I was beyond excited to see New Grass Revival get inducted into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame on Thursday night. I got to know the band through a cassette edition of the greatest hits album purchased at a truck stop for a trans-national drive in a friend’s pickup truck. Damn good highway music. I’d known about Sam Bush and Bela Fleck by then, but the NGR music only made me more fascinated in them. This sound drew me toward Nashville and the holistic story of modern string band music and bluegrass. They were hugely admired by musicians from coast to coast and plenty of fans, but they faced a 90s America distracted by a lot of lesser rock and roll, and NGR was a rock and roll band in certain ways. I’ve been wildly fortunate to spend a good bit of time with most of this band over the years, and I’m grateful for the interview time and the hangs. Although I never saw New Grass Revival play live, a great regret, they’ve influenced my taste and thinking as a band and as individual musicians in countless ways. I’m truly in awe of these guys. So as the Hall of Fame week approached, I got together, half virtually and half in person, with the four members of the second NGR for a set of interviews that covered the remarkable NGR story. I edited them down into an hour of radio released via The String, which you can find here at the full feature:
NEW GRASS REVIVAL GETS THE LAST CHAIR SNAP, LANDING IN THE BLUEGRASS HALL OF FAME
The tension in bluegrass music between the old and the new isn’t an unfortunate rift in an otherwise happy community. It’s essential to the music’s meaning, genius and place in history. Bill Monroe’s original bluegrass was a progressive take on traditional old-time fiddle music and a contemporary cousin of the bebop movement in jazz. Even genre-defining first-generation acts like Flatt & Scruggs began stretching with sound and repertoire in the 1960s. By 1970, bands like the Country Gentlemen, The Dillards and The Bluegrass Alliance were coloring outside Mr. Monroe’s lines, arranging pop and folk songs on bluegrass instruments, and starting to jam like jazz players.
The Bluegrass Alliance was a band of scruffy Kentucky youngsters – Sam Bush, Ebo Walker, Courtney Johnson, Curtis Burch and Lonnie Peerce. And for reasons of personal and musical chemistry, or lack thereof, the band moved to let Peerce, the fiddler, go. That’s where the New Grass Revival story starts. READ MORE