The Travelin’ McCourys Blaze Their Own Trail
Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine
June 2010, Volume 44, Number 12
The Travelin’ McCourys have a couple things they’d like you to know. First, despite rumors, Del is alive and well and not planning to retire for a long, long time. Second, they’re getting tired of those “Del-less” McCoury Band jokes.
It all started a little more than a year ago when the eighty percent of the Del McCoury Band (DMB) that’s not Del—mandolinist Ronnie McCoury, banjo player Rob McCoury, fiddler Jason Carter, and bassist Alan Bartram—started performing as the Travelin’ McCourys (a play on the name of rock supergroup the Traveling Wilburys). Enlisting a rotating pool of guitarists, including Jeff White, Kentucky Thunder’s Cody Kilby, Josh Williams, Jim Nunally, and Josh Shilling, and they played regional venues like Nashville’s Station Inn and Columbia Caverns’ Bluegrass Underground, as well as bluegrass and jam band festivals, the latter often with the Lee Boys, an electric sacred steel group. They’re planning a busy 2010, including a package tour of performing arts centers with the Lee Boys, as well as more festivals and shows on their own. An album with the Lee Boys is in final stages of production for the family-owned label, McCoury Music.
Their biggest project this year teams them with bluegrass-loving mainstream country star Dierks Bentley. They’re part of Up On The Ridge (Capitol), the long- awaited acoustic project by Bentley, who won a Grammy for his duet with Harley Allen on the 2003 Louvin Brothers tribute, Livin Lovin Los in Bentley includes a bluegrass track on each of his country albums. Plans include a 25-show tour in April and May, leading to a June release.
“I’m the Travelin’ McCourys’ biggest fan,” says Bentley. “They’re able to go with anybody. They can go to bluegrass festivals. They can do stuff with me. They can do stuff with Phish. I’ve learned so much playing with those guys. They’re just operating on a different plane all the way around, not only in their music, but also in their conduct.”
While it’s common around Nashville for bandmembers to form part-time groups when not backing their marquee-name bosses, from the start the Travelin’ McCourys had a more serious game plan. “It’s kind of an inevitable thing,” explains Rob McCoury, noting that his dad turned 71 in February. “Eventually, he’ll get to where—and I hope it’s a long time from now—but eventually there’ll come a time that if we’re gonna play music, we’re gonna have to do it without him. I don’t know a really good way to say that. My wife, she asked me, ‘Well when do you think your dad’ll hang it up as far as getting tired of doing it or just wants to retire or whatever?’ And I said, ‘He never will, as long as he feels he’s doing it justice. He’s not gonna get up there and sound bad. He’s that kind of guy.’” Fueling retirement rumors was last year’s ambitious boxed set, Celebrating 50 Years Of Del McCoury. The collection of fifty of Del’s best songs goes all the way back to his start as a young North Carolina banjo picker who, by 1963, was good enough to audition for Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys. (He was beat out by innovative melodic picker Bill Keith, but Monroe liked Del’s singing so much that he had him switch to guitar, completing a beloved Blue Grass Boys lineup.) More than a look back, the boxed set provided further proof of Del’s continued vocal power, with 35 of those McCoury classics newly recorded. “My dad, he sung so good on that stuff,” says Ronnie McCoury. “When he went into the studio, you could really tell that he knew there was a purpose here.”
Family Business
Del’s dedication to bluegrass has never been in question. He’s always been ready to sing, whether leading his own group, guesting with others, or just harmonizing backstage for fun. I remember going with Red and Harley Allen to see Del at the tiny Village Tavern in Cincinnati in the early ‘80s. They ended the evening singing trios, trading parts, trying to outdo one another, reaching higher and higher into the vocal stratosphere. As capos crept up guitar necks, Del grinned and laughed the entire time. For Del McCoury, bluegrass was a way of life, not just a gig. And that’s never changed. In more than forty years as a bluegrass fan, musician, and writer, I’ve never known anyone who loves the music better than Del McCoury. The only thing he loves more is his family. And, Del’s purpose behind the “50/50” box set involved both. Along with his golden bluegrass anniversary celebration, it was a business move, allowing McCoury Music to own new masters of Del’s best-known recordings made for Rounder, Rebel, and Arhoolie.
“It just made sense that the family had this stuff,” says Ronnie. That’s part of a long-term plan of the McCourys and manager Stan Strickland, he adds. “We just got a lot of our business straightened out the last ten years.” The biggest part of that was starting their own label. They were part of the “Down From The Mountain” tour when producer T-Bone Burnett tried to sign them to his Sony- distributed DMZ label. He wasn’t alone. “We had been at Skaggs (Family Records) and we were done there, and there was about eight major record labels that we sat down with and they all were interested,” says Ronnie. “That really made us think. There was something in the air with the whole acoustic bluegrass thing. And we knew that most records that are made on a major label have a very short shelf life. We decided, ‘Look, if we make our own records, get a good distributor, the family will own the masters forever.’ And it took money and time, but we did it.”
It was that same strategy of building the McCoury brand that led the family to start their eclectic DelFest in Cumberland, Md., in 2008. And most recently, that business plan turned the bandmembers’ hobby into something more. The guys had been doing projects of their own for years. The brothers released Ronnie & Rob McCoury in 1995, and Ronnie cut a solo album, Heartbreak Town in 2000, followed by his children’s bluegrass album, Little Mo’ McCoury, in 2007. He also conceived and co-produced the all-star Bluegrass Mandolin Extravaganza in 1999, which brought together a who’s who of the instrument. Fiddler Jason Carter released his On The Move in 1996. But, from the start, their main goal was making Del the major headliner he deserved to be. “We always knew Dad was a star in our eyes,” says Ronnie. From the late ’60s into the ’80s, as Del and his wife Jean raised their three kids (Ronnie and Rob have a sister, Rhonda) back in York County, Pennsylvania, music remained a weekend sideline. Del worked in timber, cutting trees, driving log trucks and otherwise risking those million-dollar fingers.
New Generation
Ronnie started playing with his dad in 1981 at age fourteen. By 1989, younger brother Rob joined on banjo. Back then, the band was called the Dixie Pals and included Del’s brother, Jerry, on bass. Del quit timber in the mid-‘80s and, in 1992, the McCoury family relocated to Nashville, which was, at the time, in the midst of a country and bluegrass boom.
Ronnie had started as a frustrated fiddler, turning to mandolin when he was nine. Rob was eight when he started picking Del’s 1934 Gibson archtop, the same banjo Del had used to audition for Bill Monroe. They had a great teacher. “Dad had a lot of patience,” says Rob. “He was leaving the house before daylight and getting home way after dark, but he still had patience to show me something or straighten me out if I wasn’t doing something the way he showed me. He showed me the forward roll first and the first thing I learned with both hands was the hammer-on to ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown.’ I guess his thinking then was, instead of just practicing rolls, he’d give me something exciting to play.”
“Dad, he never ever pushed us or told us to practice or anything,” says Ronnie, who holds a record eight IBMA awards for Mandolin Player Of The Year. “We just always knew that Dad was really happy when he played music and when he was around the band. Not that he wasn’t happy in general, but he was ultra happy playing.”
In return, the boys stretched their dad’s musical horizons, adding bluegrass- friendly songs by rockers Tom Petty, Richard Thompson, and the Lovin’ Spoonful to the band’s set list. DMB has also covered such non-bluegrass artists as George Jones, Jerry Lee Lewis, Robert Cray, and even Frank Sinatra. But, though the boys may have opened that door, they’re quick to credit Del’s eagerness to adapt that eclectic material to his personal high-lonesome sound. “In the ‘90s, when I got him that Tom Petty song, he could have easily said no. But, he knew that there was something there. Once we got him turned that way a little bit, this last record, he picked every song.”
DMB fans include seminal jam band Phish, which brought the band on tour with them in the ’90s and also with the Boss himself. Del had been invited to be part of the Pete Seeger ninetieth birthday tribute at New York’s Madison Square Garden, says Ronnie. “And Dad’s in the hallway, and Bruce Springsteen comes up and tells him he’s a fan. Pretty wild.”
Del and the boys have continued obliterating boundaries at the Bonnaroo festival in Tennessee, where they’ve been regular headliners. “We introduce him and he gets a standing ovation,” Ronnie says with a wide grin. “When that happens, there’s isn’t nobody more proud than me and my brother. I would do anything to see my Dad raised up to the next level.” For that next level, as the premier representative of a particular brand of American roots music, their role model is B.B. King. In 2010. Del will play between 75-100 dates. The most talked- about is a package tour with DMB and another American music icon, New Orleans’ Preservation Hall Jazz Band.
His reduced schedule is a supply-and-demand booking decision to keep Del’s price high and avoid too much wear and tear. “To do that, you have to not be on the road. I mean, we’ve road warriored for years. But, you have to get to the point where, if you want to see Del, this is the time you get to see him.”
While Rob and Ronnie know the story of B.B. King, they also know the story of Bill Monroe. As a band, the Blue Grass Boys died with its leader. “Dad wants us to get our own feet and be out there,” Ronnie explains. “I think it would worry him and my mother both if something was to happen to him and then here we are, starting totally from the ground up again. We’re where we are because of the hard work that we’ve done with the McCoury name that my dad has blessed us with. So. let’s see what we can do.”
Backing Up and Rocking Out
Along with the Travelin’ McCourys’ ongoing work with Bentley, DMB has backed singer/songwriter Steve Earle on The Mountain and also recorded with Patty Loveless. Ronnie performs on Willie Nelson’s new, stripped-down Country album, while Rob has been cowriting with Ronnie Bowman, including “Revenuer’s Blues,” on the DMB’s new Family Circle CD.
Ronnie would like to see the Travelin’ McCourys become for bluegrass what Booker T. & the MGs were to Memphis soul, a self-contained houseband, recording with other artists as they have with Bentley, Earle, or Loveless. For Ronnie and Rob. Who’ve been playing with their dad since literally picking up their instruments, the Travelin’ McCourys project has been liberating. “I’ve been playing in my dad’s band for 28 years or something like that, since I was 14, and I’m almost 42,” says Ronnie. “I haven’t had the opportunity to really go out and do a whole lot of different things. Now, I’m not complaining at all. I love what I’m doing and I’m going to keep going with it. But. this gives us the opportunity to play with other people.”
The family feeling extends beyond biological McCourys. Jason Carter, from Lloyd in eastern Kentucky, has been in the band almost half his life, joining in 1992 at age nineteen. Even the “new guy,” bassist Alan Bartram, has been in the group since 2005. Carter started on mandolin, but had his first professional fiddling gig with the Goins Brothers. He credits Melvin Goins with reining in his tendency to play too “notey.” “‘Play that long bow, play that long bow,’ I can remember him preaching to me,” says Carter. But, he says his bluesy style was primarily shaped by Del. “A lot of my style of fiddle playing, I basically learned how to play being in the Del McCoury Band,” explains Carter. “I would learn the melody just how he sung it and, of course, he hit every blues note there is, and I just tried to copy his voice.”
The Travelin’ McCourys allows Carter to stretch some more. “We’ve done several different things, from doing the Lee Boys thing—which is almost a rock thing, everybody’s plugged in and loud—to doing just regular bluegrass shows where we’re all featured,” Carter explains. “We all sing and we’re trying to find new material that we can do. The good thing was when Alan joined the band, there was three of us that could sing. We don’t have to rely on getting a guitar player that can sing.” But, like everyone in the DMB, he’s not looking to change his regular gig. “I’ll tell you what; I love that job. I really do. I’m a huge Del McCoury fan and always have been. Even a couple nights ago, we had a show, Del was just really singing great. Everybody was playing good together—just a great show. We’re really lucky, man; we’ve got the best of both worlds. It would be hard to find another boss like Del who encourages us to go out and do our own thing.”
Bartram 32, was raised on the Del McCoury Band’s music. He grew up in New London, Pa., near the legendary bluegrass and country venue, Sunset Park. An uncle played in the regional bluegrass band Special Blend, but it took a trip to the Delaware Valley Bluegrass Festival to hook the then 17-year-old guitarist. He soon formed a bluegrass band, and when the bass player left a couple years later, Bartram took over. “The other guy was a much better guitar player. I said, ‘I’ll start playing bass and see how it goes.’ And, I really liked it.”
Bartram gets to sing more lead in the Travelin’ McCourys, and even does some original songs. “What better outlet to do your own material than that?” he says. And, when the Travelin’ McCourys go electric with the Lee Boys, he’ll plug in a Squier Precision bass. But, like the other guys, he’s happiest in DMB, playing his big blond Kay bass behind the premier voice in traditional bluegrass. He calls it the gig for any bass bluegrass player. “I can’t really think of a better one. I’ve been really blessed.”
Not The Del McCoury Tribute Band
With the Travelin’ McCourys, they get to play both ends of the bluegrass spectrum, from hard-core acoustic bluegrass not far removed from DMB (at times, Ronnie sounds uncannily like his dad) to the outer reaches of electric jamgrass with the Lee Boys, blending Roosevelt Collier’s pedal steel with foot-stomping southern gospel. It’s a formula that the best progressive bluegrass has always shared—an adventurous musical attitude grounded by deep love and respect for tradition. As Ronnie says, “You got to know the roots of the music.”
“The Travelin’ McCourys is a whole other realm,” says Bartram. “On one hand, it’s a very traditional bluegrass outfit. On the other hand, we try to stretch the boundaries a little bit. But, it’s also a way to start the next step. I hate to think about it. but we’re not going to be playing with Del forever. So, there is going to have to be something after the Del McCoury Band.”
Yet, even though audiences know the members of the Travelin’ McCourys well, it hasn’t been easy, Ronnie admits. “Every show we’ve done, every kind of thing has flown out; ‘Del’s retiring. Del’s done. Where’s your dad?’ And every place we play, they’re all yelling for my dad’s songs. And I appreciate that, but, at the same time, there’s a lot of that I can’t do or don’t want to do. But, I know it’s gonna happen when you’re the son of someone that’s made such a huge mark in this business,” says Ronnie.
They don’t want the Travelin’ McCourys to become the Del McCoury Tribute Band, but they understand it’s part of establishing themselves on their own terms. “Number one is to get out and get our own thing happening; get our feet wet,” says Ronnie. “Number two is to be able to let everybody else shine a little bit more. Dad features us all every night, but this way we all get to do a little bit more. And everybody gets to talk a little bit, ‘cause that stuff matters.”
Even as the industry evolves, dealing with new technologies and economic realities, there’s no downturn in that famous McCoury optimism. “Despite the economy and all that stuff, people still need to be entertained, get their mind off of things,” says Ronnie. “It’s a hard time to be trying something new. But, at the same time, we’re kind of going on our name and getting out there. We get to be part of this golden age for my dad, and it’s the beginning for us. It’s an exciting time.”
Larry Nager is a Nashville-based musician and writer. He’s the author of Memphis Beat and writer/co-producer of the documentary Bill Monroe: Father of Bluegrass Music.
