Interview with bluegrass legend Del McCoury

Del McCoury may be 75 years old, but he’s not ready to slow down. In October, Del embarked upon a tour with mandolin icon David Grisman, further deepening their collaborative history. They will make a stop at The Keswick Theatre on Thursday, Nov. 13, where they will be joined by Hot Rize. City Paper had the opportunity to lock down the bluegrass legend for an interview, during which we discussed his history with David Grisman, why he prefers to play without a set list and the evolution of bluegrass.

City Paper: You and David Grisman go way back to 1963, when you were playing with Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys, and have played together many times over the years. How does it feel to be touring with him?

Del McCoury: We’re both excited about touring together. We have known each other for quite a while now, and we’ve recorded quite a few things. Years ago back in California — probably in the ’90s — David would ask my band and me to come to his studio and record stuff, and we’d go there and think of a song and just do it. We did a lot of things there in that studio. Vince Gill was in his band with Herb Pedersen, Jimmy Buchanan, and Emory Gordy [Jr.]. Vince Gill decided to move to Nashville and start his career as a country singer, and David called me and said, “We’ve got all these dates booked with Vince. You should come out and do these dates with us.” It was a time that I could do it, because I wasn’t busy with my own band, so I went out there and did them. That was the first time I played with David extensively.

We’ll play together sometime towards the end of the show. We’re both really looking forward to it. We’re just doing some old songs that we figured a lot of folks may have not heard before. Some of them are duets. He wrote an end-tune that he calls “Del & Dawg.” He’s good about writing new things, especially instrumentals.

CP: What are some of the major differences between the way David plays mandolin and the way Ronnie [McCoury] plays mandolin?

DM: Well, they actually both learned from Bill Monroe. David did in earlier years, and my son Ronnie did in the later years. They have different styles. That all comes out when you get older; you bring things out that are unique to you. Every person does that. Years ago, David was playing a lot of Bill Monroe things, and then he started to write mandolin tunes. He still has a jazz quintet that he plays with. He’s a great jazz player. Of course, Ronnie has played hardcore bluegrass for a long time, but he can really sit in with anybody. Once you’re playing a long time, you get pretty blunt with your style, and you can adapt quickly. Those guys can sit in with anybody — a jazz band or a blues band or whatever, you know? Or a country band, for that matter. Ronnie has recorded quite a few things with country people here in town. David did earlier, too. But they still have different styles when they play.

When they play together, one will play a line and the other one with mock him. He’ll match it as close as he can. They do that back and forth. They play great together. My band is out on the road a lot, and my manager wanted to know if there was anyone who I wanted to go out and tour with. I said David Grisman, and that’s how it came about. It’s just the two of us — just a guitar and a mandolin and two voices, for the most part. We kind of have a scripted show. It’s hard to just go out there and do anything, because the other guy may not know it. But he told me that he likes surprises, as well. Improv is always fun. The audience can feel that.

CP: You just played with banjo virtuosos Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn in D.C. As a former banjo player, can you talk a bit about how Béla has changed the traditional perception of the banjo?

DM: He really did. He’s a great musician, period. We’ve played together quite a few times through the years. We played that show in D.C., and then we played the next night in Portland with my own band, and with Béla and Abigail. Ronnie, Abigail, and I sang a trio, and then Rob and Béla did an old swing number.

Béla will just branch out and do things on his own on just about any tune. He can play single notes, which most decent banjo players don’t play unless they do the banjo roll. He’ll play single-string, kind of like Don Reno used to do, and it’s really great. He’s a really accomplished musician. He can just sit up there and play with anybody. He’ll just go out there and play like he knows it, even if he’s never heard it before.

CP: I saw you play with Béla at DelFest this year. It was one of the best festivals I’ve ever been to. Is there anything specific you’re looking for when putting together the lineup?

DM: Not really. We try to get the headliners booked early. I think we do have the headliners booked for this coming year. My son, Ronnie, and Roy Carter, who runs High Sierra Music Festival, kind of lead the booking. Roy loves to book bands. I would pull my hair out if I had to do that. So he and Ronnie, after conferring with my manager, the guys in my band, and my wife Jean and me, will decide who to book. It’s a shame, but I don’t know who’s confirmed and who isn’t yet for next year. You’ll have to interview Ronnie to find out! It will be a good lineup again, though.

CP: The first time I ever saw you play was in 2010 at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. I remember the acoustics in that venue as being unbelievable. Do you prefer to play in a venue like that over an outdoor stage at a festival?

DM: I like the variety. It’s so quiet at those types of venues, but I love playing for a huge audience at a festival. I love the variety of audiences. We do different things for different audiences — whatever fits the mood. It kind of dictates what you’re going to sing or play that day. Of course, we do a lot of requests. We don’t really have a setlist. I figure that if we go in there and the audience wants a song, it’s better if I just do what they want to hear instead of a song that I want to do. I get the band introduced, and then most of the time we’ll just go into requests after that. We’ll try to work in songs from our latest record or something like that, but a lot of times people will request a song we haven’t done in a year, and we’ll do it. I don’t worry about the band — they know it — it’s me I’m worried about! Sometimes I’ll have to turn to one of the musicians and ask them what the next line or the next verse is. It’s what keeps you young, I think. It keeps the audience entertained, too. I just never like to stick to a specific setlist. It may be more polished, but I don’t care much about polish. It keeps your repertoire bigger, because they request something as soon as you’re starting to forget it, and then it’s fresh in your mind again.

CP: Are there any musicians or bands, bluegrass or otherwise, who have never joined you on stage with whom you would really like to play?

DM: Most of the people I really admire I’ve played with at one time or another, but I think you’ve gotta have an open mind about music. It’s all related. When I was a kid, I didn’t think this, but Bill Monroe learned from people, even though he had a music that he kind of invented. He told me that when I worked for him back in the early ‘60s. He learned from other musicians, but they didn’t know it because he interpreted it in his own way. If you think about it, it was the same with the old jazz musicians. They learned from guys who were older, and it’s the same as the bluegrass musicians. Their style makes it sound brand new, even though it may be something old, but in a style that is completely new, you know? It’s disguised. I like playing with different people. Like I said, the music is all related anyway, even if it’s not bluegrass. It’s still akin to something — old hillbilly music, or twang, or jazz, or whatever.

CP: How would you describe the evolution of bluegrass music over the years that you’ve been playing? Do you notice any unusual influences that have become prominent recently?

DM: That’s really hard to say. The main influences were early on. For example, Bill Monroe, Lester Flatts, Earl Scruggs, and Chubby Wise. They were kind of the architects of this music. I think it was by accident that it all came together. Bill Monroe recorded with pianists and accordions, and he had drums all throughout his career on his records. But he was doing a lot of different things in his early years. Eventually, he hired Lester Flatts to sing lead with him and play guitar, and he had Chubby Wise, who was a swing fiddler from Florida. He heard Bill Monroe on the Grand Ole Opry and thought that he wanted to play with that guy, even though he didn’t know what that guy was doing! He said that Bill taught him to play a break in a song that he sang, because the fiddle was the closest thing to a voice.

They had most of the band together by then, and this guy [Earl Scruggs] from North Carolina comes in with a three-finger roll on the banjo, and that’s what completed the whole sound. That wasn’t called bluegrass then — it wasn’t called bluegrass for years — but this was a different kind of music from the regular country, or hillbilly, or folk, or whatever. And it was. It was different. Because Bill Monroe had a band called the Blue Grass Boys, they started calling it bluegrass. Bill Monroe, Flatt, Scruggs, Bobby Osborne, Jimmy Martin, Mac Wiseman… they were the early stylists of the music. It’s hard to find anybody today that really impacted the music like they did, just because they were stylists in their own right. They didn’t copy anybody. They played their music, and they played their bluegrass, but they played it their way.

A lot of times today, you’ll turn the radio on, and a lot of the bands sound an awful lot alike. The recording quality is so much better today, and the musicians are very precise in the notes that they play, but all of the early cats may have been hungrier. They were really working hard at what they did. Also, you know, I just don’t hear things like I used to. When I was younger, I knew the names of all the musicians, but at my age now, I just don’t hear people the same. I do a radio show with Jon Weisberger. He’ll give me a CD when he’s putting it all together, and I’ll listen to it, and we do the show. But really, the only ones I know much about are the old guys, because I was there with them. If I play a record on my own, what excites me is still the old guys.

Earl Scruggs and I used to go once in a while to Sonny Osborne’s house. Sonny would call all of these cats, and my boys and I would go and have a little party and play some music. Years ago, when Earl Scruggs was playing with Bill Monroe, there were no recording studios in Nashville.  Can you believe that? There was the Grand Ole Opry, which had the greatest radio show in the world, but no recording studio. So those guys would go up to Chicago to record. Sonny said to Earl, “When you guys went to Chicago to record that stuff, did you know you were good?” And all Earl said was, “Yeah, we were struttin’ our stuff.”

But they knew they were good. They knew it. And, of course, they made believers out of a lot of other people, too. That’s the secret — having the right combination. Like I said, Bill Monroe was experimenting with a lot of styles, and it all kind of came together accidentally. [Scruggs and Monroe] lasted maybe a little more than three years, but they really made an impact in those three years. They had to record a lot, and we’re just lucky they did, because set the pattern for everyone else that came along.

Bluegrass has never been all that popular worldwide, but it’s getting there. It’s because it all got organized in 1985 with the International Bluegrass Music Association. You have to be organized before you make an impact on the music world. It’s probably the youngest music there is in this country, because it never really came about until the mid-1940s. There was western swing, and there was hillbilly, which was the forerunner of country music. Then there’s folk music, which is a different thing, although I have to give them a lot of credit for popularizing bluegrass. The early bluegrass bands played the [Newport] Folk Festival and gained more popularity through that than they did playing in the country music parts. In the early 1960s, I played the Newport Folk Festival with Bill Monroe, and we played the one up near San Francisco, and that was when Bill was first starting to play these things. That was the first time that any of the bluegrass people had ever played anything but a country-package show.

Bill played a lot of shows with country acts when I was working for him. Then a guy in ‘65 came up with a bright idea to have a bluegrass festival. That was Carlton Haney. He was in Southern Virginia managing Conway Twitty at the time, who was a big country act, and — I’m probably getting way off course — he started this bluegrass festival in ‘65 or ’66. He moved it to Northern Virginia because he knew he was drawing folks out of the big cities in the north — New York City, Boston, Philly, Chicago, Cleveland. He then wanted to have one down south, so he started one close to Greensboro in North Carolina, too. That’s what got the bluegrass festivals started.

Carlton asked Bill to partner with him and start the festival, but Bill argued with him and said it wouldn’t work. He thought Carlton was just blowing smoke. So Carlton decided to have it himself and booked Bill Monroe. It took him two years to get it through his head that a bluegrass festival would work, and then the rest is history. In 1967, he told me that he was having a festival in Beanblossom, Indiana, and wanted me to play it. He made all kinds of money doing that and had the fest every year ‘til he died in ‘96. Then another guy took it over and has two or three a year now in Beanblossom. I hope I helped you a little there. I gave you a little history.

CP: After this tour comes to a close, can we look forward to a follow-up release to 2012’s Del & Dawg: Hardcore Bluegrass in the Dawg House?

DM: You know, it’s possible. I know our managers have talked about that. The big powers are the ones who get all those things done. So yeah, you can. It’s a possibility.

TONIGHT! Hot Rize featuring Red Knuckles & The Trailblazers and Del McCoury & David Grisman, Thu., Nov. 13, 7:30 p.m., $29.50-$44.50, Keswick Theatre, 291 N. Keswick Ave., Glenside, 215-572-7650, keswicktheatre.com.