Giddy up y'all. That there Bluegrass Chartbuster show is in town again!

Time for round three of these, with a-many more coming your way. Originally I planned to have, like, three volumes of this, which means that the series would be coming to their end here. But, uh, that excalated quickly, as the saying goes. So now we're in double digits for the Bluegrass Chartbusters and have no end in sight, so I hope some of y'all are clamoring for more cool bluegrass versions of rock and pop (and punk, and country rock, and so on and so forth) songs from about the last half-century or so. Of course, knowing what I know I would have used the best tracks from my beloved Cornbread Red (pictured below) more sparingly, instead of just piling these onto the first volume especially. Oh well, I just have to go with slimmer pickings and more obscure (to me) songs from these guys once we crawl towards those double digit volumes. Incidentally they have only a single song on this volume, and it's a holdover from the Green Day comp I did a couple of months ago.

That is so because Volume Three became the most reworked of all the episodes here, as I started to really branch out of the safety of the Pickin' On series on later volumes, and then reworked the earlier volumes for more balance: Instead of only having the Pickin On housebands like Cornbread Red, Iron Horse, The Sidekicks and - increasingly - Brad Davis with band on the first handful of volumes and half a dozen other cool acts in later ones I switched and changed and juggled and replaced - and now Volume Three has somehow become the most diverse of all editions in this series - boasting no less that 15 different bands and artists for its twenty tracks! Besides repeat offenders quality contributors like the aforementioned bands we got a number of cool bands that show up here for the first time.

Two bands I recently discovered are the now sadly defunct The Wooks (who are only not called The Wookies for copyright reasons), who were mainly doing original songs, and really good ones, but also recorded the occasional cover, with their fab take on Bruce's "Atlantic City", that is slightly reminiscent of The Band's awesome cajun-flavored almost-bluegrass version. Another great recent discovery are The Grass Cats, also szdly defunct, who had a great twenty-year run, mainly as a local attraction in their home state of North Carolina. They left behind a couple of good albums and some great covers, the first one of which, a really sweet take on REO Speedwagon's "Take It On The Run" graces this volume. Happily the last of my recent discoveries, Town Mountain are still active, they clock in here with their take on alt country classic "Windfall". 

But we'll see more of these bands in the future, which isn't the same for the one-and-done that is Thunder & Rain's, uh, sweet take on "Sweet Child O' Mine". That band mainly does original songs, though they drew a lot of eyeballs on Youtube with this cover a couple of years ago. This is the original live take, not the studio version they put on an album later - this one sounds more natural and spontaneuous. 

By the way, I kind of like how the above cover recalls the mostly generic covers that the Pickin' On Series used for a decade or so before Iron Horse's Metallica album changed how they made, presented and mareketed albums. This looks like something you could take out od a rotating CD rack display in any truck stop in Rednecksville, Anywhere, U.S.A.! And that's on purpose! But it's a hundred times more awesome of course!

Artists covered include CCR, Prince, Pearl Jam, A-Ha, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Eagles/J.D. Souther, The Band, Black Sabbath, Oasis, The Rolling Stones and The Who. I also have to mention opener "Don't Stop Believin'", one of the best numbers of the entire series with some extraordinary mandolin and fiddle work by Pine Mountain Railroad that feel totally at home in the song and turn in from a somewhat hackneyed AOR song into a marvelous bluegrass number.

Anyway, Bluegrass Chartbusters Vol. 3 keeps up the quality of the first two albums, and the tons of new artists on here give the album a real freshness, due to the slightly different varying approaches of covering famous songs in a bluegrass style. Good stuff all around, one again. Get the bluegrass jukebox goin' once more...