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The Del McCoury Band
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Thursday, March 29, 2012 at 8 pm
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More Information:
The Del McCoury Band
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Del McCoury’s music has defined authenticity for hard core bluegrass fans for half a century. McCoury is a living link to the days when bluegrass was made only in hillbilly honkytonks, yet he still maintains a commandingly vital presence today.
Background:
Born in York County, PA seventy years ago, Del McCoury would once have seemed an unlikely candidate for legendary status. Bitten hard by the bluegrass bug when he heard Earl Scruggs’ banjo in the early 50s-”everybody else was crazy about Elvis, but I loved Earl,” he says with a chuckle-McCoury became a banjo picker himself, working in the rough but lively Baltimore and D.C. bar scene into the early 1960s. He got his first taste of the limelight when he joined Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys in early 1963; the Father of Bluegrass moved McCoury from the banjo to guitar, made him his lead singer, and gave him a lifetime’s worth of bluegrass tutelage direct from the source in the course of little more than a year. But rather than parlay his gig with the master into a full-time career of his own, he returned to Pennsylvania in the mid-60s to provide steady support for his new and growing family.
Within a few years, McCoury had settled into work in the logging industry-and formed his own band, the Dixie Pals. For the next decade and a half, he piloted the group through a part-time career built mostly around weekend appearances at bluegrass festivals and recordings for labels ranging from the short-lived and obscure to roots music institutions like Arhoolie and Rounder Records. And while there were the inevitable personnel changes and struggles to contend with, McCoury was also building a songbook filled with classics remade in his own image and a growing number of originals-songs like “High On A Mountain,” “Are You Teasing Me,” “Dark Hollow,” “Bluest Man In Town,” “Rain And Snow,” “Good Man Like Me, “Rain Please Go Away” and more-that would become an important part of his legacy in years to come.
The first big sign of change came in 1981, when McCoury’s 14 year old son, Ronnie, joined the Dixie Pals as their mandolin player. Banjo playing younger brother Rob came on board five years later, and by the end of the decade, the three McCourys were ready to make a move. “We came to Nashville in 1992,” Ron recalls, “and it was dad’s idea. He’d been watching bluegrass on TNN-Bill Monroe, the Osborne Brothers, Jim & Jesse-and thought that it was the place to be, that we’d have a new outlet there, where we could get some more attention. And without a doubt, moving to Nashville and just going for it turned out to be really big.”
If anything, the younger McCoury’s understating the case. Armed with a new Rounder Records association-and a newly named Del McCoury Band that soon included not only his sons but a complete cast of youngsters-Del McCoury’s career soared. Del himself got the ball rolling early in the decade with three consecutive Male Vocalist of the Year awards from the prestigious International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA), and in 1994 the quintet began an astonishing streak of top Entertainer of the Year honors that would net them 9 trophies in an 11 year stretch-along with ongoing honors for Ronnie (8 straight Mandolin Player of the Year awards), fiddler Jason Carter (3 Fiddle Player of the Year trophies), and a wide array of projects featuring Del and the ensemble.
But though the 90s propelled the Del McCoury Band to the top of the bluegrass world, they also gave birth to a more startling phenomenon: the emergence of the group onto the larger musical scene as a unique torchbearer for the entire sweep of bluegrass and its history. For it turned out that the unmistakable authenticity of McCoury’s music-along with his good-natured willingness to keep alert for new sounds and new opportunities-had bred fans in some unlikely places.
By the second half of the 90s, the acclaim-and Del’s open-mindedness-put McCourys in onstage jams with Phish and on the road and in the studio with Earle, bringing the Del McCoury Band’s fierce musicianship and its leader’s instantaneous, easygoing connection with listeners to new arenas. The group appeared on prime time television and began an ongoing series of visits to popular late night TV talk shows, toured rock clubs and college campuses, and found itself welcome at country and even jazz-oriented music festivals and venues.
The fifth decade of that half-century of music making has been filled with new and ongoing triumphs. The Del McCoury Band has shown unprecedented stability, with but a single change in membership in fifteen years; their namesake earned membership in the cast of the legendary Grand Ole Opry in 2003, and the Band earned their first Best Bluegrass Album Grammy award two years later; they traveled with the groundbreaking post-O Brother “Down From The Mountain” tour, performed and recorded (on his Grammy-winning These Days) with Gill and with country star Dierks Bentley; they’ve made multiple appearances at the spectacular Bonnaroo Music Festival (and will appear there again in 2009) and launched an impressively popular annual New Year’s Eve show at the Ryman Auditorium, where Del first appeared on the Opry with Bill Monroe some 46 years ago. Perhaps most importantly, McCoury took an almost unprecedented step in 2003 when he took control of his own music by creating the McCoury Music label, home to that Grammy-winning album along with a select set of releases by the Del McCoury Band, country icon Merle Haggard and more. |
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