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Sounds of The Old School: Danny Paisley And John Reischman

While the public has become hyper aware of Billy Strings on his rocket ride to the top of bluegrass, only a small retinue of the music’s traditional veteran artists have achieved popular name recognition. I think especially of Del McCoury and Ricky Skaggs. But there’s a deeper world there, and we should work a little harder to shine the light on more of the old school masters working today. That’s what episode #299 of The String is about, through conversations with singer Danny Paisley and mandolinist John Reischman. They are “musicians’ musicians,” which doesn’t help them put food on the table or build their legacies.

Danny Paisley has certainly been acknowledged by his industry peers as one of the finest singers of his era with four IBMA Awards for Male Vocalist of the Year, including another one this September in Raleigh. Danny’s “throw it on up there” style of singing bluegrass wasn’t in the forefront of the genre for quite a few years, when more mellow, mellifluous voices were winning the big awards. When Paisley won for the first time in 2016, it felt to the crowd like a comeback for the hard edged, older sound.

“Some people sing very gentle,” Paisley says at the outset of our conversation. “But I go back to the old Ralph Stanley, Bill Monroe technique. You had to put as much power into your singing, or dynamics, such as softening up, as the song requires…That's the way I was brought up, and that's the way I still hear bluegrass.”

And he’s not being metaphorical about being brought up in bluegrass music. Danny’s late father Bob founded the Southern Grass in the late 1960s, touring the nation and the world from a home base in Eastern Pennsylvania. Danny joined the band about as soon as he could, playing bass and then guitar. Thousands of shows and tours ensued for a band that for a time included two fathers and sons. When Bob died, Danny took over the Southern Grass in 2004 and has released a half dozen albums while carrying on the family business of playing live anywhere and everywhere.

If you have heard Danny sing or speak, you might notice some vocal similarities to Del McCoury, largely because they hail from the same part of the country. “I first heard Del McCoury as a young fella play that guitar, I never heard any rhythm guitar playing like that. Oh, my goodness!,” Paisley tells me. “Then when he lit into singing, I was just blown away, you know? And this was 40 or 45 years ago. So over the years, since Del at the time lived the next county over, we all played the same venues. We all were around each other all the time. And whether I knew it or not, he made a big impression on me.”

Paisley also talks about how impressed he is by the evolution and diversity of bluegrass, trusting that fans who discover the music by way of more progressive players will find their way to the darker, more mountain feeling of traditional grass. “It'd be foolish for me to say the younger ones putting their spin on the music is not the way to do it. I say embrace the new; cherish the old. I live that way.”

By contrast, John Reischman grew up on and around some of the most innovative string band music of his age and contributed to Tony Rice’s “spacegrass” movement in the early 1980s before trending long term toward the rich and rooted old-time sound one hears in his band of 25 years, The Jaybirds. But since the 90s, Reischman has been based in Vancouver, so he was always on the periphery of my attention, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that. Yet I recently heard friends speaking in glowing terms about Reischman’s mandolin playing and musicianship, so I set out to hear and meet him during World of Bluegrass 2024.

The Jaybirds performance in an old church was delightful, more subtle than hard driving, with emphasis on melody, heart and swing. That said, there is a banjo, played two-finger style by Nick Hornbuckle, plus fiddler Greg Spatz, and guitarist Patrick Sauber, the only member who’d not been in the band all 25 years. Bass player Trisha Gagnon took many of the lead vocals with a sweet and empathic tone, though most everyone leaned in on harmonies. And it was clear that Reischman has a style on mandolin all his own, mingling the rhythmic lope of old-time country blues with sophisticated harmonic ideas that he picked up over a life that’s touched all manner of string band music.

He first held a mandolin, he says, at a hippie beach party in his teens on the Mendocino coast of California. It felt easy to make music on, and it spoke to him. “So I borrowed a mandolin from a family friend, like a Montgomery Ward type mandolin, and tuned it to an open E chord for a long time, which is really not correct. But eventually I got a Gibson and thought I should learn to do this correctly. So I tuned it right, and just started learning fiddle tunes. I discovered Sam Bush and started learning solos off the records. And that's all I was interested in. And still, that's all I'm interested in.”

In a real jaw-dropper, Reischman tells me that among his musical explorations as an eager young fan, he attended a concert by Old And In The Way, the iconic hippie-grass band with Jerry Garcia, Peter Rowan, and David Grisman, at the very San Francisco Boarding House venue where their influential album was recorded. And we of course get into his professional journey. His first band job was with the Good Ol’ Persons, a formerly all-woman band that featured West Coast leaders Kathy Kallick and dobro player Sally Van Meter. Then around 1980, Reischman heard that guitar maestro Tony Rice was scouting musicians for his first project as a leader.

“We hooked up, and I went over, and he said he was putting a band together to play similar music to what David (Grisman) was doing, but a little bit more improvisational, a little more jazz leaning. So he's looking for mandolin and fiddle,” John recalls. “And he gave me some records and some charts, and I went home for a couple weeks and learned a few of the tunes, and went back and played with him. And he basically said, ‘Okay, I'm not looking for another mandolin player.’”

Reischman toured with that iteration of the Tony Rice Unit and recorded two albums - Still Inside (which is hard to find) and Backwaters (which isn’t), marking an important chapter in instrumental newgrass history. Then John moved to Vancouver for love and has made it his base ever since, forming the Jaybirds in 1999 and steering it with a stability and longevity that’s rare in bluegrass music, or any genre for that matter.

“I guess early on, I liked the more progressive stuff, because I love Sam Bush’s playing,” Reischman says. “But one of my good friends, who was also learning at that time, had a keen appreciation of the more traditional stuff, and he had the Bill Monroe High Lonesome Sound LP. And I loved that, but it was a little foreign to me, you know, just in the approach. But I got to appreciate it much more later, and still today, the bluegrass I like the best is the more traditional sounding stuff.”

That’s the kind of phase I’ve been in lately as we curate music for The Old Fashioned, and the Jaybirds fit the bill beautifully. You’ll hear their music in this hour of bluegrass old and new.

Craig Havighurst is WMOT's editorial director and host of <i>The String, a weekly interview show airing Mondays at 8 pm, repeating Sundays at 7 am. He also co-hosts The Old Fashioned on Saturdays at 9 am and Tuesdays at 8 pm. Threads and Instagram: @chavighurst. Email: craig@wmot.org</i>