One of the highlights of last September’s festival, the Bristol Rhythm & Roots Reunion, was the bluegrass band Missy Raines & Allegheny. The quintet opened with the classic Ola Belle Reed composition, “I’ve Endured.” Even as Raines was belting out the lyrics, “Now, I’ve worked for the rich; I’ve lived with the poor. I’ve seen many a heartache; there’ll be many a more,” she was steering the ship with her muscular thumping on the stand-up bass.
Raines—61 then, 62 now—has endured a long career of ups and downs to see an era when women are flourishing in string-band music like never before. Alison Krauss, Molly Tuttle and Rhiannon Giddens have graduated into something neighboring pop stardom, but even within the tight-knit, tradition-bound world of bluegrass festivals, women are grabbing more and more of the spotlight. And it’s not just singers such as Dale Ann Bradley, Rhonda Vincent and Brooke Aldridge; it’s also instrumentalists such as Alison Brown, Kristin Scott Benson and Deanie Richardson.
Missy Raines, who has been voted the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Bass Player of the Year 10 different times, wore a bright-red pantsuit as she paid tribute to such trailblazers as Sara and Maybelle Carter and Hazel Dickens by singing their songs. But Raines also previewed such recently penned songs as “Listen to the Lonesome Wind,” “Fast Moving Train” and “Ghost of a Love” from her forthcoming album.
That record, Highlander, is out now, and it marks a return to bluegrass basics after more adventurous fare such as 2018’s Royal Traveller. And it’s the locomotive rhythms stoked by Missy Raines’ bass that makes this traditional material work so well, even when dressing up a recent Loretta Lynn composition, “These Ole Blues,” in bluegrass clothing. The record climaxes with a sobering Raines composition, “Are Your Ready To Say Goodbye,” about the recent deaths of two siblings.
About two-thirds of the way through her Bristol set, Raines was joined by Alison Brown, the co-owner of Compass Records and the producer of Raines’ two latest albums. “As a young girl who grew up loving bluegrass,” Brown told Raines on stage, “it’s an honor to be playing with you.” Brown played the tasty banjo break on “Looking to You,” a Raines love song from the new record. Just last year Brown released On Banjo, an impressive, all-instrumental album of her own.
For Royal Traveller, Missy Raines assembled what she called “The First Ladies of Bluegrass”: the first females to win an IBMA Award for Best of the Year on their respective instruments. She was joined by Brown, guitarist Tuttle, mandolinist Sierra Hull and fiddler Becky Buller. Since then, both Bronwyn Keith-Hynes and Deanie Richardson have won the fiddle award. Richardson and banjoist Gena Britt were co-founding members of the all-female bluegrass quintet, Sister Sadie, in 2016. The original lead singers, Dale Ann Bradley and Tina Adair, are gone now, but the reconstituted fivesome has released its third album, No Fear, and the picking is stronger than ever, even if the vocal firepower is diminished.
Buller and Adair each contribute a song, but Dani Flowers emerges as the key singer-songwriter, lending a mellow mezzo to nicely understated songs of heartbreak and longing. The wild card is country star Ashley McBryde who wrote the album opener “Willow” and who sings a duet with Britt on “Ode to the Ozarks.” She reminds us that the gap between bluegrass and mainstream country is not as wide as country radio would like us to believe.
Kristin Scott Benson is the non-singing banjo virtuoso in the Grascals, and her husband Wayne Benson is the mandolinist and harmony singer in IIIrd Tyme Out. Both are terrific pickers, but neither is a legitimate lead vocalist. That limits the impact of Pick Your Poison, their first album as the duo Benson. But the presence of the Traveling McCourys’ guitarist Cody Kilby reinforces the high level of musicianship, especially on the Beatles’ “I’ll Follow the Sun,” Becky Buller’s “What Kind of Fool Are You?” and Gib Guilbeau’s “Red Mountain Wine.”
Guilbeau was a Cajun musician before he joined the Flying Burrito Brothers, and those Louisiana roots illustrate the under-acknowledged ties that Cajun string bands have to bluegrass in particular—and Americana in general. Ann Savoy’s new album, Another Heart reinforces those links. Savoy, matriarch of the Savoy Family Band (featuring her husband Marc and their sons Wilson and Joel), produced and performed on the influential 2002 album, Evangeline Made: A Tribute to Cajun Music. That project featured the likes of Linda Ronstadt, John Fogerty, Richard Thompson and Nick Lowe singing Cajun standards backed by Cajun musicians.
Another Heart is the mirror image of Evangeline. This time it’s Cajun musicians playing non-Cajun songs such as Thompson’s “The Heart Needs a Home,” Joni Mitchell’s “Tin Angel,” the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Stolen Car.” Ann Savoy handles all the lead vocals with aplomb, and producer Dirk Powell (former member of the Balfa Toujours Cajun band) douses the back tracks in Louisiana swamp water. Ann’s three original compositions hold their own in this heady company.