Nashville Bluegrass Band - Twenty Year Blues (CD, 2004)

by Jerome Clark, 08/10/2004

Twenty years on, the Nashville Bluegrass Band gives us the gift of this extraordinary recording - a richly rewarding collection of splendid songs and superior performances, the kind of album that even on first acquaintance feels as welcome as an old friend. The NBB captures the soul of bluegrass with a sound that seems at once traditional and eternal. This is music that could be dropped into any era and yet move any and all who hear it.

To start with, it's the material: sturdy, unflashy but built-to-last songs of the sort that as a musician you have to care enough to seek out. You didn't sit there complacently waiting for them to come to you, and you certainly don't hear them on everybody else's recordings. For example, there is the soul-stirring African-American spiritual "Hush (Somebody's Callin' My Name)," out of the song family that produced the more familiar "You're Gonna Need Somebody on Your Bond." There's "There's a Better Way," an affecting gospel ballad co-written by Niall Toner, known in his own country as the "father of Irish bluegrass." It has the sort of eerie resonance of "Ghost Riders in the Sky," though without sounding much like it.

Bill Dale's "The Luckiest Man Alive" is a strikingly unordinary treatment of its subject, the postwar life of a World War II veteran. If you have imagination enough and your knowledge of country music extends that far back, you might even conceive of it as a sequel to Ernest Tubb's classic "Rainbow at Midnight." Or maybe as a hopeful counterpart to Paul Siebel's bleak late-1960s song "Bride 1945." Whatever it is, it is one hell of a good tune, and it stands out even amid some pretty stiff competition here.

The NBB has an obvious taste for folk music in the old-fashioned sense. Mandolinist Mike Compton's "Pretty Red Lips" is a reworking of a traditional Southern song. "Sitting on Top of the World," the one standard NBB tackles, is from the early and influential black string band Mississippi Sheiks (incidentally a favorite of Bob Dylan's). Though credited to Jimmie Rodgers and Shelly Lee Alley, "Gambling Barroom Blues" is an old folk ballad from the British Isles. In its original form a darkly comic lament concerning a rake's death from syphilis, in America it spawned quite different versions in white and black traditions, "Streets of Laredo" and "Tom Sherman's Barroom" (and more) in the former, "St. James Infirmary" and "Let Her Go, God Bless Her" (and more) in the latter. In common with many songs he recorded, "Gambling" came to Rodgers's attention, directly or indirectly, from the repertoire of black songsters.

Though not in fact an antique song, the John Hartford/Bill Monroe composition "Old Riverman" could easily pass for one. Too bad those two geniuses didn't do more writing together. "Tell Me Your Love Is Still True," of uncertain origin, harks back to 19th-Century heart songs, but NBB sets it to a gently, irresistibly swinging arrangement.

Yeah, these guys - meaning Compton, banjoist Alan O'Bryant, guitarist Pat Enright (who shares lead-vocal duties with Compton), fiddler Stuart Duncan, and bassist Dennis Crouch - are good. They can sing, they can play, and they grab up outstanding material when they find it. And sometimes, as on the Monroe instrumental "Crossing the Cumberland," they come scarily close to transporting you to another world. Who wouldn't want 20 more years of this?

Songlist:
1. Garfield's Blackberry Blossom
2. Travelin' Railroad Man Blues
3. That's All Right
4. Old Riverman
5. Pretty Red Lips
6. Sitting On Top Of The World
7. Luckiest Man Alive
8. Hush (Somebody's Callin' My Name)
9. Gamling Barroom Blues
10. There's a Better Way
11. Rockin Chair Money
12. Crossing The Cumberland
13. Tell Me Your Love Is Still True