X To The B To The G To The C, y'all! Word! Oh, uh, I'm sorry, wrong genre. Howdy y'all, my fellow musical country bumpkins and Bluegrass lovers - it is indeed the time of X, as in, the tenth volume of our Bluegrass Chartbusters series. That would be a neat achievement for many a series, but as I hinted at before, for this particular series it's fair to say that we've only just begone...
Nothing new 'round these parts in terms of what you'd expect and what you'd get: another set of twenty handpicked covers of yesteryear's chart entries, as brought to you by the same fine batch of musicians that populated the first nine volumes. We sadly say goodbye to the long-defunct Grass Cats, who leave this series with a very fine rendition of Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine". And we say hello to a new band of contributors, the ominously named Grassmasters.
Grassmasters sems to have been the short-term rival project of the cheapo comp and lapsed copyright release specialist Synergy Entertainment for the subgenre's undisputed king, CMH's Pickin On...-series. They brought out three dozen albums between 2004 and 2010, with most of them cmoing out in 2005 and 2006, or around the prime of the Bluegrass cover album genre, probably to compete with the Pickin' on offerings. And while CMH was using this boom period to branch out into a ton of less conventional artists and genres, The Grassmasters stayed with the classics, covering Dylan, Clapton, Aerosmith, Johnny Cash, The Grateful Dead, Fleetwood Mac and Elvis. The latter's "Heartbreak Hotel" is included here as their introduction to the series. Most of their work is instrumental, though they would occasionally add vocals to some selections and we will see them again a number of times.
Lots of good stuff covering artists we haven't had on the series before: Jackson Browne! Poison! Daft Punk! The Raconteurs! Urge Overkill! The Dream Academy! My personal fave from this collection is Love Canon's wonderful take on Bruce Hornsby's "Just The Way It Is", which for me brings out the emotional nuances of the song better than the original. I'm also quite taken by Steve'n'Seagulls' take on AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long", which captures the song's ridiculou single entendre's perfectly. And long-time reliable series contributors The Petersens, mainly working in the ballad section, surprise with a groovy take on Alain Toussault's "Southern Nights" (made famous by Glen Campbell, of course) in which Julianne Peterson really let's the Southern drawl shine through. For, you know, that extra Southern feeling.
So, folks, throw this on for another smokin' good time with them Bluegrass Chartbusters, as ever, only and exclusively brought to you by One Buck Records and the One Buck Guy...
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