Hotdayum! Them's Chartbusters back, fellas, so let's start the hootenanny...

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. 

The Sidekicks might be anonymous, but their studio logo is pretty cool

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...