Like baseball, bluegrass announced some big personnel changes this winter. I’m upset that pitcher Max Fried has left the Atlanta Braves for the New York Yankees. I’m a little sad about fiddler Jason Carter retiring from the Del McCoury Band and the Travelin’ McCourys (as much as I respect his desires and plans). But everybody seems excited that Russell Moore, founder of the massively successful bluegrass band IIIrd Tyme Out, is joining Alison Krauss and Union Station.
Moore’s gig is temporary but substantial, with major tours this year and next, as well as appearing on Arcadia, the first album from Krauss with her venerable bluegrass band since Paper Airplane, 14 years ago. The disc arrives March 28, and then Moore will set out from his Georgia home on the first leg in mid April with a date at the Louisville Palace Theater. Union Station has otherwise had a stable lineup since 1998, with Jerry Douglas on dobro, Ron Block on banjo and guitar, Barry Bales on bass, Larry Atamanuik on drums, and Dan Tyminski on guitar. But Tyminski has leveled up his own solo career, so that’s who Russell Moore steps in for, the “Man of Constant Sorrow” himself.
Moore says he got the call from Krauss in 2023. He was approaching 60 years old and leading an award-winning band that he founded more than 30 years ago. So he had to put a pencil to it, as the engineers say. “At the end of the list, there was not a check mark on the side that said, Don't Do This,” he said. “I had the full support of all my family, my friends, my peers. Everybody in the band was on board. They thought, man, it's a great opportunity. You need to do this.”
In the bonus audio interview posted here, Moore talks about processing the change, about taking on some of the songs Tyminski has sung over the years in concert (“Man Of Constant Sorrow” is so far not one of them), and his feelings about this exciting late career opportunity. “Alison has been as influential as anybody in bluegrass music over the last 30 years,” he says. “I find her to be very genuine, very honest and supportive, for sure. If you're on her team, she's got your back and she believes in you. And that's just a wonderful thing to have in your back pocket, somebody of that caliber to be tooting your horn for you.”
But the main event here is Episode 312 of The String, which relates how Moore became one of America’s (and Alison Krauss’s) favorite bluegrass singers. His lucid and rich tenor hits hard on ballads like his famous “Erase The Miles,” the gospel quartets that IIIrd Tyme Out does so avidly, and hard driving bluegrass, like his band’s recent single “Heading East To West Virginia,” which opens this show. So Moore is hugely respected in the business. He won six IBMA Male Vocalist of the Year awards, while IIIrd Tyme Out won a record seven consecutive IBMA Vocal Group Of The Year awards. So we talk for most of an hour about how he got here.
Russell says he grew up a couple of miles from Gilley’s, the famous country music club in Pasadena, TX and that while there wasn’t much bluegrass in the area, he and his family loved a residency show nearby by featuring local band Johnny Martin and the Bluegrass Ramblers of Texas. Moore was transfixed as a kid, especially when they’d let him hang out and watch up close as they rehearsed. He took up several instruments and over time got good enough to join the band, and he’s never not been in a band ever since. He formed Southern Connection with two future bluegrass standouts Scott and Curtis Vestal. After touring and a move to Georgia, several of them were recruited into Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver, where his real tutelage in bandcraft and the road life began.
“He knew the sound that he was looking for,” Moore says about Lawson, who was about 20 years his elder. “He liked for the music to, as they say, be on top of the beat, where it almost feels like it's going to rush and get faster. He wanted that excitement, and the things that he was telling us and teaching us was just to get the end result - when it makes you get up on the edge of your seat, like it's getting under your skin, it's so good. That’s what he was looking for.”
Lawson’s band became known as a kind of academy of bluegrass with young musicians cycling through and going on to launch bands of their own, and that’s what happened with the first generation of IIIrd Tyme Out in 1991. Moore, Mike Hartgrove and Ray Deaton, along with former Quicksilver banjo player Terry Baucom, formed IIIrd Tyme Out in honor of the fact that it was each musician’s third professional venture.
“It was nothing more than a desire to see if you can spread your wings and fly on your own,” Moore reflects. And it certainly worked. While there have been a number of personnel changes over the three decades, IIIrd Tyme Out has remained a top billing act in the field. In this hour, we hear why, with songs from across their years together. Eventually they formally became known as Russell Moore and IIIrd Tyme Out because of Moore’s leadership and his frontman’s voice. His many trophies from IBMA and other industry awards have, in his telling, put fuel in his tank.
“It actually made me work even harder,” he says. “And I say that because when you win an award like that, and it comes from the industry and your peers and the fan base itself, if they give you that title, in my mind, what you're doing over the next 12 months is you're representing that title. So for me, it was a pressure thing. I had to come up to the level of earning that title every time we went on stage.”
As for IIIrd Tyme Out today, it’s “not going by the wayside,” says Moore. “I committed that to the rest of the band. I had no desire to give up IIIrd Tyme Out. And that's not my intention whatsoever. And when I'm not with Alison, we will be touring and playing show dates and trying to get into the studio.”
