String Bands: Bluegrass and Beyond
A Curmudgeon Column
Photo by J. Strausser, courtesy of IVPR
DelFest, the annual event hosted by Del McCoury, is often described as a bluegrass festival, even though only a minority of the acts are traditional bluegrass bands. Many a casual observer assumes that any band dominated by banjo, fiddle, acoustic guitar, acoustic bass, dobro, mandolin and/or fiddle is a bluegrass act. But these instruments were wielded effectively before Bill Monroe invented bluegrass, and they’ve been used skillfully in many styles since his death in 1996.
It would be more accurate to describe DelFest as a string-band festival, one that, this year, included not only hard-core bluegrass act such as the Junior Sisk Band but also jam-bands such as Trampled by Turtles, honky-tonk singers such as Sierra Ferrell, old-time acts such as Price Sisters and folkie singer-songwriters such as Peter Rowan. The term “string-band” provides a larger umbrella that all of these acts can fit under—and a number of recent records demonstrate the diverse uses these wooden, stringed instruments can be put to.
One of the highlights of this year’s DelFest was the group led by Jason Carter, the much awarded fiddler in the Del McCoury Band. But this year, his second solo album, Lowdown Hoedown, revealed that Carter is also an impressive singer—as good a baritone as his bandmate Ronnie McCoury is a tenor. It’s not just that Carter can hit the notes; he knows how to tell a story, especially when a song is as evocative as John Hartford’s “The Six O Clock Train and a Girl with Green Eyes” or Shawn Camp’s “The Queen of the Nashville Night.”
The album emphasizes the old-school country roots of Carter’s vocals by welcoming such guest singers as Vince Gill and Dierks Bentley, both longtime collaborators of Carter at Nashville’s Station Inn. The fiddler holds his own in such company and thrived on the DelFest stage with no famous guests, just two of his bandmates in the Travelin’ McCourys (Cody Kilbey and Alan Bartram) and two members of the East Nash Grass (Gaven Largent and Cory Walker). The results are so impressive that Carter should treat this venture as more than an occasional side project. He proves that these acoustic instruments can be more than nostalgic or virtuosic; they can draw you into characters as timeless as the mountains.
The Infamous Stringdusters are a post-modern bluegrass quintet. They have almost the same instrumental line-up as Flatt & Scruggs (dobro, guitar, bass, fiddle and banjo but not mandolin), yet the Stringdusters were co-founded by three students at Boston’s Berklee College of Music who love the Grateful Dead as much as Bill Monroe. The Stringdusters nod to their roots and prove their bona fides on a new EP, A Tribute to Flatt & Scruggs. These versions are well executed but don’t add much to the brilliant originals.
All six songs clock in at less than four minutes. When the group played “I’d Rather Be Alone” and “Down the Road” from the EP at DelFest, however, the arrangements began faithfully but soon stretched out well past the six-minute mark, incorporating Dead-inspired improvisation. That approach of bridging past and present was much more revealing and would have made for a more satisfying recording than this one.
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