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“It’s funny how a record comes together,” says Del McCoury—and with fifty years of music-making already under his belt, he’s a man who knows what he’s talking about. “You get one song from here, another from there, and then you get one from out of left field, and you don’t even know where it came from. This record, it was really fun to do, and I think the reason is because the songs were so different.”
Del’s not kidding about that “different” part, and it’s a big reason why Family Circle, the latest on his own McCoury Music label, is so special—it’s not only an enjoyable, exciting set of music, but an unmistakable sign that, at the age of 70, he’s more ready than ever for a musical challenge. Others in his shoes might have stuck with the award-winning tried and true so brilliantly embodied in the epic Celebrating 50 Years Of Del McCoury, the McCoury Music boxed set issues earlier this year, but not this bluegrass legend. He may own Grammy awards and International Bluegrass Music Association trophies by the case full, he may play to enthusiastic audiences from Conan and Letterman to Bonnaroo, the New Orleans Jazz Fest and Merlefest, and guest with artists like the New Orleans Preservation Hall Jazz Band and country superstar Dierks Bentley, but Del’s not resting on his laurels; it’s just not the McCoury way.
That way has led Del through an unparalleled career in bluegrass. A product of the rowdy Baltimore bluegrass club scene in the late 50s, he jumped onto the national stage when he joined the music’s original band, Bill Monroe And His Blue Grass Boys in 1962, and though his memorable stint with the Country Music Hall of Famer was followed by several decades’ worth of part-time band leadership as he worked logging industry day jobs and raised a family, his stature grew steadily within the tightly knit bluegrass community. When he moved to Nashville in the early 1990s—his now-grown sons in tow and in his band—to devote himself to a full-time career, he was rewarded with a flood of acclaim from that community, including an unsurpassed string of IBMA Entertainer of the Year awards. At the same time, his blend of musical integrity and open-mindedness, fierce intensity and easygoing charm and willingness to look for new opportunities to present his crackerjack Del McCoury Band to the world at large began to bring him new audiences, aided by public admiration from popular fellow artists like Elvis Costello and Phish.
By the time Celebrating 50 Years Of Del McCoury came out, then, Del McCoury, along with sons Ronnie (mandolin) and Rob (banjo), long-time fiddler Jason Carter and bass player Alan Bartram had hit a groove that was both immensely successful and artistically rewarding—and yet it was at precisely that point, as Del began to think about his next album, that his sense of adventure began to take the upper hand. “I didn’t really have anything in mind,” he recalls with a trademark chuckle. “I just started looking through things I had that people sent me—people send me stuff all the time, I’ve got a box full of it. So got the box out and started listening, and I was surprised at some of the stuff that I found.”
Among the songs that weren’t surprising were entries from favorites like Shawn Camp, whose “My Love Will Not Change” has become a favored closer or encore on shows, and Billy and Terry Smith—Del’s been recording songs of Billy’s since the early 90s—but even there, it turned out there was room for a twist. “I didn’t write any of the songs this time,” he notes, “but it’s a funny thing: I really liked that song of Billy and Terry’s, but I got to thinking that it was a little short, so I wrote another verse for it and asked Billy if it was ok, and he said, sure—and then I wound up doing the same thing with a song that Jim Lauderdale had sent me. They had a different ending on the song, and it was kind of short, and I thought it would be better if I just came up with another verse for it. And then I saw Jim at a show, and I said, you know, Jim, I wrote another verse to that song and recorded it, I hope you don’t mind. And he listened to it and said, yeah—it matches!”
Others given the familiar McCoury touch include West Virginian Alan Johnston’s “Sweet Appalachia,” the Alaskan story, “White Pass Railroad,” a simmering “Revenuer’s Blues,” written by son Rob with long-time family friend—and country hit songwriter—Ronnie Bowman, and a nifty remake of a 40s movie song, “I Remember You,” that Del got from country singer Slim Whitman, who grazed the charts twice with it. “Of course, I remember hearing Slim do it years ago,” he says, “but then I think I heard it again on the radio. And sometimes, if I hear a song, I’ll write the title down on a little piece of paper and stick it on the wall in the stairway at the house, and I had that one stuck on there. So I told my grandson, Jacob, see if you can get this song on the computer—and he downloaded it, and that’s how I learned it.”
For most of the rest, though, it’s another story. “I kind of had to work on some of those, because they were so different from what I’m used to doing,” Del admits with a laugh. “Like ‘Does My Ring Burn Your Finger.’ Someone told me it was a hit for Lee Ann Womack, but I heard it done by [soul legend] Solomon Burke on some kind of compilation of things by different artists—we had a cut on there, too—and I really liked it, but it took me a while to get, because the melody is so different. And then there’s that song of Joe New’s—I had met him back when he lived in Nashville, before he moved back to California, we did one of his songs a couple of records ago, and there’s two of his this time, and one of them is called ‘Barbaric Splendor.’ I wasn’t too sure about it at first, but the more I listened to it, the more I really liked it—there’s a lot of mystique in that song, and that’s the reason I recorded it—but that took some work, too.”
Then there was “Hello Lonely—a “mystery song” that Del decided to record nearly at the last minute. “At the very end, I got to thinking, there aren’t too many harmony songs on this album, I’d better see if there’s something that needs some harmony vocals. And there was a CD sitting on my kitchen counter that didn’t have a thing written on it—I didn’t know whose it was at all. But I played it, and there was a real slow song on there that I thought, that’d be good for harmony at a fast tempo. And when I got to the studio, I got it out, and I was singing it, and Ronnie was starting to learn it, and then Jason walked in and said oh, that’s my buddy there—I went to high school with the guy who wrote that. And I said, so that’s whose song it is!”
Perhaps most surprising –at least for those who know him only by reputation as a keeper of the bluegrass flame—is Del’s soulful cover of Mark Knopfler’s “Prairie Wedding,” given a wistful reading that, he says, came about mostly by accident. “My bass player, Alan Bartram, brought that in, and I remember, the guys were working it up in a hotel room somewhere when we were on the road. And they were doing it from listening to his record, which was in the key of C, and he sang it pretty low there. Well, I thought, I don’t think I can sing it that low—but they’ve got the parts worked out already, so maybe I better sing it in that key! Because, you know, I really did like the song.”
Yet while some might think that Del’s new reach for left-of-center material was spurred by the younger generation of McCourys, and though he’s quick to give son Ronnie credit for the instrumental arrangements—“all of the guys are good at that, but Ronnie usually takes the lead; he’ll suggest things like all the playing the melody together that you hear in ‘White Pass Railroad’”—Family Circle is arguably one of Del’s most hands-on albums. “I guess I produced it,” he says in a typically modest way. “With Ron and Robbie and Jason and Alan doing more on their own now with the Travelin’ McCourys, I pretty much put this together on my own—and I really like it. I didn’t start out to do something different, but that’s how it turned out!”
Indeed, Family Circle is likely to turn more than a few heads, and open more than a few new ears. For while his love for the hard drive and mournful wail of classic bluegrass burns as brightly as ever, Del McCoury’s still got a passion for great songs, no matter where they lead him—and a way of somehow still making them his own that’s as fresh today as it was 50 years ago.
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