Category Archives: Instrumental

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“Old Sock” by Eric Clapton & “Electric” by Richard Thompson

Eric Clapton
Old Sock
Surfdog Records
1 star (out of 5)

Richard Thompson
Electric
New West Records
5 stars (out of 5)

By Aaron Keith Harris

Eric Clapton’s place as the godfather of rock guitarists is undisputed—of course because of his brilliant early work, but also because he seems like a nice guy who has outlived greater talents like Hendrix and Duane Allman—but as a solo artist his work has been erratic, reaching a new low with the fittingly—and frighteningly—named Old Sock. All of the adjectives it brings to mind apply to this 12-track, 53-minute set that nearly put me to sleep on a recent road trip.

There are only two new songs here—more about them later—and the remaining 10 are don’t seem to have been chosen for any other reason that the minimal effort they required. A folksy “Goodnight, Irene” and a syrupy “Born to Lose” (from Ray Charles’ country and western phase) would be bad enough, but tossing in three chestnuts from the so-called Great American Songbook in as well, all with shimmering strings and Roy Conniff-style backing vocals, is just painful, surpassing even the dreck that Rod Stewart has been shoveling for the last decade or so.

“Further on Down the Road” (Jesse Davis/Taj Mahal), “Till Your Well Runs Dry” (Peter Tosh), and “Your One and Only Man” (Otis Redding) sound like faux-reggae rejects from the 461 Ocean Boulevard sessions, while the late British blue guitarist Gary Moore’s “Still Got the Blues” is most assuredly devoid of any trace of the purported blues. A soft arrangement, a lazy vocal, and a brief guitar solo that could have been pieced together from three or four other solos from different songs just doesn’t cut it.

Neither of the new songs did Clapton write. “Gotta Get Over” almost comes to life, but not quite. It’s a decent song, with a decent vocal and lots of those familiar guitar fills that Clapton does better than anyone, but which have been done to death. The other original is “Every Little Thing,” which may have already wrapped up the award for worst track of 2013. Not only is it another of the faux-reggae lot, complete with a faux-Marley title, but its chorus halfway in assaults the listener with the worst sound that can be captured by a recording engineer: a children’s chorus. After this debacle, I’d be surprised if we ever got a good new track out of Clapton again.

However, the constant stream of great work from Richard Thompson continues. Electric was recorded in Nashville with Buddy Miller producing, with Thompson including, for the most part, just Taras Prodaniuk on bass, Michael Jerome on drums, and, occasionally, Siobhan Maher Kennedy on backing vocal. Without anything to hide behind, Thompson’s strengths as a singer, songwriter, and guitarist—both electric and acoustic—continue to amaze.

“Stony Ground,” “Sally B,” and especially “Stuck on the Treadmill” have the thump and heft of the sort of rock songs that aren’t getting made much these days: a cranky guy belting out pointed lyrics and driving the point home with guitar solos that sound like the gleam on a shiny new barbed-wire fence you glimpse as you’re about to hit it face-first after being thrown over the handlebars.

“Salford Sunday” and “Where’s Home?” have the folk tinge that Thompson’s work has had since his days with Fairport Convention, the latter featuring the incomparable Stuart Duncan on fiddle and some of the Buddy Miller sound that one might have expected on the rest of the disc. (I also wanted a Thompson/Miller guitar duel, but I guess Buddy knew better). “Straight and Narrow” is another rocker that Thompson does well—a grungy look at an unattainable, frustrating vamp—but I’ve never cared for the Farfisa organ sound.

Another Nashville luminary—Alison Krauss—lends her translucent voice to “The Snow Goose.” Though it’s only for a couple of slight passages, the two voices together are as as gorgeous as a summer sunset sliding through the clouds.

Thompson has always been able to write about the bitter and the sweet of mature relationships as well as anyone, and “Another Small Thing in Her Favour” and “Saving the Good Stuff for You” are two more that resonate more deeply than anything new I’ve heard lately.

“My Enemy” and “Good Things Happen to Bad People” are aptly situated near the middle of Electric, and they amount to 11 devastating minutes of haunting melody, harrowing guitar work, and a vocal/lyric meditation on self-hatred and contempt for the world that holds everyone to account. The effect is not quite cathartic, leaving the listener to deal with the scab that’s just been scraped off.

Electric is my frontrunner for this year’s best album, and it’s going to take something remarkable to change that.

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“Born Bad” by the Tina Adair Band

Tina Adair Band
Born Bad
TAB Music
4 stars (out of 5)

By Larry Stephens

If you’ve been around bluegrass awhile you may remember Tina Adair. She is a multi-instrumentalist and an excellent singer. Her first release, Just You Wait & See, was released in 1997 and climbed to the top ten in the charts. She released another album in 2000 but then disappeared from the national bluegrass scene.

But she’s back, joined by husband Tim Dishman (Special Consensus) playing guitar and singing harmony (plus bass on the CD), Sim Daley, hailing from the bluegrass mecca of Cornwall, England (but now in Nashville) on banjo, and Forrest Goodman playing bass (in the band but not on the CD). She wrote six of the songs on the CD and proves to be an adept songwriter.

She touches country music with a duet with Billy Dean, “Tomorrow & For Always,” featuring some fine Dobro work by Randy Kohrs. This is a love song with a modern country music sound. “Don’t Grieve” is a love song, too, but with a different twist: one of them has gone on to Heaven and this is a message back to the one left behind. Written by Adair, it will tug at your heartstrings.

She doesn’t forget bluegrass’s gospel roots. Included is the old hymn, “Farther Along,” sung as a choir and with a piano. It has a nice touch but the choir sounds like they’re singing in a coliseum and you’re at the wrong end. I wish they had mixed that one differently. “Go And Tell Jesus” is done at a fast pace, driven by the banjo and bass with a good guitar break, a contrast to the Primitive Quartet’s earlier recording. She also does a nice touch with a gospel quartet favorite, “Just a Little Talk With Jesus.”

“Snaker Dan” was composed by banjoist Daley and lets the band show off their instrumental chops. Bluegrass is chock full of great instrumentalists and the members of this band don’t need to take a backseat to any of them.

The title song starts out with a biblical reference but it’s more about the child who was told she was born bad. Another Adair composition, this should be a big hit for her. Good lyrics, good arrangement; this is a track you’ll play over and over.

From a bluegrass rocker like “Now Forever’s Gone” to “Heart I Had To Break,” a slow song that pulls the emotions from your heart, she shows here she can do it all. It’s a shame she’s been gone for so long. Let’s hope she’s back on the scene for a long time.

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“Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard: Hard Time, Good Time & End Time Music: 1923-1936″ by Various Artists

Various Artists
Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard: Hard Time, Good Time & End Time Music: 1923-1936
Tompkins Square Records
5 stars (out of 5)

By Aaron Keith Harris

The story behind Work Hard is as wonderfully odd as the music this three-disc set contains. Some guys were cleaning out the house of a recently dead hoarder—Don Wahle of Louisville, Kentucky—and they knew enough to know that the boxes and boxes of 78 RPM records might be of interest to someone.

The Tompkins Square label culled much of its 42-track survey of hilbilly records from 1923 to 1936—including 19 cuts previously unissued in any format but 78—from Wahle’s collection, and the result is captivating.

I’ve always loved recordings from this era, because you can hear the performers (and those running the primitive recording equipment) trying to figure out exactly what it is they are doing. They’re not playing a barn dance with whiskey and dancing, they’re not playing in a church at the back of a holler, and they’re not playing in their parlor with family and friends gathered close. Most of them have never owned a record player. The closest they could have come to mass entertainment was a big fiddle contest, or the various radio shows that were beginning to fill the air and help songs and styles to spread quickly.

But one imagines the musicians recorded here shifting their feet, asking where they should stand and look, and holding back a little, not quite able to cut loose as in their native element. The picking is a little tentative at times too, but the effect is deeply satisfying. The rules of American popular music—country, pop, gospel, and even bluegrass, blues, and jazz—have long been codified 80 or 90 years after these sides were cut, and when we hear Earl McCoy’s staccato steel guitar on “John Henry the Steel Drivin’ Man” with that one unexpected note in his riff, Jimmie Tarlton and Tom Darby’s quavering, yodeling harmonies on “All Bound Down in Texas,” or the Happy Four’s shape-note arrangement with harmonica fills on “Climbing the Golden Stairs,” we can’t help but touch parts of our musical and cultural imagination stored way in the back of our amygdala.

The Work Hard songs on Disc One deal with imagery far removed from most of us—Fiddlin John Carson’s “The Farmer is the Man Who Feeds Them All,” Oscar Ford’s “The Farmer’s Dream,” Red Gay & Jack Wellman’s “Flat Wheel Train Blues, Pts. 1 & 2,” Pierre La Dieu’s “Driving Saw Logs on the Plover”—while talking about ideas we still confront: class division in “Poor Man, Rich Man (Cotton Mill Colic No. 2)” by David McCarn, consumer cynicism in “I’ve Got the Chain Store Blues” by the Allen Brothers, and the injustice of prohibition (alcohol then, certain drugs now) in “When the Roses Bloom Again for the Bootlegger” by Earl Johnson.

The Pray Hard cuts on Disc Three often address issues that came up when country boys went to the city, or city culture came to the country. The listener may not be entirely convinced to go dry by Gid Tanner’s “You’ve Got to Stop Drinking Shine,” but the scolding of the Georgia Yellow Hammers on “I’m S-A-V-E-D” will surely get him to takea firm position one way or the other. “The Gambler’s Dying Words” from Sid Harkreader & Grady Moore sports a melody quite similar to “Roving Gambler” to draw listeners close to hear their warining, reminding me of the chart my church youth pastor put up that pointed the impressionable to soundalike versions of dangerously secular bands.

The Kentucky Holiness Singers live up to their name with “I’m On My Way,” a tune with a proto-bluegrass mandolin break punctuated by a little shouting, and the Dixon Brothers turn in a lovely, pious performance on “Easter Day.”

The most fun here is of course on the 14 Play Hard tracks of Disc Two. Gid Tanner’s “Work Don’t Bother Me” captures the relish that those who worked so hard must have took to the weekend opportunity to tie one on and forget everything for a couple of days. The unnamed members of the improbably named North Carolina Hawaiians turn in a nifty “Solider’s Joy,” the dance number picked on ukulele, guitar, and steel guitar (picked Hawaiian style with some slides reaching into Duane Allman bird-chirping territory), the Carolina Ramblers rave their way through “Barnyard Frolic,” and the Hack String Band’s “Too Tight Rag” is the soundtrack to a cartoon short that hasn’t been made yet, with fiddle, mandolin, tenor banjo, and jazzhorn taking turns on lead licks.

I hadn’t heard of several of the acts on this set before, much less most of the songs, and this set can be enjoyed equally by old-time aficionados and new initiates into these strange and old sounds: you’ll get some of the more typical sounds from this style and era in songs you haven’t heard to death, and some real gems, patterns of sound you’ve never imagined, like the Taylor-Griggs Louisiana Melody Makers’ “When the Moon Drips into the Blood,” and Whit Gaydon’s “Tennessee Coon Hunt.”

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“Bluegrass Bluesman: A Memoir” by Josh Graves, edited by Fred Bartenstein

Bluegrass Bluesman: A Memoir
Josh Graves (Edited by Fred Bartenstein)
University of Illinois Press
5 stars (out of 5)

By Aaron Keith Harris

If you made a Mt. Rushmore for bluegrass music instrumentalists, there would have to be six faces—not five as Bill Monroe originally intended—and that sixth face would have to be the smiling visage of Josh Graves. Burkett Howard Graves, known professionally as “Buck” or “Uncle Josh,” was born in Tellico Plains, Tennessee (Monroe County, oddly enough) in 1927 and popularized the use of the Dobro, or resonator guitar, in bluegrass music.

Others, including yodeler Cliff Carlisle and his Hawaiian steel guitar and Bashful Brother Oswald, who played Dobro with Roy Acuff, had made the slide guitar sound part of country music, but when Monroe’s new brand of music called bluegrass branched off just after World War II, the Kentucky bandleader brought with him only guitar, upright bass, fiddle, and his own rapid-fire mandolin. Joined with Earl Scruggs three-finger banjo style, the new style became a separate and distinct form of country music.

In a series of recorded interviews that Fred Bartenstein has shaped into Bluegrass Bluesman: A Memoir, Josh Graves tells us how his Dobro playing was able to cut in and become a partner in what quickly became a highly stylized dance. First with Mac Wiseman and, starting in 1955 with Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs’ Foggy Mountain Boys, Graves’ tone-rich, loud Dobro sound—the right hand influenced by Scruggs’ picking style, the left hand by Lightnin’ Hopkins and other black blues players—cut through the other noise to become an accepted part of a music played by hard-headed men whose main innovation was to tweak and then codify tradition.

At 176 pages (including a foreword from Neil Rosenberg, an introduction from Fred Bartenstein, and 16 pages containing 41 great black and white photographs) Bluegrass Bluesman is a slim volume, but that’s one of its virtues. The effect is that of spending a a day on the bus with a genial host who has lots of great stories not only about himself, but of many of the founders of one of America’s unique contributions to world music. Some of portraits are less-then-flattering, but there’s nothing vindictive or gratuitous, just the confirmation that our musical heroes are people too, and that their foibles and faults sometimes had important effects on the music just as their incredible talents did.

About 20 pages are dedicated to short tributes and remembrances from well-known colleagues, friends, and acolytes, and there’s a short appendix from Bobby Wolfe about Graves’ best-known guitars that will be of great interest to many.
Bluegrass Bluesman belongs with Can’t You Hear Me Callin’: The Life of Bill Monroe, Traveling the High Way Home: Ralph Stanley and the World of Traditional Bluegrass Music, and Still Inside: The Tony Rice Story as essential portraits of musicians essential to the history of bluegrass music.

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“Last Train from Poor Valley” by Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett
Last Train from Poor Valley
Lonesome Day Records
4.5 stars (out of 5)

By Donald Teplyske

Danny Barnes. Wayne Taylor. Richard Bennett.

Three performers with little connecting them beyond there being another professional musician with the same name making music.

Namefellowship aside, this Richard Bennett is the bluegrass guitarist, not the Mark Knopfler (and Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Cherry Bomb, and Neil Diamond, etc.) sideman. Well-established for more than three decades in the bluegrass big leagues, Bennett has worked with J.D. Crowe in the New South, Lou Reid in Carolina, and as a sideman for many artists. He has previously recorded solo albums for Rebel Records, one of which—A Long Lonesome Time—is in this writer’s opinion, one of the finest albums heard from the late ‘90s.

A dozen years ago, in my first review for Bluegrass Now magazine, I wrote about the Auldridge, Bennett, and Gaudreau album Blue Lonesome Wind, and within that piece stated that “the pearl which glistens most true [ouch, that hurts! And how did it ever pass by the editor?] is Richard Bennett’s home spun vocals, which, at times, are vaguely reminiscent of Gordon Lightfoot…without a splash of false showmanship.” In the years since, nothing has changed: Bennett’s voice remains pure and strong, woven through years of singing folk-influenced bluegrass music.

Featuring an instrumental and vocal cohort of bluegrass veterans—Rickie Simpkins (fiddle), Crowe (5-string), Ron Stewart (fiddle, banjo, mandolin), Harold Nixon and Joe Sharpe (bass), Shayne Bartley (mandolin), and even bluegrass Danny Barnes (mandolin)—Bennett has created an album that lacks the bluegrass bite some of us find most attractive, yet is thoroughly enjoyable as a cracking collection of largely country and folk to MOR standards given gentle acoustic folk-laden, bluegrass treatments.

Several songs standout amongst this set. “The Ballad of Jesse James,” a song written by Barry Metcalf I’ve not previously encountered, features exceptionally clean guitar lines from Bennett. Bennett’s original “Roan Mountain Rag,” resurrected from 1997′s Walking Down the Line, is given a slightly extended treatment herein. Lightfoot’s 1972 classic “Don Quixote” features some lovely fiddle flourishes as Bennett gives the song a “just right” vocal treatment.

The moments that most strongly bluegrass are contained in numbers including the country standard “Wrong Road Again,” the traditional “Handsome Molly,” and Merle Haggard’s “Working Man Blues.”

The album proper closes with Bennett performing “Tennessee Waltz,” and reminds one of why his name is so often mentioned alongside Tony Rice’s. The “one-take” bonus track “Leavin’s Heavy On My Mind” stands up to everything contained on the album.

I’m not sure I needed to hear new renditions of “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes” and “Georgia On My Mind,” but other listeners—and obviously Bennett—may feel differently. Another oft-recorded chestnut, John Hartford’s “Gentle On My Mind” is always a pleasure to hear, and this interpretation is simply stunning; again, Bennett’s voice and guitar sounds are the stars, but everything within this take, down to the bass playing, sounds absolutely ideal.

Last Train from Poor Valley, named after the Norman Blake song, is an album that should appeal to all bluegrass listeners and most Americana and traditional-leaning country fans. If you appreciated Home From the Mills from Jimmy Gaudreau and Moondi Klein last year, or Cahalen Morrison and Eli West’s Our Lady of the Tall Trees, you are sure to enjoy exploring the latest from Richard Bennett.

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Lonesome Road Review’s Best of 2012

Five-star reviews:

“All In” by the Boxcars

“Outshine the Sun” by Foghorn Stringband

“Life Finds a Way” by the Grascals

“Life Goes On” by Musicians Against Childhood Cancer

“Papertown” by Balsam Range

 

Other notable releases:

“Hard Country” by Audie Blaylock & Redline

“Heart of the Country” by Chris Brashear

“The Gospel Side of Dailey & Vincent” by Dailey & Vincent

“Home from the Mills” by Jimmy Gaudreau & Moondi Klein

“Sing Me a Song About Jesus” by Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver

“They’re Playing My Song” by Joe Mullins & the Radio Ramblers

“New Bluegrass & Old Heartaches” by Bobby Osborne & the Rocky Top X-Press

“Road Into Town” by Danny Paisley & Southern Grass

“The Old Home Place Ain’t the Same Anymore” by Jussi Syren and the Groundbreakers

 

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“The Old Home Place Ain’t the Same Anymore” by Jussi Syren and the Groundbreakers

Jussi Syren and the Groundbreakers
The Old Home Place Ain’t the Same Anymore
Snowflake Records
4.5 stars (out of 5)

By Aaron Keith Harris

Finland is a long way from Nashville, but it was the latter place I thought of when unwrapping the recent mailer from Jussi Syren and the Groundbreakers postmarked in the former location.

Inside was an LP, along with a CD for those not as properly equipped for old music as yours truly, that vividly mimics the Technicolor covers of Monroe’s Decca recordings and others from the 1950s golden age of bluegrass music.

The thirty-two minutes of music inside also evokes that time: eleven tracks of loud, raw, pure bluegrass and one a cappella gospel, Carl Story’s “My Lord Keeps a Record,” in the style of Ralph Stanley,  the texture of whose voice Syren’s recalls more than a little.

The Groundbreakers employ the standard five-piece lineup—Syren (mandolin), Tauri Oksala (banjo), J.P. Putkonen (guitar), Karl Hella (bass) and Nelli Ikola (fiddle)—to honky-tonk perfection, with Putkonen’s mighty G-runs, Ikola’s greasy fiddle, and Oksala’s pealing banjo achieving a sound of which Jimmy Martin or Vern Williams would be proud, especially on original instrumentals “Syren Stomp” and “Rockhill Ride.”

Original Syren compositions “Detroit Blues” and the title track stand with Jim Eanes’s “Your Old Standby” and Stonewall Jackson’s “Blue Field” as the best on this record, showing that old musical formulae can still be used to great effect today.

My only complaint is that, in spite of several listens on LP and CD, with headphones and without, I found Syren’s lead vocals, which also contain a dash of Steve Earle, to be too low in the mix.

 

 

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“Outshine the Sun” by Foghorn Stringband

Foghorn Stringband
Outshine the Sun
Foghorn Stringband
5 stars (out of 5)

By Aaron Keith Harris

For the Foghorn Stringband, the dream of the nineties is indeed alive in Portland, just as long as you’re dreaming about the eighteen nineties. (I hope no other reviewer has made that connection to the excellent Carrie Brownstein/Fred Armisen sketch comedy Portlandia on IFC, but I’m too lazy to googlebing it.)

Oregon-based eight-stringer Caleb Klauder and fiddler Sammy Lind, now joined by Quebecois bassist Nadine Landry and Washington guitarist Reeb Willms, are as good as you can wrangle if you’re looking for the picking and singing old-time, with Lind knowing when to be a little ragged here and when to be a little fancy there and Klauder’s tenor pained enough to hit nostalgia without bleeding through to melodrama. The ladies are not here for ornamentation, but for strong and supple performance that gives the band the range and talent to handle the ballads, love songs, instrumentals, parlor songs, and white gospel that make up the twenty-one songs clocking in two minutes shy of an hour.

Foghorn could keep the feet tapping the hardwood all night long with Hartfordesque fiddle tunes like “Humpback Mule,” “Indian Ate the Woodchuck,” and “Salty River Reel,” and with “Lover’s First Quarrel,” which somehow manages to be concise and baroque at the same time.

But it’s the singing—whether solo or harmony—that’s made me keep this one spinning. The simple voice blends on “Distant Land to Roam” and “Just a Few Old Memories,” a simple tearjerker led by one of the ladies (I’m sorry to say, from the materials at hand, I’m not sure which) indeed evoke “another place and time,” like the scent of an old upright piano.

The drop-thumb rave-up “Whoa Mule” and two almost-bluegrass hymnal thumpers, “Outshine the Sun” and “Gospel Ship,” have the band running hard and true vocally and instrumentally.

The track that haunts me is the penultimate “Over the Garden Wall,” a sweet and strange romance from the Carter Family oeuvre made sweeter and stranger by this fine quartet.

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“Who’s Feeling Young Now?” by Punch Brothers

Punch Brothers
Who’s Feeling Young Now?
Nonesuch Records
2 stars (out of 5)

By Aaron Keith Harris

When Nickel Creek disbanded, I was excited that Chris Thile, the greatest mandolin player in the history of the universe, would be free from trying to please the modern country market and let his talent and creativity take acoustic music fans places they had never been.

How to Grow a Woman from the Ground, his 2006 solo effort featuring three members of the current Punch Brothers lineup (Chris Eldredge on guitar, Noam Pikelny on banjo, and Gabe Witcher on fiddle), came the closest to fulfilling that potential, though Thile at times did stoop to doing a mawkish John Mayer impression.

Covers of Jack White’s “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground” and the Strokes’ “Heart in a Cage” had an angry young man with Jaggeresque charisma pouring his heart out with impassioned, raw vocals and shredding mandolin lines. Covers of Gillian Welch’s “Wayside (Back in Time)” and Jimmie Rodgers’ “Brakeman’s Blues” had Thile and the band delivering well-known material with freshness and elan, while a couple of the instrumentals were both tuneful and intricate.

Sadly, on this, the third Punch Brothers effort, the emphasis is solely on the latter, with arrangements that simply make your head hurt as you try to stick with the time signatures and nimbly picked scales as they fly past or, more frequently, just lie there.

Exhibit A is “Kid A,” a perfectly played cover of an unlistenable instrumental track by the obnoxiously pretentious Radiohead. That a band as supremely talented as Thile’s would waste their talents and our time on such a soulless exercise is a waste.

The rest of the 11 tracks on this disc have promise, but none of them reach it. They’re full of jaw-dropping instrumental passages that never join up to go anywhere. The whole experience is like being seated next to a beautiful woman at a dinner party only to find out during the salad course that she’s incapable of talking about anything but herself.

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“They’re Playing My Song” by Joe Mullins & the Radio Ramblers

Joe Mullins & the Radio Ramblers
They’re Playing My Song
Rebel Records
4 stars (out of 5)

By Aaron Keith Harris

This five-piece band—which is based in Xenia, Ohio, the next town over from me where Joe Mullins’ radio empire is based—deservedly won the IBMA’s emerging artist award a couple of months ago, and it’s nice to have the fourth album of their short but eventful run in time for the cold winter ahead. (Read reviews of the previous three by searching “Joe Mulins” on this site.)

As bandleader, banjo picker, and lead and tenor singer, Mullins is the main attraction, all of his many talents coming together to make “Lily,” a Tom Holt/Boys from Indiana tune, my favorite. Not many talents can pick such a song from the archives, play flawless, understated banjo, and deliver a vocal that rivals the best of those done by the three other great tenor singers from the original Longview, but Mullins does on this track.

The “Osborne Brothers Medley” also has Mullins in his element, singing smooth and high lead in the trademark Osborne trio format (with mandolinist Mike Terry on low tenor and guitarist Adam McIntosh on baritone) as the Ramblers fit four classics into four minutes and thirty-eight seconds of bluegrass perfection.

McIntosh and Terry are about as solid as you can get, both instrumentally—where they nail all their breaks crisply while remaining conscious of the song as a whole—and vocally—where their effortless delivery makes tracks like “A Blue Million Tears,” “Bottom of the Mountain,” and “Granddad (the Preacher)” surefire favorites on radio and on stage.

Evan McGregor’s fiddle is always where it needs to be, especially on the classic country of “Listen, They’re Playing My Song” and the David Harvey instrumental “Cruisin’ Timber.” Tim Kidd keeps perfect time with a steady bump on the upright bass, and adds the 1950s-style snare drum to “She Left Me Standing on the Mountain,” a track from the Delmore Brothers by way of Jim & Jesse.

All but Kidd join the gospel quartet for a beautiful reading of “Moses, Set My People Free,” Becky Buller’s new telling of an old story.

I could always stand for more Joe Mullins banjo showpieces, but we get just one here: his take on Earl’s arrangement of “Steel Guitar Rag,” with equal amounts of swing and drive.

This 45-minute, 14-track disc ends perfectly for any fan of the Mullins family, with a spirited live cut of “Katy Daly,” a bluegrass classic written by Joe’s dad and mentor in music and radio, Paul “Moon” Mullins, more than a half century before.

Editor’s note: The Lonesome Road Review offers its deepest sympathies to Mullins and his family on the recent loss of his mother Prudence, a great lady and an important personality in the history of bluegrass music in southwest Ohio.