Having successfully recorded and toured with Steve Earle, bluegrass legend Del McCoury is back once again doing his own very high and lonesome thing. With his latest album, The Family, showcasing the extraordinary virtuosity of his sons Ronnie and Rob, Del finds himself fronting the group described by Earle as the one which now sets the standard by which bluegrass is judged. And it's a very high standard at that. To hear the Del McCoury Band in full flight is one of live music's more thrilling experiences. In short, they are as good as it gets.
Born in North Carolina in 1931, Del McCoury's first experience of music was hearing what he calls his mother's "mountain blues". And as she sang Barbara Allen, his brother began teaching him a few chords on the guitar. On the radio he listened to Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and the great Bill Monroe - not knowing that many years later he would himself become one of Monroe's legendary Blue Grass Boys. That music, which Kentuckian Monroe was basically inventing back then, was characterised by high-pitched vocals and furious instrumental breaks. They called it bluegrass, and among its devotees was the young Elvis Presley, who recorded Blue Moon of Kentucky at almost the first chance he got. In fact, Presley, the person in whom the musics of the day were to clash most spectacularly, was as much bluegrass as he was blues.
"You know what? I really didn't think about that back then," says McCoury. "I never made the connection. I knew Bill Monroe played mandolin a certain way and then later on in life, when I heard those Memphis guitar pickers, they played a lot like Bill Monroe. But still I didn't make the connection. It was just something I didn't ever think about. You know, I was at an age when I should have been listening to Elvis Presley, but just a few years before rock 'n' roll got big, I was listening to Earl Scruggs and that kinda ruined me for life !"
In Del McCoury's early years, the mainstream pop territory was well covered by Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. His own preference, however, was for the other pop (popular) music of the day - Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams, Roy Acuff, The Stanley Brothers and, of course, Bill Monroe. But, post-Elvis, what constituted pop music had changed entirely and the old timers - be it Sinatra or Monroe - were in serious trouble. And while the new souped-up stylings of Presley had little direct impact on the world of Del McCoury, the rock 'n' roll phenomenon that came with it certainly did. Suddenly a lot of very big stars were blown clean out of the water.
"You know, I imagine there was resentment. They couldn't even get work. There was a guy who worked at Decca Records called Harry Silverstein and he told me that in the middle Fifties, he couldn't even get Bill Monroe to record! I guess they were all disgusted, you know?"
The older legends of pop and country ploughed on, however, waiting anxiously for their time to come around again - and indeed Monroe himself was to enjoy a major revival during the years of the folk boom. Back in 1963 he needed a new guitar player and it was McCoury who got the job. Before long, Del was on the stage of the Opry and singing with his hero. A year later, however, he quit, got married, moved to Pennsylvania and worked in a sawmill - occasionally thinking back with great fondness on his time as a Blue Grass Boy.
"I'd heard him on the Opry from the time I was a kid and when I went to work for him he was 52 years old and still a great singer and musician. He stayed that way until he was in his seventies. Some people said he was a tough bandleader but it was the easiest job I ever had. I was used to hard work - I mean physical work - and playing for Bill, he just expected people to work hard when they got on stage. A lot of musicians are lazy and he didn't like lazy people. It was hard for those guys to work for Bill!"
And bluegrass musicians certainly work very hard indeed. It's a music with no short cuts - breath-taking, high-powered and high-speed -and demands great virtuosity from its players. Its critics might dismiss it as almost too technical, too slick and too clean - the old argument being that the musicians are just so proficient that they lack a certain soul. But for Del McCoury, bluegrass - like other musics often considered a little looser - is, in fact, full of improvisation and personality. The difficulty is that not everybody has ears quick enough to spot it.
`YOU know, these guys played different every day - but the thing was they weren't making mistakes. Those guys were really good at what they did, but it was still coming from within. I didn't know it myself then, but I know now that what they played yesterday, they wouldn't even know today. Or what they played when they recorded it, they wouldn't know today. But they were just that adept at it! Yeah, you do have to know your stuff and I guess it is hard to play. But at the same time, once you get to a certain level of musicianship, you can improvise and play just what you feel that day and pull it off. I think it's that way with a lot of other people, too - just like jazz musicians."
As the McCoury Band gathers around the single microphone, Del himself stands well back, leaning in occasionally when things call for a bit of high and lonesome. And as the fiddles and mandolins fly, the silver-headed Del seems like a very happy man indeed - proud of his music, proud of his family and proud of his bluegrass band.
"I can't speak for other bands, but I've hired a lot of musicians over the years. And I've been fortunate. I've had a few where they would go off somewhere leftfield, and then I would just have to get rid of them because they didn't have no sense of nothing. But when I hired Jason Carter he was just a kid, but I heard things in him that I didn't hear in a lot of professionals. He wasn't good at all at that time, but he had blues in his playing and you can't teach that. So I heard that and I said, `This guy's going to make a good one'. Working with my sons is better than I thought it would be and it works better than I thought it would. Musically I don't show them anything anymore. There just came a certain time when I could hear they had their own ideas about things and I just let them go. They have a pretty good sense of what to do."