Round two for our dip into bluegrass takes on popular songs from...oh...about the last 60 years or so. Volume one was exclusicely sourced from the Pickin' On... series, which will stay the main source of that series, but I decided to open up the series for any well-done bluegrass cover of a popular song. This mainly happened because, Honeywagon, one of my favorite bands on the CMH/Pickin On... roster , well presented on volume one, left relatively quickly. Then again, so did Cornbread Red, who at least left a ton of music behind. So, Honeywagon released at least two albums covering a single artist after leaving the Pickin' On... series, covering Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga. One is more likely to be featured here than the other, I let you guess which one it is.
Besides stalwarts Honeywagon, Cornbread Red and Iron Horse we also have the return of The Sidekicks, though that is, as I speculated last time around, not a real band, but whatever studio pros mark Thornton is lining up in his Sidekcik Sound Studios in Nashville. Consequently, The Sidekicks have a ton of different vocalists and not really an identifiable style, unlike the three former bands.
Newcomers to Vol. 2 of Bluegrass Chartbusters are The Petersens, a family band from Branson, Missouri, the "live music capital of the world". The mom as the steadying presnce on upright bass, her three daughters and son, plus a family who mainly plays the dobro. They play gospel standards as well as - more interesting for these comps - pop and rock classics. Also showing up for the first time are Larry Cordle & Lonesome Standards, who produced an album of Lynyrd Skynyrd covers for CMH and Tim May, already featured on these pages with his Neil Young tribute.
The list of artists covered include, among others, Steppenwolf, The Mamas & The Papas, Journey, The Doors, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Buffalo Springfield, and Aerosmith for the classic rock era; Whitney Houston, Men At Work, Survivor, and Bon Jovi for the 80s; Pearl Jam, Barenaked Ladies and Green Day for the 90s, and Lifehouse, Aloe Blacc and Colbie Caillat for music from the 2000s.
This volume follows in the footsteps of the first one, in that I stuck with serious readings of these songs. For now I have excluded acts like The Cleverlys or Boss Hoss (I'm kind of on the fence as far as Hayseed Dixie are concerned), who are really doing a piss-take on the genre, and are really leaning too much into the country yokel humor part for me. No, these aren't parodies, these are well-done, respectful bluegrass renditions of some very fine songs. That may be your gig, or it isn't, but for the former of y'all, there's 75 minutes of very fine music awaiting you. Now, about that hootenanny...
Hootenanny!
ReplyDeletehttps://workupload.com/file/sZyaC2ab9Rw
What's your favorite unexpected cover, bluegrass or otherwise?
ReplyDeleteThe Sounds Of Silence by Disturbed. A quite recent , welcomed addiction to my fave covers dept. (thanks to my wife, who usually doesn't listen to things like that but occasionally gets caught and passes them to me)
DeleteI don't know my favorite, or if I even have a favorite, but the Dickies doing 'Nights In White Satin' was a kick, even if lo these many decades later there's an industry in punk bands doing amped up covers of non-punk songs. The original 'Nights' is superior to the Dickies version, but the Dickies certainly did not shame themselves.
ReplyDeleteC in California
Thanks for this! I've been on a real bluegrass kick lately (Billy Strings!!! OMG!!). I always seem to like bluegrass covers of Pink Floyd tunes.
ReplyDeleteThe Beatles translate into Bluegrass quite nicely.
ReplyDeleteA couple of Beatles covers coming up on later volumes...
DeleteSo, I checked some Billy Strings (whose name and the occasional song I stumbled onto several times) and it's really nice, old school bluegrass.
ReplyDeleteI also rechecked Hayseed Dixie and, yup, they're a full-time comedy bluegrass troupe, so they're not contenders for this ongoing series...
This is my hobbyhorse, so I'll be brief about riding it: "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" is commonly the only song by Richard Thompson that (NPR-listening) people have ever heard. Which is okay; you don't have to be as obsessed as I am, and it's both good-quality and somewhat-representative. Del McCoury and band covered it, and it might be a more-popular cover than the Pointer Sisters doing "Don't Let A Thief Steal Into Your Heart."
ReplyDeleteBut now I've heard it covered by other bluegrass bands. And I think there's a danger of that becoming a "thing" and reducing his lengthy and prodigious output to one dimension.
OTOH, better heard in one dimension than not at all? I'm not sure.
D in California
Interesting. I didn't know that was 'a thing', and it's true that being reduced to one song from one of the richest songwriter catalogue that exists is...not great?!
DeleteBut, you know, it does give him some royalties, however modest, and maybe a handful are moved to check out more of that Thompson guy...