Some of your family members still around for their annual visit for the holidays? Any of 'em from Hicksville, Somewhere? (Let's not investigate blood relations here, shall we?) They all ready to prolong the festivities with a good ol' fashioned bluegrass hoedown hootenanny?
Or do you have very refined urban hipster guests who still have a hard time finding the door? Who just might recoil in horror at the sound of a banjo, thinking someone might soon invite them to squeal like a pig? Well, turn up this hick music to send them running towards their microbreweries and organic soy drink shops!
You see, Bluegrass Chartbusters is the right series for any occasion involving your Christmas guests!
This series just keeps chugging along, providing once more 20 perfectly lovely or interesting Bluegrass versions of rock and pop classics from yesteryear. Nothing much has changed, we're looking at a line-up that includes Pickin On... stalwarts Cornbread Red, Iron Horse, The Sidekicks and Brad Davis, as well as more recent additions Town Mountain and The Grass Cats (check out those cats above...), the latter with frankly fantastic renditions of, respectively, "I"m On Fire" and "I Shot The Sheriff".
A new arrival to the series is Hit & Run Bluegrass, a group led by Rebecca Frazier, and in this case produced by her husband John. It's second guitar player Mike Mickelson doing the lead vocals on their take on "Jessie's Girl", but Hit & Run Bluegrass will assuredly be back on future volumes. The same thing is true of fellow newcomers to this series, Craig Ferguson & Band, who cover Foo Fighters' "Times Like These (One Way Motorway)", also covered by Glen Campbell back on his modern standards album Meet Glen Campbell.
If on the last volume we could almost lament a short supply of Cornbread Red, but here you can feast on them doing Barenaked Ladies' "One Week", Green Day's "Wake Me Up When September Ends" and Def Leppard's "Let's Get Rocked". Family band The Petersens are also back, here with a rare lead vocal performance of family friend and dobro master Emmet Franz on a slowed-down version of the Backstreet Boys' "I Want It That Way", as well as a sibling duet on Coldplay's "The Scientist".
Songs covered run a large spectrum, from Brad Davis' take on 1968's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" to 2014's "Shake It Off" by the one and only Taylor Swift of course. Along the way we check in with versions of "Walk Like An Egyptian", Nirvana's "Come As You Are" and, perhaps most surprisinly, Ozzy Osbourne's "Crazy Train", the latter two taken care of by old pros Iron Horse. I also particularly like instrumental closer "No Surprises", an instantly recognizable version of the Radiohead classic by Old School Freight Train.
The Christmas Hootenanny is on with these twenty fun and occasionally innovative covers of beloved favorites from almost fifty years of popular music. Yeehaw and Ho-Ho-Ho!
Bluegrass Chartbusters Vol. 4
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What's your favorite Christmas/Holiday dish, folks?
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