A few weeks ago, Alan Jackson stepped onto the stage of the famous "Station Inn" in Nashville for a live broadcast to debut the music from his new all-bluegrass album. I could not be there in person, but it was broadcast live on WSM, the famous Nashville station that also broadcasts the WSM Grand Ole Opry. I listened on their internet stream (www.wsmonline.com), and it was a treat. They played all of the songs from the album live, in an intimate, small-venue setting, and the audience loved it. The best part was that he was not pretentious about it. He had extraordinary musicians, but did it in his own vocal style.
The new album comes out today ("The Bluegrass Album"), and WSM is re-playing the live show tonight at 9:30 Central Time (10:30 Eastern). I highly recommend it, and I know I recommend the album. They have been playing cuts from it all day. I especially like "Ain't Got Trouble Now," a song about feeling like, for now, you don't have trouble (because you broke up!). It's fun. If you like bluegrass, or traditional acoustic country, check it out.
The Wall Street Journal had a good article today about Alan Jackson's foray into bluegrass:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100...0081491000.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_Lifestyle_5
The new album comes out today ("The Bluegrass Album"), and WSM is re-playing the live show tonight at 9:30 Central Time (10:30 Eastern). I highly recommend it, and I know I recommend the album. They have been playing cuts from it all day. I especially like "Ain't Got Trouble Now," a song about feeling like, for now, you don't have trouble (because you broke up!). It's fun. If you like bluegrass, or traditional acoustic country, check it out.
The Wall Street Journal had a good article today about Alan Jackson's foray into bluegrass:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100...0081491000.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_Lifestyle_5
Bluegrass, the Old Way
by BARRY MAZOR
Since his 1989 recording debut, Alan Jackson has been among the most honored and respected of modern country performers. One reason for the enduring acclaim: his success as a singer-songwriter in maintaining musical connections with classic country sounds, concerns and history through a drastically changing era. As country stars of the 1950s and '60s did, he has produced change-up theme albums from time to time that have saluted classic country songs ("Under the Influence") or hymns learned in his childhood ("Precious Memories"). With "The Bluegrass Album," due out Tuesday, he's now adding his take on a genre he's long loved but not recorded. It was certainly easier for a country star to turn to such pet projects back when Mr. Jackson's friend and idol George Jones was hitting his stride than it is today, as Mr. Jackson discussed in a recent phone interview:
Zina Saunders
Alan Jackson
"For years now it's been 'Oh, you've got to have an album every two years,' and you never can do anything different, because everybody's worried about the next album and the next single. So I've always had to force these things. With this one, I didn't tell a soul I was doing it; I didn't even tell the record label," referring to EMI, under Mr. Jackson's own Alan's Country Records/ACR imprint. "I just paid for it myself, and went in and did it, and told my manager, 'When we go out to look for songs, don't even tell them exactly what we're looking for.' When we booked musicians, I said, 'Tell those guys not to be talking about it.' I just wanted to do this because I had a feeling it was going to come off."
He'd had the idea in mind, he reports, for at least 18 years, but events kept getting in the way: "Whenever I got in a position where I could start it, some other country act would make a bluegrass album, or that movie 'O, Brother' came out. So I thought it would look like I was jumping on a bluegrass bandwagon. I finally got Alison Krauss to help me make an album, but she'd done so much bluegrass she wanted to do something more mellow—a cool album ["Like Red on a Rose," 2006], but definitely not bluegrass. Looking back, I just think it was supposed to be that way."
Mr. Jackson, 55 next month, found his attention to bluegrass renewed when he and his wife, Denise, purchased a retreat in the Georgia Blue Ridge Mountains two years ago. "A lot of the visuals there helped inspire new songs like 'Appalachian Mountain Girl' and 'Blue Ridge Mountain Song,'" he notes. But his taste for bluegrass, as it was for many not raised on it, began with the music's broad exposure on 1960s television, such as the Dillards' regular appearances on "The Andy Griffith Show." His version of their "There Is a Time" finds a place on the new album, as does Bill Monroe's "Blue Moon of Kentucky" and a fresh bluegrass turn on "Wild and Blue," the John Scott Sherrill song best known as a 1982 country hit for John Anderson. There was no great gap between mainstream country and bluegrass when the genre's originators, including Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs and Jimmy Martin first came along, nor was there one, Mr. Jackson stresses, for 1980s "New Traditionalist" country stars such as Ricky Skaggs, who directly preceded him on the charts and influenced him.
"Bluegrass is not that different from the kind of country music I've always loved," he says. "Country music that's about the songs, the real singers, the melodies, harmonies and the picking. And that's what bluegrass really is—only more so."
Scott Coney, the acoustic guitar player in Mr. Jackson's country band, was experienced in bluegrass and rounded up an extraordinary set of seasoned, award-winning bluegrass players for the sessions, including Sammy Shelor on banjo, Rob Ickes on dobro, Adam Steffey on mandolin and Tim Crouch on fiddle, plus two of the genre's prized lead singers, Don Rigsby and Ronnie Bowman, as back-up voices. The entire 14-track album was cut in just two days, with Mr. Jackson's talented singer-songwriter nephew Adam Wright and Keith Stegall producing, and was mainly recorded the very old-fashioned way—live.
Surprisingly, given the constant interaction in the bluegrass community, the celebrated players on the record had for the most part never recorded together, and in some cases ever played together. As Mr. Ickes noted, in a separate interview: "I've known Sammy Shelor forever, but we've never really worked together on a project; we may have overdubbed onto some of the same records, and the same with Tim Crouch, who sat right next to me. It was a unique combo, and it was real simple production, with all of the pickers in one room. They've captured that live feeling with this record; it was wam-bam—but in a good way."
The genre maintains its historic down-home image, but today's top-tier bluegrass production is generally as sophisticated and deliberate as mainstream country's, so the live in-one-lone-room set-up was a refreshing change of pace for the gathered pickers, too. "Alan wanted to do it like that," Mr. Ickes noted. "The funny thing is, in contemporary bluegrass—unfortunately—it's not the way we usually work either, though I didn't want to tell him that."
The musicians joined Mr. Jackson for a crowd-thrilling live premiere of "The Bluegrass Album" at Nashville's storied home base for bluegrass, The Station Inn, in late August; they will all play it live again at Carnegie Hall on Oct. 28, with future appearances at bluegrass festivals likely.
One thing Mr. Jackson didn't do—entirely to the benefit of one of this year's strongest country albums of any sort—is attempt to swerve his singing toward "high and lonesome" for the genre's sake. "And kudos to him for that," Mr. Ickes says. "We just did what we do, and he did what he does, but he picked the right songs for it." Mr. Jackson adds: "Honestly, I just don't really think I'm a great bluegrass singer; my voice is suited for the kind of country I make, and it wouldn't have sounded natural if I'd tried to do that. This album is a tribute, to show my appreciation for their music, as best I could, in a way I feel comfortable with."
Mr. Mazor, based in Nashville, writes about country and roots music for the Journal.