Bing! Bang! Boom! Bluegrass! Chartbusters!

Bluegrass fiends, you have not been forgotten. I'm surprised to find that it's been almost a month since our last volume, but of course our Bluegrass Chartbusters series will continue unabated, and here's Vol. 14, another volume that has been reworked a numbe rof times and probably doesn't resemble its original incarnation in the slightest. This can of course only be positive, because I found tons of cool stuff that I wanted to bring to you first, and this volume doesn't disappoint! After sitting out the volume, The Brothers Comatose are back with a vengeance...and a great cover of "Mercedes Benz" to boot! Della Mae are back with an equally wonderful version of "No Rain", a song that, as further reserach for the series has shown, is very propular among bluegrass bands. Dierks Bentley, normally not a Bluegrass player, sings U2"s "Pride (In The Name Of Love)", and boy has he brought some back up, enlisting both the Punch Brothers and genre legened Dl McCoury. 

As for newcomers, here's the first appearance of Holler Choir with "Heart-Shaped Box". I was ready to call them a one-off, but the latest expansion wave has brought some more Holler Choir tracks, so these guys will be back. The same is true for We Banjo 3, a now defunct Irish group who - in order to do justive to Tom Petet's "Wildflowers" - recruited Kiana June and Steve Ferrone for backup. I'm not the huget Old Crow Medicine Show fan, but they're debuting here in a backup function - lots of collabs on this one, as you might have noticed - as they are supporting Molly Tuttle and her beautiful take on Uncle Neil's "Helpless". 

Also making their first series appearance is Duluth's own Trapled By Turtles, an Americana group that play all kinds of country-inspired music, and only very rarely dabbles in Bluegrass, but often enough to record their fine cover of "Where Is My Mind?", which means that - somehat improbably - The Pixies are now joining the list of artists being covered. Other artists covered for the first time: Scotland's own Franz Fredinand via Cornbread Red's "Take Me Out" and Howard Jones via Love Canon's "Things Will Only Get Better". 

What else do we have here: Vets Iron Horse covering not one, not to, but three classics ("Sweet Child O' Mine", "Proud Mary" and "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath"!  David Lee Roth covering himself, again, gicing Jamie's Cryin'" a bluegrass makeover with the help of The John Jorgenson Bluegrass Band. And more! So, 20 fine handpicked tracks, showing once again the genre's elasticity in bringing these pop, rock, folk and reggae songs to life...

Them Bluegrass Bands and Folks Would Like Your Attention Once More, Please...

Aaaand welcome everybody to Chartbusters week over here at One Buck Records which of course must kick off When last we checked in with with our beloved Bluegrass Chartbusters series - or probably the time before that - I talked about the massive expansion that took place in the meantime, when I was alerted to certain bands that might fit the format. After I had just weaved those bands (The Fly Birds and Della Mae) into existing volumes, I went on a crazy Bluegrass cover song search bender, searching high and low and ending up with something like eighty plus tracks as a haul. Now that's a lot of tracks, and certainly way too many to just try and weave into existing volumes by throwing out or pushing doiwn the line a couple of others. No, a more radiczl solution was needed. 

Seeing the massive number of tracks, I thought, that I'd better start from scratch and create a couple of entirely new comps that I would then weave in between existing ones, whcih is what I did. This is the first of three entirely newly compiled volumes that will show up in the following weeks and months, as I also want all regular contributors to have been introduced by the series halfway point. To keep continuity with the other volumes, I took a couple of tracks of series stalwarts like Love Canon or from the Pickin On...-crew of other volumes, but one side effect is still a rather huge influx of new faces and names into Bluegrass Chartbusters Vol. 13. 

Having already established most of the bluegrass bands trading in pop and rock covers, most of the new arrivals make their own original music, with the very occasional cover song thrown in for good measure. Such is the case of country/Americana veteran Darrell Scott, who doesn't necessarily do a lot of bluegrass, but got his String Band together for a fantastic take on "Southern Cross", which hereby becomes the first triplicate Bluegrass Chartbuster. Well, what can I say, I love the song, and I have yet to run into a Bluegrass cover I don't appreciate. The Darrell Scott String Band version is interesting as it's the only one with harmony singing, but instead of the close harmonies of the original, they are loose, shouty harmonies, really upping the back porch get together feel of the cover.  All this is to say: it's awesome. 

Also not strictly a bluegrass group, but occasionally dabbling in it: The Whiskey Brothers, opening things here with a simply wonderful cover of Van Morrison's "Brown-Eyed Girl". Also new to the series is the Grass Mountain Unit, a young quartet from Alabama, tht even has double representation on this whole volume. The group, with lead vocalist and mandolin player Drury Hammond tackle Johnny Cash's "Big River", while second-in-command Lucas Black with other bck up plays a superb cover of The Grateful Dead's "Deal". The Mountain Grass Unit will have their debut album out later this month, and are definitely on the rise, so check them out here first!

And the debuts just keep on coming: Just when I thought I had caught all 'play unexpected bluegrass covers for a living' type bands, here come the Grasslers, et ils vient de près de chez moi, plus ou moins. The Grasslers are coming from - careful, pun incoming - the Var Ouest as they like to say (so the south of France), with their covers landing just on the right side of reverence. Their debut in this series is a cover of "Dancing In The Dark". 

Fireside Collective usually play what they call GrooveGrass - with electric guitars and drums - and we'll have some of that on later volumes,  but here they debut with an acoustic take on Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue". Also debuting but here to stay: The Hayde Bluegrass Orchestra, here helped out by Darling West, for "Gold Dust Woman". And finally, in the one-and-done category: The Stray Birds were an acoustic trio out of Lancaster, Pennsylvania - now also sadly defunct - leaving a beautiful version of Nancy Griffith's "I Wish It Would Rain" for our delectation. 

As if all these new folks were not enough, the old(-ish) crew also has some highlights lines up. AJ Lee, once again backed up by Blue Summit, has never sounded as soulful or sultry as on Southern soul classic "He Called Me Baby". Truly wonderful stuff. Plus more quality work from Iron Horse, Cornbread Red, Love Canon and others. I also really like what Kenny Blackwell and violinist Gabe Witcher do with their instrumental take on Neal Diamond's "Red Red Wine", turning the normally upbeat song into a surprisingly elegiac tune. That's one of the things I like about this series, still being able to wring something unexpected from the well-known and even the hoary. 

And that should do it for today, folks. Now load up those twenty tracks and have yourself a grand ol' time. Spoiler: Total keeper, this one...

The Dirty Dozen Of Bluegrass Chartbusters Is Full...

 

It's the ying and yang of the cosmos, or at least of the One Buck Records part of it: One series - beloved All Pearls, No Swine - slows down while another - it took a couple of volumes, but now also beloved Bluegrass Chartbusters - picks up the pace. As said in the last installment of our series, I got to diggin' again...and diggin...and diggin'...And then I got to recompiling...and recompiling...and recompiling...So I did spend a lot of time recently with this series to knock it into shape after a wave of new arrivals made it grow by another 25%! 

The result of some of this work is now right in front of you. The first reworked 'old volume', into which I reseeded some of the new arrivals, the idea being that they don't all arrive in the back half of this series disproportionally. Also: Get some cool new discoveries out early, and for all to hear. I've spent the last week plus or sso grooving to one particular tune, Molly Tuttle's "She's A Rainbow". It's such a propulsive, fun cover of the ol' Rolling Stones experiment - and for me it dusts the original. Now this is bluegrass verging on pop, with drums and electronic effects. But if we consider the latter a nod to the horribly dated psychedelic effects on the original, I'll allow it. Ah, scratch that, I would allow it anyway, it's such a great track. 

But a one highlight reel this is not! We got more where those come from. also making their series debut: The Dirty Grass Players, introducing Jimi Hendrix to the row of covered artists, with their take on "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)". As a one-off, we have brothers Jake And Tebey Vandelaand, covering Aloe Blacc's "Wake Me Up", an immensely popular tune in bluegrass covers, and for good reason. Even in its original pop arragement it sounds half like a lost bluegrass tune already! Tebey Vaadeland is normally more of a rockabilly specialist, but they bring a nice old-school backwoods feel to it.

And there's another series debut for future contributors: The Grateful Bluegrass Boys dropped an album of bluegrass covers in 2017, and nothing since. Paul Simon's "Late In The Evening" has some of the Zydeco feeling (accordeon solo!) that Simon brought - not wthout controversy - to Graceland. The rest is ably handled by the veterans - old and new - of this series. Want to hear "Stop Dragging My Heart Around" in a countrified/deep country fried version? Dale Ann Bradley and Dave Adkins will oblige! Ever thought that Mr. Mister's "Kyrie Eleison" (or "Carry A Laser", for those of us in the know...) would make a nice bluegrass tune? Listen to Love Canon to find out...

Newly covered artists here include Phil Collins (and his coolest solo song), The Allman Brothers, one-hit wonders The Lumineers and Gotye, as well as Jimmy Webb, although his song would only become a hit when a certain country veteran supergroup got their hands on it...and picked up its title as their band name! 

So, you know the deal: Behind its admittedly sobre cover, here's another 20 great bluegrass tunes covering 20 great originals. Need I say more? 

I Feel Like Ol' Michael Corleone And Here's Why...

 

"Just when I thought I was out - they pull me back in". 

Yup. I do feel like Michael Corleone being dragged back into the mafia life. Except here the Cosa Nostra is them Bluegrass Chartbusters. I mentioned in my write-ups that this series is in constant revision. I also said that with this ever-expanding series I was done setting somewhat artificial limits, but admit that secretly, I did. I thought I'd wrap up the series in 25 volumes, but had too much overflow at about 27 voumes and then said to myself 'there's no way we're gonna go beyond 30'. Thirty seemed like a total resonable number to go with, I figures if I come across three or four stragglers, I'll swap them in for a couple of numbers on the last volumes et voilà, my work is done. 

And then reader Kyra Dean pointed out in a comment on the last volume of the Bluegrass Chartbusters that two all-female bluegrass bands, The Fly Birds and Della mae, would possibly make fine additions to this series. Damn you Kyra ! Thank you Kyra! These are indeed excellent bands and they also have some very sweet cover versions, especially The Fly Birds. So both bands will obviously become regular contributors to this series, starting with their lovely cover of James Taylor's lovely "Sweet Baby James". 

But, of course there is not only enough overflow tracks now to go past thirty, this discovery brought out the hunter and gatherer in me once more. I don't know what it is especially about this series, but I'm like a freakin' shark having smelt a tinsel of blood in the water, now scoring the internet and the Youtube once more for cool bluegrass cover of popular rock and pop tunes. Happily I have found another batch of songs and bands /artists I missed the first time around, but of course this means that I have to rework the next, oh, twenty volumes of this series. Just when I thought I was out...

The tons of volues still to come also explains the relatively quick turnaround between volumes this time. And need I specifically point out that volume eleven has another excellent line-up of artists and songs lined up? I don't, but I will anyway! As the last volume before the re-make/re-model work begins, this one is still very much in the old school 'mostly CMH/Pickin On... artists with a growing number of other artists mixed in' mold. Pickin On...'s most popular band Iron Horse have a whooping four numbers here, including their epic take on "American Pie" as a run-out groove. The Sidekicks cover Jimmy Buffet for the firt time with "Son Of A Son Of A Sailor". Brad Davis makes us forget about Huey Lewis, or almost, with his take on "The Power Of Love". Cornbread Red are back with "Be My Yoko Ono" and "Sweet Emotion". 

As for the relative newcomers, Love Canon are back with great takes on "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" and "Danger Zone", The Infamous Stringdusters have an off-the-cuff version of The Killers' "When You Were Young" and Bourbon Revival cover another song ready-made for Bluegrass, Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide". Greensky Bluegrass, not in action since volume 8, check back in with a take on Dylan's "When I Paint My Masterpiece". And as for real newcomers, in a one-off we welcome Theo & Brenna and their wonderful take on The Ronettes' classic "Be My Baby".

As you can gather, another 20 song program full of great tunes, well-played and sung with the quality stamp approval of your truly. Have a quality hoedown with these, same as it ever was. 

Hey There Bubba, Get Yer Fiddle, Time For Another One Of These...

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.

Bye Bye Cats, it's been god knowin' ya!

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...

A Quick, But Long (Re-Up) One While He Is Away (Y'all)

 

A visitor asked for this, but since this might be of interest for more than one of y'all, here's a mini-megapack of Bluegrass Chartbusters, collecting Volumes 1-5. It's never to late to get with this cool series, so be an honorary good ol' boy, get with the fiddles and banjos and enjoy some fantastic rock and pop covers from about 50 years of music history, courtesy of aces like Cornbread Red, Iron Horse, Brad Davis, The Sidekicks, as well as cool local bands like The Grass Cats. More info in the original write-ups, obviously, but yeah, there's some really cool stuff here, so get goin' to the hoedown, y'all...

Hotdang, Boys And Girls, It's Them Incredible Bluegrass Chartbusters Once More...

Yes, that other flagship series is back with another volume, and I'm not overselling anything when I say this one's a killer. Having spent a good bit of stolen moments here and there on this series, I did a ton of revisions on it, including this volume, making place for more and more cool beans discoveries. It also means that the line up of recurring favorites and favorites-to-be is now almost complete. All the stalwarts of previous volumes are back, including relatively recent addition Love Canon with a cover of ZZ Top's "Legs" as the kick-ass opener. But we also have the debuts of two great combos that will bring enjoyment to this series and your homes for weeks and months to come.

So, give a big, hearty 'howdy y'all' to Bourbon Revival and The Infamous Stringdusters. The former are my latest discovery, and boy am I glad I found them. They don't have a lot of covers (or published songs fullstop) to their names, but the ones that they brought out are all really good. They debut with "I Want You To Want Me", 'cuz you can never have enough Cheap Trick in Bluegrass, folks. The Infamous Stringdusters, also a band I stumbled on recently, have been way more active, which makes sense since they recently celebrated their 20th anniversary. Thye are mainly doing original songs, but from time to time record the odd pop or rock cover.  For their first appearance we got a stone-cold classic, Tom Petty's "American Girl". 

Other folks debuting: Interstate Express with the Eagles' "Take It Easy" and The HillBenders, a group specializing in WhoGrass, including covers of the entire Tommy album, from which the claasic "Pinball Wizard" comes. And two other tracks have blink-and-you'll-miss-'em artists: Wheatstone Bridge clock in with a great cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit", but as of today, we won't see them again. And the fine bluegrass cover of Bryan Adams' "Heaven" by Chad Darou and Cia Cherryholmes seems to have been a one-off. 

So, crank this up, get some overalls or straw hats (or not), and get the hootennany goin' once more...

Hotdang, Them Bluegrass Chartbusters Are Back In Town Once More...

...and after visiting our All Pearls, No Swine last week, here's the other long running series at One Buck Records, for your fill of fiddles, banjo, guitar, mandolin and dobro, should the sudden need arise. And arise it should, because once more we have a vey fine collection of very fine bluegrass music assembled here, all in between the sweet spot of humming along as if it was the original on the radio, while admiring (hopefully) how the song has been transformed into a bluegrass tune. I don't know who said it, but it's been said that to check out if a song is any good, pay it as a bluegrass tune, and if it works, then that's a good tune. And this test is passed by all twenty tracks on here, as well as the army of bluegrass bands doing them. 

The same beloved series stalwarts are all here, along with another batch of newcomers: AJ Lee with Blue Summitt (pictured below) for example, who will show up again, here taking on Sheryl Crow's "Soak Up The Sun". Roots music vet Tony Trishka shows up with Billy Strings in tow, as they do a mammoth version of "Gentle On My Mind". Both will show up in this series again. There's also a one-off in the bunch: TGO with "Livin' On A Prayer" that handily beats the Pickin On... version. 

Favorite cuts on this volume include the Gras Cats' take on Steve Earle's outlaw classic "Copperhead Road", Love Canon's "Solsbury Hill" and Iron Horse's version of Guns'n'Roses' "Patience". There is also another bluegrass version of an Imagine Dragons song ("Demons") which is pretty great, which means I now know and like more bluegrass covers of that band than songs that they did. 

Artists covered on this volume that i haven't mentioned yet: Lucinda Williams! Cyndi Lauper! Def Leppard! Kiss! Dire Straits! Barenaked Ldie! Hell, even dumb-ass Kid Rock (thankfully, that track is instrumental...)! Double hell, even freakin' Nickelback! These songs might be terrible in their original version for all that I know, but as bluegrass cuts they are very good. 

So, all of this is to say: Throw on that straw hat and them overalls, and throw them feet in the air while y'all get to dance'n'holler to them Buegrass Chartbusters once more...  

Hotdiggity, Them Bluegrass Chartbusters Are Filling Up Them Airwaves Again...

Time for another hoedown with the series that combines the sound of the backwoods with the popular songs of yesteryear. I might have mentioned it in the write-up to the last volume, but this series is in constant reworking, though here I have, let's say stabilizd, the whole thing, with the next ten or so volumes ready to go. Yes you heard that right. What I initially thought would be about three volumes continued to grow and grow beyond all reasonable proportions, and after setting arbitrary limits to how much volumes the series should have I gave up on that. I wanted to top it at ten, then twelve, then fifteen and now gave up on setting a limit. As long as I keep finding worthwhile bluegrass covers of pop tunes, this series will continue, and so it does. 

What makes these volumes grow is of course also that I keep finding new cool covers or bands that fit the series' profile, wich I then try to weed into the existing, up-until-then-finished volumes, so that some artists that I recently found don't just show up on, like volume thirteen or whatever. So existing numbers get dropped off, then push into one of the next volumes, which then pushes other songs out etc. etc. 

A top notch addition to the roster is Love Canon, a group that focuses on covering songs from the 1980s (they bend the dates a little bit, for, say "Solsbury Hill", which will show up on the next volume). These guys have real chops, and, more importantly, don't treat the whole thing as an ironic hardy-fuckin'-har exercise. For these reasons you haven't seen folks like Hayseed Dixie or The Cleverlys show up in this series. No piss takes on the genre, or bluegrass lampooning of the originals. There's certainly a time and place for that, but not now and not here. A band that skirts with the 'funny bluegrass covers' label, but has just enough reverence for the originals and its tongue not so deeply in cheek that it theatens to push through the skin is the previously featured Steve'n'Seagulls, who with this volume are also gaining their access ticket to Bluegrass Chartbusters. Love Canon stick with Peter Gabriel in reworking "Sledgehammer", while Steve'n'Seagulls cover - of course AC/DC and "Moneytalks".

We also welcome some other newcomers that will also sow up on future volumes, such as The Brothers Comatose, joined on this volume by John Craigie for a take on Don Henley's classic "The Boys Of Summer". Now that is a song that is great, but Henley's really 80s sounding version is probably one of my least favorite takes on the song. Hell, I even prefer The Ataris with their punk rock version (and changing the "deadhead sticker on a cadillac" line to "a Black Flag sticker on a cadillac" is pretty genius. But I digress). Alos new to the series in one-offs (for now): Crazy Mule covering Bob Seger's 'on the road' classic "Turn The Page" and Southern Strings' take on the Doobies' "Listen To The Music", where the young female lead singers vocals bring something to the song that I really like. 

Other than that, we got the usual roster of Pickin' On...artists, and other assembled first choice artists (check out Dale Ann Bradley's smokin' double-time take on "I Won't Back Down"). Again, tons of fun to be had, with other artists being covered including, bt not limited to Madness, Cyndi Lauper, Def Leppard, The Dixie Chicks, The Guess Who, Kings Of Leon, The Beatles, and The Who. The songs we all love and remember!, says he in a smarmy TV salesman voice (from back when you could order fishy looking music boxsets on teleshopping channels). 

If you've been on board with this series for a couple of volumes, you'll know what to expect, and if you haven't - well, its never too late, to find your inner good ol' boy with a heart for classic radio. Plus you'll get some rather fetching cover art, if I migt say so, though I forgot where I picked this up. So, get ready to throw down for the hoedown...

It's A Weekend Hoedown With The Bluegrass Chartbusters !

And the hits just keep on coming. Literally. And I am also proud to report that with this new volume of our Bluegrass Chartbusters series there is an even bigger variety of artists and picking styles than ever before. We are having the hole beloved roster of Pickin' On artists - from Cornbread Red to Iron Horse and Bread Davis - and also bring back Honeywagon into the fold with their cover of Michael Jackson "Thriller". Plus Larry Cordle & Lonesome Standard ! Plus The Wooks ! Plus The Grass Cats ! 

We also welcome a couple of new comers into the fold: Dale Ann Bradley is, hitherto unbeknownst to me, a five-time Bluegrass vocalist of the year and will from now on grace this series with her presence, starting with a fabulous version of the Greatful Dead's "Ripple". Also say hello to the Sawtooth Bluegrass Band, checking in with a tremendously fun version of "Jet Airliner". Getting back to the Pickin' On guys for a second, they got an attention-catching casting coup when assembling Strummin' With The Devil, their tribute to Van Halen. They got David Lee Roth to front the John Jorginson Bluegrass Band for two numbers, including a memorable take on "Jump".

This volume of Bluegrass Chartbusters also includes a couple of numbers that improve on the originals. To be fair, I have no idea what Imagine Dragons' "Demons" sounds like, though, but The Sidekicks' version of it is a total killer. I also never had much use for the Eagles original of "Already Gone", one of Glenn Frey's typically boorish 'Evil Woman'-type songs with its ridiculously overwrought whoo-hoo-hoo's. The who-hoo-hoo's are still present in Dave Dick & Band's take on the song, but they are severely understated, and the song is all the better for it.

Eagle-eyed viewers will realize, that "Southern Cross" was already on the first volume of the series, but this is a different version by the Sidekicks that is almost as good as the Cornbread Red one. If I have two great version of a song, there will probably both show up on different volumes of this series. The word Chartbusters doesn't necessarily apply to every single track on here, as I believe Modest Mouse's "Ocean Breathes Salty" didn't bother any charts anywhere. But it is a great song and a great performance by Iron Horse, who sometimes seem more engaged - and engaging - on lesser known band's material than on some of the big hitters that they cover.

All in all, as ever you get about 80 minutes of fantastic Bluegrass music. So let the Hoedown begin ...

It's The Bluegrass All-Star Revue, Covering Your Favorite Chartbusters Again...

Yup, they're back! Everyone's on board! If you have loved a particular artist in the first four volumes, there's a good chance he, she or the band are here once again. Corngread Red? Check. Honeywagon? Check. Hit & Run Bluegrass? Check. The Petersens? Check. Brad Davis? Check. Iron Horse? Check. David West? Check. The Grass Cats? Check. Tim May? Check. Maybe even Dave Dick & his band? Check. 

Check, check, check. Yes, they're all back, and they're all once again delivering very fine versions of popular hits from the late 1960s ("Here Comes The Sun", courtesy of The Petersens - ladies and gents, we've got our first Beatles cover!) to the late 90's (the aforementioned Mr. Dick covering Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Califronication" and Iron Horse going on "Broadway", tracing the Goo Goo Dolls' steps). In between, we get lots of beloved classics: "Don't Fear The Reaper"! "Stuck In The Middle With You"! "Billie Jean"! "Hungry Heart"! "Sad But True"! "Even Flow"! "Dancing With Myself"!"Heart Of Gold"! and many many more..!

A special mention for the second song from The Petersens - they nail Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", which really is no mean feat! But again, these are all good to great. It's like some weird Twilight Zone jukebox that plays the greatest hits of yesteryear - but only in Bluegrass versions. 

Hey, I'd listen to that station. Do you? 

It's A Holiday Hootenanny, y'all, with the newest edition of them Bluegrass Chartbusters...

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! 

Beware Of Cats!

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. 

No, OBG, no! Refrain yourself! No 'Hit & Run' jokes here, no, sir!!!

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!

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...

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...

Bluegrass Chartbusters Ahead! Yeehaw and Hotdiggity!

If you have followed this blog for a bit, you already know that, when not listening to folks giving it a neo-traditional spin, I like my bluegrass...weird-ish. I'm down with folks putting hip hop and bluegrass together, and I'm down with a couple of Finns doing bluegrass covers of hard'n'heavy songs. So, it's fair to say I'm not a traditionalist. Still, I wouldn't have bet on engulfing myself as much as I did in bluegrass groups covering popular songs, and I certainly hadn't expected to do so with the help of the Pickin On... series. After albums highlighting bluegrass covers of single artists like Neil Young and Green Day, time to take it a step further and wander through more than fifty years of charts history...via the all-new Bluegrass Chartbusters series!

This album that runs through songs from 1968 to 2015 also doubles as a bit of a Best Of of Cornbread Red, for my money the best band that worked for CMH and the Pickin' On...-series. These guys burned brightly, and quickly - relatively speaking of course - going through ten tribute albums in three years...and then just vanished. Cornbread Red were built around three bluegrass veterans: Stan Dailey on lead vocals and bass, Marc Scott on banjo and mandolin, and Dennis Clifton on guitar, dobro and bouzouki. They recorded those famous blugrass tributes to, among others, Franz Ferdinand, Aerosmith, The Offspring, and Maroon 5, as well as doing the lion's share of the label's two classic rock tributes, from which a majority of their tracks were sourced. Bluegrass bands covering pop and rock songs can always come off as gimmicky and joke-y, and that's kind of the point in a way, but these guys actually found the essence of the songs, instead of just doing fun covers. 

Which means that their versions of these rock and pop classics (and semi-classics) have now supplanted the originals for me. Their version of "Comfortably Numb" is my favorite version of that song, bar none. I've never liked Roger Waters' vocals on the original. I've always liked the melody of "Here Without You" by Three Doors Down, but the compressed nu rock production didn't do it any favors. It's not needed anymore, as isn't the smooth sounds of Maroon 5, whose "You Will Be Loved" is much better as a bluegrass tune than a soft pop number. And finally, I'd probably go out and say that Cornbread Red's version of The Offspring's "Self-Esteem" is also my new favorite take on that number. I liked Steve'n'Seagulls' version fine enough, but that one really tipped over onto the humour side, whereas Cornbread Red's version really finds a sort of logical variation for it, protraying the protagonist loser like a country bumpkin who's getting abused and is too nice to do something about it. You should also check out what they do with Cheap Trick's "Surrender". Good stuff. 

The other 'name' band in CMH's employ is of course Iron Horse out of Alabama (below), who are taking care of the majority of the other tracks here, including Kansas' "Carry On Wayward Son", a cool version of Steve Miller Band's "The Joker", lovely takes on Van Morrison' "Into The Mystic" and Elton John's "Rocket Man", as well as a cover of Kings Of Leon's "Molly's Chambers", the only non-chartbuster here, but a cool version of a cool song, that got the band noticed in the first place. The third band in the Pickin On... stable is The Sidekicks, who more or less replaced Cornbread Red on the roster, though they seem to be less like a real working band and more like a bunch of varying studio pros drafted in for the occasion. Be that as it may,  their take on Hanson's "Mmmbop", for example, does two things: make you understand the lyrics for the first time (try that on the spead up mickey mouse voiced original) and make you appreciate the song (although adult Hanson's acoustic readings of their song are very good as well). They also have a nice, drawl-y take on Blind Melon's "No Rain", their version of Imagine Dragons' "I Bet My Life" is clearly an improvement on the original (not that hard) and a cover of Hootie & The Blowfish's "Only Wanna Be With You". 

This is a fun, rollickin' time, offering often beautiful takes on some of the best known songs from the last half decade. You don't even need to be a particular big fan of bluegrass, armed with even a basic appreciation of acoustic or country-tinged music you'll probably find something to like here. Yeehaw, let the good times roll...