The mandolin player was one of the founding members of New Grass Revival in the early 1970s.
Sam Bush first met Bill Monroe in 1964, when he was a 12-year-old kid playing mandolin and he and his father got backstage at the Grand Old Opry in Nashville. He remembers the next time he and Monroe met in Nashville, three decades later.
"Over the years [Monroe] didn't really care for us in New Grass Revival, with our long hair and stuff at first, but over the years he softened up ... when I played with Emmylou Harris after New Grass Revival broke up, we would run into him occasionally and he really liked Emmylou.
"We recorded a live record here at the famous Ryman Auditorium ... three nights we would play our set and videotape it as well as record it. .. [Bill] would come and dance with Emmylou while I played a Bill Monroe tune called 'Scotland.'
"The last night, they needed to change a reel of tape, and someone said, 'why don't you and Bill play a duet together, just the two of you?'
"All of a sudden, it just hit me that there I was, getting to play with Bill Monroe on the stage of the Ryman Auditorium and that's something I could only dream about in 1964."
With Carter Stanley, Ralph Stanley recorded as the Stanley Brothers from 1949 to 1952. He founded the Clinch Mountain Boys and was named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress.
Stanley, who rose to mainstream prominence before and especially after recording on the "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" soundtrack, is a man of few words. Born in 1927 in southwest Virginia, he still lives there and performs throughout the year. The Ralph Stanley Museum and Traditional Mountain Music Center opened in Clintwood, Va. in October 2004.
"I like to do the traditional bluegrass, or oldtime mountain music, whatever you want to call it. That's all I've ever tried to do ... I'm simple. I grew up in the country, and I like to do it natural, the way I feel it.
"I've stuck to my roots, and I believe that's why that I've been on the road for 59 years."
The founder of Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver is a native of east Tennessee and former member of the Country Gentlemen.
Doyle Lawson's Quicksilver band has changed faces over the years, members have gone on to play with IIIrd Tyme Out, Mountain Heart and Ricky Skaggs' Kentucky Thunder. Lawson has stayed with a more traditional approach to bluegrass and gospel, and he's inspired by the mountains he grew up in.
"My family, the Lawson side of the family, came from Scotland.
"[Mountain people] carried the music from a lot of their home countries with them. They were obviously in some ways missing their home, and they had those old ballads and things that they brought with them.
"I don't know if you grew up in the mountains or not, but there's some things about living in the mountains—sometimes if you step outside on a clear, moonlit night, you can look out and you can see those beautiful, beautiful mountains and the rolling hills, and the treetops ... to me, and I'm 60 years old, but to me, I still go out sometimes and I look around and I just thank the good Lord that he allowed me to be born in such a beautiful place as we have."
The Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter/instrumentalist tours as Rhonda Vincent and The Rage.
Rhonda Vincent grew up singing, and never left it behind. Except for some brief forays into country, she's stayed true to her bluegrass roots, and in 2004 was named Female Vocalist of the Year by the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA).
"It was a musical family, traced back at least five generations, so it was a way of life ... I started singing when I was three, and when I was five we had a television show and a radio show and made our first recording.
"It's just something the Vincent family did. My mom, when she married my dad, he taught her how to play the standup bass and realized that she had some natural talent, because she already played the piano and I don't think he even knew that she sang as well as she did.
"So if you were born into the family or you married into the family, you were expected to play music."
The banjo virtuoso is a former member of New Grass Revival and founded the Flecktones
Fleck first heard the banjo as a child on the television how, “The Beverly Hillbillies.” While he recognizes the inaccurate stereotype the show presented, he loved the music.
“For me, it was a mixed blessing. The same thing happened on the ‘Andy Griffith Show,’ where you’d get to see Doug Dillard play the banjo every once in a while, but he’d be dressed up like a hayseed. Like it or not, that’s part of the past of the banjo, the history of the banjo. But you know, if you keep following the banjo back, you get into people playing, slaves and so forth, and if you follow the path, you get into Africans playing it in their native land. So there’s been a lot of periods for the banjo, and they all have their stereotypical images.”
Guitarist Sean Watkins formed the group Nickel Creek in 1989 when he was 12, with his sister Sara, a fiddler, and mandolin player Chris Thile (both 8 at the time).
Nickel Creek was inspired by bluegrass at a pizza parlor in the trio's California hometown of Carlsbad. Since then, they've been named IBMA's Emerging Artist of the Year (2000) and have performed on The Tonight Show, CNN, Austin City Limits and Conan O'Brien. The members record and perform separately and with other artists including Bela Fleck, bassist Edgar Meyer, fiddler Mark O'Connor and dobro player Jerry Douglas.
In more recent recordings, Nickel Creek is moving beyond bluegrass and experimenting with their own brand of music that draws on many traditions including bluegrass, Celtic, jazz and rock.
"There will always be people that are gonna play traditional bluegrass, so I'm not worried about that going away. But it's also a nice palette to launch from into other kinds of music, and I mean, in a way that's what it's supposed to be. [Bluegrass] started off as an experiment, a combination, it was very cutting-edge at the time, and it's really not even that old. So it's not strange to me for it to be changing and morphing into new things."
Two young mountain-inspired groups—King Wilkie and the Hackensaw Boys—started in Charlottesville, Va. The Hackensaw Boys formed in 1999 from informal jam sessions at the Blue Moon Diner. King Wilkie was recruited out of a Charlottesville farmhouse in 200 l after its two founding members graduated from college and moved there. The two groups are recording, touring, and making increasingly big splashes in the acoustic and bluegrass scene.
Rob Bullington, a.k.a. Mahlon Founding member and mandolin player, The Hackensaw Boys.
Like a lot of names, ["Hackensaw"] started out as son of a half-funny joke that stuck. It means as in "to hack and saw," as in like hacking at a mandolin and sawing at a fiddle.
“There were 12 people in the band when we first started out, and I was one of the original 12. There's six of us now, so we're exactly half the size we were five years ago, which is a lot more manageable in terms of things like hygiene and pay scale and that sort of thing.
What about musically?
Say you're sittin' in a club in, you know, Birmingham, Ala., and 12 guys roll in, each with an instrument, and they just immediately start playing. I mean, there's a certain group energy there that you just can't recreate unless you have 12 guys in the band who are just sort of pell-mell, out of control, rolling around the country.
On the other hand, with six guys, you can really hone in on the individual parts, it gives more chances for individual people to step up and be heard, and there's a lot more creative control and give and take that you can do with six people that with 12 you just can't really even approach.
Do you [and King Wilkie] consider each other competition or colleagues?
They're fantastic—I don't think we consider them competition, maybe they consider us competition, I don't know.
Their strengths are different from our strengths. We actually did a bill with them on New Year's Eve at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville ... the Del McCoury Band was headlining, and each of the bands was just different enough from each other. .. it was just sort of everybody getting together, doin' what they did best, and it worked really well.
Reid Burgess: Founding member and mandolin player, King Wilkie
One of the more rewarding things is getting to meet and be accepted by a lot of our heroes and our earlier musical inspiration—people like Del McCoury and Peter Rowan and these guys—and then play with these guys. It's almost like well, man, we're tempted to retire now, 'cause we just can't believe we've had that experience.
Is it terrifying, as well?
It's less and less—you just realized what's one of the main positive points in bluegrass music is ... the accessibility of the musicians. I remember I met Ralph Stanley really at one of the first festivals I went to, so the people aren't terrifying—they're really just normal people.
What's your take on the Hackensaw Boys?
They're more of a raucous old-time string band—they have a lot of energy, that great fire and passion. I like 'em a lot.
Bluegrass, it seems, more than other musical areas, has this really strong, close-knit community of musicians.
Yeah, it does. It's always been that way. There's still that impromptu jam element, people just wanting to get together and play music, and there's this canon of traditional songs and folk songs that everyone knows, and so you can get together with someone you've never met, someone from a totally different background, different generation as you, and be able to play songs together.
Every year, the Cowan Creek Mountain Music School in Letcher County, Kentucky, places young and old, beginners and masters, shoulder to shoulder for five days of classes, jam sessions, recitals, concerts and square dances. Students range from children as young as 11 to adults, who choose from the areas of fiddle, banjo, guitar, mandolin, singing, storytelling and square dancing.
"It gives them a taste of mountain music and the way entertainment used to be, and they can claim it as their own," says Sarah Howard, who attended the school as a student for three years and returned this year as a teaching assistant.
Last year, 110 students from 12 states studied at the school. Most were under 18. Attendance has grown every year since the school began in 2002.
"I don't have to worry about being the last fiddler in Eastern Kentucky," says school founder Beverly May.
Because the school accommodates all ages and all skill levels, it has become an event for the whole family in some cases.
"You can come to Cowan as a family, and leave as a string band," May says.
Visiting master musicians in 2005 included Emily Spencer of the White top Mountain Band, Ken Childress and Jimmy Mullins, Bruce Greene and the Tri-City Messengers—Doug Tattershall.
Well-known Grayson County fiddler Albert Hash started the school band in 1982. Emily Spencer, Hash's sister-in-law, and a banjo player in his Whitetop Mountain Band, took over a few years after his death in 1983. The band has been taped for PBS and NPR and was nominated for a Grammy.
Spencer's son and daughter, Kilby and Martha, both play in several string bands, as do other Mt. Rogers School alumni. But Martha says the biggest benefit of the band is that it keeps kids in school.
"There were a couple of boys that were too nervous and active in class," she says. "They would have dropped out if they hadn't started playing. The band was their reason for being here, but they started doing better in all their classes."
Young bands like Cana Ramblers, Galax Little Leaves, East Tennessee State Bluegrass Ambassadors, and Albert Hash draw the biggest crowds at Rex Theatre and the Bristol's Pickin' Parlor because they get the young people out, says Derrick Davis, host of the Rex's "Blue Ridge Backroads" live radio show.
"They're the future of bluegrass," he says.
Note: These archival articles are presented exactly as they appeared at the time of the issue in which they appeared. As such, all quotes, as well as references to temporal facts, artifacts and other items are contemporaneous to the date of original publication.