The String

This hour, a tale of two Johns. My guest is John Jorgenson, one of the most well-rounded and admired guitar players of the last 40 years. His life and career have carried him from the country music hot spots in his native California to the studios of Nashville to world tours with Elton John and on to a global reputation as a master of gypsy style jazz guitar. We’ll touch on all of that. But our main topic when we sat down was the other John, the songwriter John D. Loudermilk. Jorgenson helped produce a tribute concert that brought together some of Nashville’s elite artists for a loving look at an under-appreciated master. John D, as his friends called him, was in attendance that night in March of 2016 at the Franklin Theater in nearby Franklin, TN. He died a few months later at the age of 82. The show has been released as an album. And as a concert film that’s airing now on various public television stations around the country, including Nashville.

American Folk, a feature film that's already won numerous jury prizes at film festivals, starts its theatrical run in late January of 2018. First time writer/director David Heinz wanted true-life folk singers to play the lead characters, rather than actors playing at folk singing. And Amber Rubarth is a certified folk singer. Raised in California, she discovered music as a creative outlet at about 20 years old, but as soon as she took her fresh voice to New York in the 2000s she found support and collaborators and was soon making records. Rubarth’s music won several significant prizes, including the Mountain Stage New Song Contest. She stands out for her playful lyrical style and daring sense of imagery. As well as her affinity for collaborations. She's released a half dozen albums on her own, including the recent Wildflowers in the Graveyard. Amber talks about her background, her acting debut and how a life altering accident inspired her latest recording.  Also, guest producers Matt Follett and Brady Watson report on the multi-year effort to revive and amplify the vital legacy of soul and R&B music in the development and future of Music City.

The plan was to spend an hour with David Rawlings, an artist who’s releasing brilliant folk albums, touring to huge acclaim and driving a new string band agenda. The plan was to ask him about his emergence in recent years as a leader and artist of note after so many years of playing the not silent but often unbilled partner of Gillian Welch. Then, in a happy turn of events, Gillian Welch came along. And the conversation became an exploration of a legendary partnership that changed the course of roots music. Also, a visit to the studio of quietly influential producer, songwriter and guitarist Thomm Jutz. He left his native Germany focused on making something happen in bluegrass and country music in Nashville. He certainly has, most recently his solo debut album. 

Blessed are the storytellers, and this week we’ll visit with two of them from the world of roots music. Thirty years into his recording career, Radney Foster is a certified star of Texas songwriting and authentic country music. Always intellectually restless, Foster has widened his scope in recent years by songwriting with military veterans and writing fiction. Recently he released an album and a book of complementary short stories under the title For You To See The Stars. Joe Kendrick’s medium is radio and his new audio series Southern Songs and Stories is documenting musical culture with a podcast out of his home base at legendary Americana station WNCW in Spindale, NC. I sit down with Radney Foster and Joe Kendrick in the hour ahead.

It’s a love story, with an all banjo soundtrack. Hollywood would never buy the pitch. But it’s better that it’s real life. Béla Fleck is the most famous banjo player of his time, a searcher who’s played and preserved traditional bluegrass while innovating on his instrument in jazz fusion and classical concert music, among many other things. Abigail Washburn, with great suddenness, embraced Appalachian old time banjo and folk singing, becoming one of the most revered traditional artists of her generation. These two esteemed but very different artists found one another fascinating and then captivating. Now they’re touring with their young son and releasing duo music that sounds like nothing that’s ever come before it. Old time, bluegrass and the post-bluegrass fusion styles innovated by Béla Fleck all exist today in roots music side by side. But on their two albums as a duo, Béla and Abby fuse and mesh their vivid instrumental voices in sometimes uncanny ways. The new project is titled Echo In The Valley. Also, a visit to the video studio of Steve Boyle, who got the job restoring the historic Jimmy Dean Show, a major national platform for country music between 1963 and 1966.

It’s hard to over-state the importance of Norbert Putnam to Southern music. As a teenager he was one of a handful of guys who built the legendary recording scene in Muscle Shoals from scratch. Working with a young Rick Hall and Tom Stafford, plus some fellow musicians, they figured out how to make records and then how to make hit records. And they made history. Then Putnam and several of his studio musician colleagues moved to Nashville and ushered in a new era when a swirl of genres from soul to rock and roll mingled with and drew from the country recording scene that was already well established. Putnam produced important music for Joan Baez, Dan Fogelberg, Jimmy Buffett - and he played for years in studio and on the road for Elvis Presley. He’s a figurehead and a great storyteller. Jon Langford meanwhile grew up in Wales but made his name as a founding member of The Mekons, an influential underground band that laid the groundwork for the country punk and alt-country movements. Besides songwriting, which he’s done prolifically as a solo artist and collaborator in many bands including the Waco brothers and the Pine Valley Cosmonauts, Langford’s been an admired painter. He’s most famous for his graphic visions of the conflicts inherent in and around country music. His work has been shown widely around the US and the UK and a couple years ago, he was asked to do the feature art for the Country Music Hall of Fame's Nashville Cats exhibit. There, he met Norbert Putnam, who invited him to come to Muscle Shoals to make a record. It’s title: Four Lost Souls. With guest interviewer/producer Gina Frary Bacon.

Jerry Douglas in the encyclopedias as the singular innovator of the Dobro, that horizontal acoustic slide guitar developed in the early 20th century. But that’s like calling Charlie Parker a saxophone player. Jerry is a consummate creator who found an unlikely muse and who made the most of it. Among the vast catalog, Douglas has recorded or performed with: Charlie Waller’s Country Gentlemen, The Whites, Ricky Skaggs, JD Crowe, Dolly Parton, Ray Charles, James Taylor, Garth Brooks, Elvis Costello, Bill Frisell and it just goes on and on. Since the mid 90s he’s been a key voice, instrumentally and vocally, in Alison Krauss and Union Station. Recently he formed the Earls of Leicester, a deeply traditional bluegrass band that channels the work and feeling of Flatt & Scruggs, and they promptly won every award in sight. And for many of us, the hub of the wheel of Jerry’s world has been his lifelong collaborations with fellow newgrass superstars Bela Fleck, Sam Bush, Stuart Duncan, Tony Rice and Edgar Meyer. And yet for all his adventures, Jerry the  band leader and composer never quite found the path to writing and recording in an idiom he’s loved his whole life. Until now. He’s recently released a jazz fusion record called What If.  Also on the show, a short interview with Anna Bek Schwaber, producer and director of The Porchlight Sessions, a profile of the bluegrass community in the 21st century that's newly out as a web pay per view documentary.

Since his band the North Mississippi Allstars broke out in the early 2000s, Luther Dickinson has been at the vanguard of an important roots music revival. Not only has he and his brother Cody championed a reconsideration of hill country blues, they've amplified the legacy of their father Jim Dickinson and his many contributions to the music of Memphis and its rural surroundings. They’ve collaborated widely and reached audiences that previously had little contact with deep African-American roots music. Today, the brothers say they’re as fulfilled and energetic as they’ve ever been, touring behind the June 2017 album Prayer For Peace. Also, Virginia-born, Kentucky-based songwriter Sam Gleaves, and out gay artist from coal country, takes his place in the activist tradition of folk music. 

On the cover of Ben Sollee’s new album Kentucky Native, an astronaut with a pick axe on his shoulder looks at Earth from the surface of the moon, contemplating loneliness and the fragility of life. He’s the subject of the song “Moon Miner” on the artist’s thirteenth recording, one that does some mining of its own - of the Kentucky bluegrass tradition and of his state’s complicated economic and environmental evolution. In more than a decade of a multi-faceted career, Sollee has never settled into a predictable pattern of recording and performing. His ensembles shift. He takes on conceptual projects between studio sessions, such as scoring a ballet or touring entirely by recumbent bicycle. His profile rose as a member of the globe-touring Sparrow Quartet with Bela Fleck, Abigail Washburn and Casey Driessen. At Fleck's suggestion, Sollee developed a prolific solo voice. Yet he nearly always performs with his high school jazz band friend Jordin Ellis, one of the best drummers around.  His classical training and his folk muse are in constant dialogue, so his music is always surprising. One thing he’s never done before now is dive explicitly into the bluegrass tradition that was at least nominally born in his home state of Kentucky. Unsurprisingly, his interpretation sounds like nothing else that’s come before it.

AmericanaFest 2017 is in the books, and it was large and loud. Fifty venues across Nashville. A new hotel headquarters. It felt the same yet different. We’re 18 years into this thing after all. It’s hard to discern trends from inside the belly of the beast. But in the hour ahead we’ll try. Five artists or groups from different generations and places on the musical spectrum talk about career, art, commerce, inclusion and exclusion and the elusive but cherished idea that is Americana music. In case this is new terrain for you, AmericanaFest is the snappy short version of what’s been formally called The Americana Music Festival and Conference, a Nashville gathering launched in 2000. What began as strategic ideas convention has grown into a major draw for music fans with about 300 artists playing some 50 formal and informal venues around town. The exponential growth of venues and audiences and private parties surrounding AmericanaFest is emblematic of the format’s success in the wider world. Americana is a legit player at the top tiers of the music industry, whether indicated by Margo Price on Saturday Night Live or Sturgill Simpson going up against Beyonce at the Grammy Awards. It’s good times. Can that get too good? Too big? Too much of what Americana was meant to be an alternative to? That concern is definitely in the air, and that will get touched on in the hour ahead. Featured, conversations with: Sean McConnell, Yola Carter, The Accidentals, Larry Campbell & Teresa Williams and Rayna Gellert & Keiran Kane.