The Blue in Bluegrass
Nashville Bluegrass Band plumb the bluesy side of Bill Monroe's vaunted hybrid
by Jon Weisberger
Nashville Bluegrass Band
Twenty Year Blues (Sugar Hill)
Though it bears the name of the city that gave birth to the music more than 60 years ago, the Nashville Bluegrass Band have never hewn to the path of bluegrass orthodoxy. Yet oddly, with the passage of time—their new CD, Twenty Year Blues, is titled to commemorate the group's longevity—it becomes clearer that, while they may largely sidestep what's called "traditional bluegrass," the NBB tap into currents present at the music's origin that might well otherwise be lost.
The album stakes the group's ongoing claim to this lively preservationism after a long absence from the studio. In the NBB discography, it's preceded by 1998's American Beauty, and for their fans, it's been a long six years. Never known for profligate touring—an endless string of Music Row session calls for master fiddler Stuart Duncan has been in itself sufficient to account for that, though there have been other reasons, too—the band seemed to be fading from sight at the turn of the new century.
Two near-simultaneous and connected events seem to have turned the tide, though. About the time mandolinist Roland White and bassist Gene Libbea departed the band, singer-guitarist Pat Enright and Stuart Duncan landed musical roles as Soggy Bottom Boys—the fictional group responsible for the O Brother, Where Art Thou? signature tune "I'm a Man of Constant Sorrow"—and so did former NBB mandolin player Mike Compton. By the time the O Brother-related "Down From the Mountain" tour got under way a year or so later, with the NBB along for the ride, Compton was back in the group, while bassist Dennis Crouch was drafted to fill the bass chair.
Compton has a high profile on the new CD, and his contributions notably enhance one of the band's greatest strengths: its uniquely precise take on the blues. Where others tend to focus on the dark, moody side of blues playing and singing, the NBB reach back to the pre-bluegrass days of white blues singers like Jimmie Rodgers, who favored using a standard major third in their melodies rather than the "blue" thirds that lie somewhere between the major and minor. Enright has long made this particular melodic terrain his home, employing variations between the major, minor and blue thirds to give each song a distinct feeling, as he does here on the jaunty "Travelin' Railroad Man Blues."
Compton has the same facility, not only as a singer, but as an instrumental soloist. When he and Enright duet on Autry Inman's blues waltz, "That's All Right," or when he solos on a version of "Sitting on Top of the World" that restores the song's original angularity, the tunes and harmonies slip and slide in a way that's at once fresh and nostalgic.
Twenty Year Blues shows off plenty more besides the NBB's slant on the blues. There's an old-time, pre-World War II edge to Duncan's fiddling, for instance, that will surprise anyone familiar only with his elegantly smooth, understated country playing. There's Alan O'Bryant's mournful singing on "There's a Better Way," a song for which the term "gospel" conceals far more than it reveals, as well as the group's emblematic take on African American gospel, "Hush (Somebody's Callin' My Name)."
Ultimately, though, it's the first of these elements that stands out most starkly in the NBB's music. Many pay lip service to the ties that bind Bill Monroe's music to the blues, but few explore their exact nature—and no one does it better than the Nashville Bluegrass Band.
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