Carrying on the Family Tradition

Photos by Emma McCoury

If you have been to a Del McCoury Band show in the past several years, you may have noticed a young man standing in the back playing the guitar and wondered about him and his relationship to the band.  This young guitar picker happens to be Ronnie McCoury’s oldest son, Heaven.

The first thing that I wanted to address with Heaven when I talked with him was his unique name.  If you look at the Del McCoury Band website, he is referred to as “Evan” under the biographical listing for his father.  But, on his personal Instagram and Facebook pages, he is referred to as “Heaven McCoury.”  When I asked him about the origin of his name he said, “I get asked that a lot, but that is more a question for my parents.”  To which I replied, “You must know a story?”  He said, “The story is that after I was born, I went a week or two as ‘Baby.’  I was un-named.  Then they decided that I was their ‘little piece of heaven.’  That is about it.”  When I asked Ronnie McCoury about his son’s name, he said, “We called him ‘Heaven’ because ‘heaven comes from within.’  But, from the time he was born, we nicknamed him Evan.  When he was a teenager, he decided that he wanted to use his full name.”

Growing up in Ronnie McCoury’s home and being the grandson of Del McCoury, there is no question about how Heaven discovered bluegrass music.  When asked about how he became interested in playing the guitar, he said, “We always had instruments laying around the house and there was a little nylon string guitar that I started messing around on.  I was about five and my dad taught me the G, C and D chords.  With that, and a capo, I could play along with the guys.  That drove me a little bit because I could be included in what my dad was doing.”  When Ronnie was asked about his son’s start on guitar, he said, “His mother got him a little guitar and he never stopped.  He always loved it.”

Although he was “messing around” on the nylon string guitar when very young, Heaven said that he started to really develop an interested in playing when he was ten and listening to his father’s iPod and heard “Eruption” by Eddie Van Halen.  He said, “I thought, ‘What the heck is that?!’  So, I started learning a bunch of that classic rock stuff.”  He said that between the ages of ten to thirteen he really became inspired to learn how to play both the acoustic and electric guitars.

Although he did study with guitar teacher Justin Clark for about six months, Heaven said he started by watching YouTube tutorials for classic rock until his ear and playing developed to where he could learn by ear.  Ronnie said, “He has always been around a lot of great musicians and he has a good ear.”

When asked how long he has been performing with the Del McCoury Band, Heaven said, “Pretty much as long as I can remember.  There are pictures of me on stage holding a mini-guitar.  I didn’t know what to do with it.  I would hold it and just strum the open strings.  That must have been before I was five.  Now Rob’s son, Vassar, is doing the same thing.  He started with a cello and played it like a bass.  Now, at 12, he is playing guitar.  The band didn’t care if we didn’t know what we were doing.  They just included us if we wanted to play and we figured it out real-time on stage with those guys.”

When asked if the members of the band helped him to learn, he said, “When we are on the road I asked Cody Kilby, who plays with The Travelin’ McCourys, a lot of questions.  For a while, when I played a break, my dad would say, ‘That was good, but what if you add this little thing here.  So, I also got his insight about how he would approach it.”

Although Heaven goes out on the road more often with The Del McCoury Band than The Travelin’ McCourys, he said that he does perform with The Travelin’ McCourys if Cody Kilby can’t make a show.  A lot of times both bands will be playing at the same venue or festival and he will sit in with both bands on those occasions.   He said, “Usually with The Travelin’ McCourys I’ll get up for the last few songs.  It is usually the jammier songs, like the Grateful Dead songs.  Cody and I will trade solos and he’ll show me how it is done.  He keeps me humble.”

When asked specifically about what he has learned from Cody, Heaven said, “Bluegrass solos—to get them to sound full and clean and melodic—can be daunting.  Cody does all of those things.  What he plays is not just a jumbled mess of pentatonics.  He can sing that solo even though the tempo is flying.  It is really pretty with great tone and his right hand is powerful.”   

In addition to Cody Kilby, another big influence on Heaven’s bluegrass guitar playing was Tony Rice.  He said, “I have all of his albums.  His musicality and tone are so special.  A big portion of my flatpicking upbringing was Tony and Cody and also the people that would come to jams at our house.  Seeing people like David Grier and Bryan Sutton…getting introduced to those guys and diving in on them…and finding people like Jake Workman and Trey Hensley down the line.  Great pickers.”

Heaven’s grandfather, Del McCoury is one of the best rhythm guitar players in the history of bluegrass music.  When asked if he has learned about playing rhythm by being on stage with Del, Heaven said, “Oh, yeah, I still do.  Every show I am locked into his right hand.  He just has such a flow to his right hand.  He keeps it so loose, but it is also just groovin’ at all times and his bass runs sound so authentic.  Everything he does is intentional.  I still learn every night from him.  Growing up in it, I didn’t realize or understand what I had in front of me.   It doesn’t get better than Pop’s rhythm playing and to have all of those role models on stage with me is something that I took for granted for a long time because that is all I knew.  Later, I realized that it was something very special.”

Since the Del McCoury band has both Del and Heaven on guitars, Heaven tries to capo at different positions than Del in order to provide a different tonal range.  He said, “I capo at different positions and use different chord forms so that I’m not sitting right on top of him. A lot of times I will play on the higher pitched strings and avoid the lower frequencies because that is where he is playing.  I see where everyone else is at and then I go somewhere else.”  

In addition to performing with the McCoury bands, Heaven also has his own ten-piece band called The Broomestix.  The band’s website says that it “…blends several different genres of music to create a unique brand of R&B.”  Heaven describes it as a “jazz/funk/R&B type thing.”  The Broomestix have performed at DelFest and Heaven remembers that one year Billy Strings got up on stage with them.  He said, “We played one of his songs and we funked it up a bit.  He played the electric with us.”  The Broomestix have been together since Heaven was a freshman in high school.  The band started in 2013 and they played their first time at DelFest in 2015.  There are three original members that are still in the band and they have released three albums to date.  

Additionally, Heaven performs in several country bands.  He said, “I perform in about six different bands on the electric guitar.  I love a lot of different kinds of music and I love playing it all.” Most of the bands Heaven performs with stay around the Nashville area, although he travels some playing with country singer Julie Williams and one of the country bands he plays with performs on cruise ships.

When asked if he brings over any of his electric guitar techniques onto the acoustic guitar when he plays bluegrass, Heaven said, “I think that happens without trying.  It is just part of my vocabulary.  The melodies from that classic rock world will pop into my head.  But, I think that there is only so much that you can do when you are on acoustic trying to play electric things.  It is a different world.  I try and do my best to flip a switch and come from a bluegrass place.  But, sometimes it is inevitable that some of the classic rock will come out.  My Pops (Del) did give me to chance to play the electric on a record.  That was the first time he’s had an electric guitar on one of his recordings.” 

When asked about his son’s eclectic musical interests, Ronnie said, “When he was in school he got in with a group of kids his age and they formed a jazz band.  That put him on that path.  He knows music theory and how chords work with each other.  But all along the way he was hearing all the great flatpickers.  He has incorporated both.  I’m not comparing him to Tony Rice, but Tony was a bluegrass guy who got into jazz late—in his twenties—and he really got into it.   Evan was pretty early into jazz and bluegrass.  He has got both of that in him and he is a monster electric guitar player.  He does stuff that is way above my head.”

Since he was about nine years old Heaven has been attending DelFest.  He said, “It is kind of like our Christmas.  It has been a part of my life for the majority of my life.  It has been cool growing up in it and seeing it grow and succeed.  The older I get, I try to integrate myself more into it.”  For the last two or three years, Heaven has taught at the DelFest Academy.  He said, “I love teaching there because I was a student at it for all those years and Cody was my teacher.  I was a student for a long time.  Teaching there has been a great experience.”

As a kid who grew up playing classic rock on the electric guitar, one of the highlights of Heaven’s career was when the Del McCoury band was invited to play at Eric Clapton’s Crossroads festival and he had the opportunity to perform with Clapton.  He said, “That was super cool.  Eric had emailed the management and asked if Pop would play the Crossroads Guitar Festival.  For a guitar player, that is about the coolest gig you could come across.  We went there and it was about as stacked of a line up as you could get if you like guitar.  We went to LA and we played a set and we got Jerry Douglas, Sierra Hull, Bradley Walker and Eric Clapton to come up with us.  Eric wanted to come up near the end of our set and do ‘Always On My Mind’ and ‘Fall Like Rain.’  We jammed on that and I soloed right before Eric Clapton.  That was one of the highlights and scariest and coolest moments.  Not to mention there was also 20,000 people in the crowd.  That was quite an experience.  Eric was so sweet and ecstatic.  It was cool to see someone of that stature diggin’ what we are doing.  We rehearsed those songs and then he said he was going to go have lunch.  A couple of minutes go by and he came back in with his wife and he wanted us to meet her.  We were just jamming after that and they sat and listened.  Eric had a practice amp and guitar in there and he picked it up and started playing along with us.  We have a video of him taking a good solo on ‘Cabin Home On The Hill’ on electric.  It was pretty awesome.”  

As if playing in more than a half a dozen bands doesn’t keep him busy enough, Heaven said that he is also learning how to mix and master recordings in his home studio.  He said he also enjoys playing disc golf and tries to get out to do that at least once a week.

Although Heaven enjoys playing every kind of music—from classic rock to R&B to funk to country and jazz—with the last name McCoury, it is hard to get too far away from bluegrass.  And even though he has had many mentors in his musical life, he points to his father as being the most influential.  He said, “Out of everyone, my dad has been the most influential because he has always been there and I trust his opinion.  Now, all of the musical decisions that I’m making stem from all of the tips that mostly came from my dad.  He is also a good guitar player himself and he taught me a lot when I was starting out.  He kind of gave me the base of it all.”

Del McCoury, now 85 years old, has been performing bluegrass since he was a teenager and famously joined Bill Monroe’s band early in 1962.  His oldest son, Ronnie, joined Del on stage as a member of Del McCoury and his Dixie Pals  in 1981 when he was fourteen years old.  Now, for years, Ronnie’s oldest son, now 26, has been performing with both his father and grandfather ensuring that the McCoury family bluegrass tradition will live long into the future.