Bluegrass is riding high with Billy Strings selling out multiple nights at arenas, which is pretty much unprecedented in the genre. The mood was upbeat and the talent abundant at last month’s World of Bluegrass convention in Chattanooga, TN. Whether that excitement translates into sustainable career success and long term growth for the artists who’ve devoted themselves to the genre is an open question. Artists face daunting challenges in the post-CD era, and Episode 336 of The String offers two case studies - artists with nicely contrasting strategies and very different back stories.
Danny Burns made a brief appearance on The String in early 2019, soon after he moved to Music City. But here we have more time to talk about the culture where he came of age - a village in County Donegal, Ireland.
“There was always music in the pubs. They'd always have trad sessions. And then if you're going to the dance hall, it was bigger bands, cover bands, and all that kind of stuff,” Burns says. “It's kind of like a foregone conclusion that if you're going out, there's going to be some kind of live music somewhere.”
His parents were gigging musicians making a living in this swirl, and Danny took up the family business. More than just about any contemporary bluegrass or roots singer/songwriter I can think of, Burns deferred finding his niche as a featured artist and made his living working most every night of the week, whether in the background or foreground of a bar - plus plenty of parties and weddings. He parlayed his chops as a traditional Irish artist into residencies at pubs during extended stays in New York, Chicago, and New Orleans before moving to Nashville.
When he did break cover as a recording artist (after tracking and rejecting several iterations of his developing sound), he did so with quite a lot of flash. His debut album North Country was stocked with elite guests who made time for the newcomer’s progressive bluegrass sound, including Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Holly Williams, Mindy Smith, Dan Tyminski, Irish star Cara Dillon, and Tim O’Brien.
There are cool guests and a hot band on his latest Southern Sky as well, including vocals from O’Brien, Ricky Skaggs and Vince Gill, plus a band with fiddler Billy Contreras, guitarist Cody Kilby, and banjo man Matt Menefee. While this album leans hard on covers (regular for Burns, as good a songwriter as he is), they’re songs well worth fresh interpretations, including ones you’ll hear - Tim O’Brien’s “Brother Wind,” Richard Thompson’s “Keep Your Distance.”
Burns, in his third decade of hustling and working, is what a match of talent, networking, and humility looks like, and it’s serving him well. “You got to keep moving. You got to keep creating,” he says. At the same time, “I try to have a very reasonable concept of myself. I think that's really important. And then also, if you can follow that indigenous route, or whatever you want to call it, your instinct - musically, artistically - I think that's the way you'll keep going.”
Another working musician, Shelby Means, had to make some adjustments of her own when Molly Tuttle disbanded her bluegrass unit of three-plus years to build a new sound. Fortunately, Shelby had a great name in the business and a solo debut album in the pipeline. The motivation for it did, however, start in her Golden Highway days.
“I noticed that when Kyle (Tuttle, banjo) and Bronwyn (Keith-Hynes, fiddle) released solo albums, then Molly (Tuttle) wanted to play a song or two of theirs on stage. Well I want to play my song on stage with Molly!” she says. “That seems like a small thing, but that was a big reason why I wanted to make a solo record. And my husband Joel (Timmons) made a solo record a year before I started making mine. And that also inspired me and showed me that there was a way to do it, because I've always made records with bands.”
Shelby took another cue from the Timmons album by calling on its producer, well-known Nashville songwriter Maya de Vitry, to manage and shape Shelby’s recording sessions for her self-titled project. The core band is stacked with bluegrass music’s finest, including Bryan Sutton on guitar and Sam Bush on mandolin. Guests include Billy Strings, Ronnie McCoury, and Molly Tuttle herself, who appears on the especially energetic and grooving opener “Streets of Boulder.” From there, the material has a nice variety while staying close to a bluegrass heart. Means wrote most of the songs, some with Timmons. And her voice, so often in support up to this point, shines with a sweet, unforced elegance. In the show, you’ll hear her power and humor on “Five String Wake Up Call” and her rich emotion on the closer “Joy.”
Means was born in Kentucky but raised on the high plains of Wyoming in a family full of music. Her father really did roust her out of bed for school with a banjo (as depicted in the song), and she moved through a series of ever-larger stringed instruments - fiddle, viola, and guitar - before having an epiphany when she saw a woman playing the upright bass when she was 13. At last she felt she had an instrument that spoke to her.
“I didn't like playing solos. That was just the worst part of fiddle for me, or guitar,” she says. “I liked playing chords. I liked being the support role. And bass was easy to get good at - fast. So that definitely had a lot to do with it. I felt like I could just jump in and play all the songs, as fast as I wanted, with the bass, whereas with the fiddle, it was a lot more work.”
Means moved to Nashville with her bass at 23 years old with no defined goals in music, but the legendary Wednesday night jams at the 5 Spot in East Nashville helped her find her friends and gigs really fast. She did her first touring with the David Mayfield Parade and then later anchored the otherwise Boston-based band Della Mae as they rose in the business on Rounder Records. She’s played live extensively in a duo with Timmons called Sally & George. Now it’s her name on the marquees as she launches a new chapter - sort of.
She underlined that ambiguity to me with a memory of mentorship from the late, great bass player Dave Roe: “He gave me a lesson, and then at the end of it, he told me, ‘You're going to be fine. Just dig into your artistry. Continue to explore your artistry, and invest in that.’ And that's one of the best things that anyone ever told me in Nashville. It wasn't about playing the bass, really. He just believed in me as an artist, and I didn't know what he meant exactly. But then making a solo record and stepping out as a solo artist, I'm like, oh thanks, Dave. Thanks for that advice. Because that's what I was doing this whole time.”
