s not the product of Elvis Presley or Sam Phillips, nor of Jackie Brenston or Louis Jordan. Rather, it is the product of all those people and more — all conduits for larger cultural ideas and desires. Rock wasn’t an invention, not like television or the telephone or the automobile or the atomic bomb. Similarly, its sub-genres and sub-sub-genres in the late 1960s weren’t inventions, more like waves swelling and cresting through pop culture.

The Beau Brummels didn’t invent country-rock in the 1960s, although they did help bring it into being. Long before the San Francisco rock explosion in the late ’60s shot the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane to national prominence, they were gigging around the Bay Area as one of the first American bands to respond to the British Invasion. In 1965, they recorded their breakout hit, “Laugh Laugh,” with a kid named Sly Stewart, later known as Sly Stone. They held their own against Southern California groups like the Byrds, the Standells, and the Electric Prunes (who were marrying their garage rock to liturgical music in one of the most esoteric experiments of the era). While tiny Autumn Records could never fully capitalize on their success, the Beau Brummels did achieve enough notoriety to appear in films and television shows. (The quality of those outlets, however, remains questionable: Village of the Giants, a kiddie flick starring Beau Bridges and Ron Howard, was skewered on Mystery Science Theater 3000.)

Cumberland, Maryland, is a mountain town tucked into the base of the Appalachian Mountains. It earned the nickname “the Gateway to the West” because of its location as a jumping off point to the western United States during the Gold Rush. It’s an artsy town with a healthy dose of a small town feel. One of our favorite artists takes over this mountainside town for four days every May for DelFest, started in honor of and in conjunction with the great Del McCoury. (If you are reading this, you know who he is, so I’ll spare you the storied history about his bluegrass career.)

In the days following the release of The Tree of Forgiveness, John Prine — the 71-year-old master song crafter, storyteller, and lover of a good meatloaf — had the best sales week of his decades-long career. His first album of originals since 2005’s Fair and Square, it’s a rare bit of triumph for the good guys — and for an artist like Prine, who has shaped our current musical climate in ways that are often beyond measure. Because, despite being one of the primary influences on Americana’s best and brightest — from Jason Isbell to Margo Price and Deer Tick — Prine’s never banked those platinum albums. Though 1991’s The Missing Years eventually sold around a half-million copies some 20 years after his self-titled debut, records, like the rest of human life, then went online: People stopped buying, and started streaming.

“Just as I started selling records, records stopped selling. I hope it wasn’t my fault,” Prine says, chuckling from his living room at home in Nashville. “I’d be spoiled, if I sold a million records. I probably wouldn’t go on the road for 10 years. But I don’t ever want to sell so many records that I have to do shows in a stadium. Stadiums are for sporting events: They’re not to watch a guy with a guitar come out and tell his story.”

He’s right, though if there’s anyone who could capture a stadium full of people with just an acoustic guitar and his heart-shaking stories, it would be Prine. The Tree of Forgiveness, an exquisite record that finds Prine looking at love, death, and the passage of time with humor, lightness, and his own quirky sort of grace, isn’t a set of arena rock barnburners (obviously). Instead, it’s touching moments of humanity that stick to the bones and linger in the mind, letting the imagination wander in exactly the direction that Prine wants it to … which is everywhere. Take “Summer’s End,” a nostalgic track if there ever was one, though it’s not explicitly clear for what — for summer, for a relationship, for life itself. “I could sell John Prine Kleenex with a song like that,” he says, laughing.

Bluegrass music has a lot of rules — spoken, unspoken, inferred, implied. These rules can make the genre a veritable minefield to tiptoe through as an artist or creator inspired by it. For singer/songwriter and banjoist Ashley Campbell, the expectations must be even more intense, with a father as beloved and critically acclaimed as Glen Campbell and a godfather, Carl Jackson, who is a bluegrass, country, songwriting, pickin’ legend unto himself.

The beauty of “Carl & Ashley’s Breakdown,” the sole instrumental on Campbell’s forthcoming debut album, The Lonely One, is that it subverts all of these rules and expectations, all at once. For a tune described as a “breakdown,” the tempo lays back, letting the picking shine for its precision, rather than just speed and freneticism. Intermittently, when the rhythm is broken down for another jammy solo, we get the wordplay in the title. Whether she’s referencing licks directly from Earl Scruggs or melodic ideas that remind of Béla Fleck’s iconic albums Drive and The Bluegrass Sessions: Tales from the Acoustic Planet, the banjo is central here, purposefully driving the band forward. There are flavors of country & western, new acoustic instrumentals, Tony Trischka-esque melodic picking, and just a dash of wonky, gritty funk. On a record mostly populated by manicured, crisp, pop-influenced country songs, “Carl & Ashley’s Breakdown” is Campbell’s subtle nod to the fact that not only does she know bluegrass rules, she knows just how to break them.

Artist: Balsam Range with Atlanta Pops Orchestra Ensemble Hometown: Haywood County, NC Album: Mountain Overture Release Date: April 27, 2018 Label: Mountain Home Music Company

In Their Words: “It’s amazing to see what these songs, which were pretty good to start with, have become when the orchestra joined us. The interface between an orchestra and a bluegrass band has been seamless for us. It’s just a powerful sound!” — Tim Surrett

Having grown up between the mountains and the sea in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Caleb Caudle would have had a difficult time not developing a deep love and appreciation for the great outdoors. The singer/songwriter’s love of nature is evident in both his sound and his style. Caleb’s style is relaxed, rugged, and, on occasion, a little refined. At any given moment, he is appropriately dressed to ride off on a horse or, with the quick change of a jacket, ready for dinner at an upscale restaurant.

Three hundred years ago just about now — May 7, 1718, so legend has it — representatives of the riches-minded colonial French Mississippi Company decided that a malaria-infested swamp in the crescent bend near the base of the river for which it was named would make a great place for a port settlement. Nouvelle-Orléans they called it.

Thanks to them, over the course of the next couple of weekends, not too far from that original settlement, you can find a spot where, depending on how the breezes are blowing, you will be able to hear five, six, maybe seven kinds of music all at once. This is music representing cultures from all over the world — from Haiti, from Mali, from Cuba, from Brazil, from Nova Scotia, from the bayous and prairies just a few hours away, and from Congo Square on the edge of that former swamp. Music originated by escaped slaves, by French refugees booted out of Eastern Canada, by Irish dockworkers, by free people of color and landed aristocrats, by Baptist celebrants and Catholic congregants and European Jewish immigrants. Oh, and of the indigenous tribes who were there long before the Europeans. Blues, gospel, country, rock, salsa, merengue, Celtic, hip-hop, bounce, rara, R&B, Cajun, zydeco, klezmer, funk, brass bands’ Mardi Gras Indian chants, and real Indians’ pow-wow chants. And jazz, of course, both traditional and modern, just for a start.

And while you’re standing there, in that same spot, you can savor the irresistible aromas of cuisine from just as many traditions, all blended together in ways that have come to be associated with this place, which we now know as New Orleans … though that’s a different story … or a different part of the same story, perhaps.

Artist: A Valley Son Hometown: New York, NY Song: “Warm Mexican Beer” Release Date: April 24, 2018

When English isn’t the first language of a particular songwriter, the way they play with its intricacies can often breed work just as — if not more — exciting than someone born and raised in London or Los Angeles. There’s a poetic appreciation that comes from studying the words anew, and a kind of flexibility that results from mastering a fresh lexicon. They are falling in love with these words in a different light than those who have always taken them for granted and, when it’s done well, it can translate perfectly into the ear of the listener.

Outside of Detroit’s Motown Music, soul has generally tended to inhabit more southern locales. Yet in Bloomington, Indiana, on the campus of Indiana University, a group of music students discovered how their mutual passion for older grooves kindled fires in the snowiest of settings. Louisiana native Durand Jones moved north in 2012 to attend grad school at the Jacobs School of Music, where he eventually met guitarist Blake Rhein, who in turn introduced him to drummer Aaron Frazer. Their subsequent lazy Sunday hangs, which involved exchanging their favorite classic 45s and contemporary albums, quickly turned into fervid jam sessions. And, from there, Durand Jones and the Indications (with bassist Kyle Houpt and keyboardist Justin Hubler) found themselves transforming those influences into heat-soaked soul that evoked Otis Redding, at turns, and Charles Bradley, at others.

Where ‘60s soul combined gospel with R&B, the Indications gaze further and wider, integrating rock, punk, funk, and more. The result is a sound steeped in the fires that first formed soul with enough grit to hold steady alongside the rowdiest of rock bands. The slithering drum-and-bass line on “Make a Change” — the lead track off their self-titled debut album — buttresses Jones’s guttural cry, while the slow-tempo burn of “Is It Any Wonder?” allows him to show off a falsetto-whisper that calls to mind Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard. Jones’s voice, which has drawn comparison to the yearning cry of Lee Fields and the robust smoothness of Sam Cooke, ties the whole affair together, but it’s not a path he foresaw walking down. He intended to play his sax at IU. But finding a soul-infused groove with a group of like-minded musicians is the same as discovering heat in the snowy plains of the Midwest: Some kinds of magic just can’t be ignored.

What’s the best way to get a playlist of great banjo songs? Ask a great banjo player to make it for you … duh. We wanted. We asked. We got. Here, Ashley Campbell culls a dozen of her favorite banjo-based jams for us. Pick on!