The first voice you’ll hear in Episode 372 of The String (besides the host’s) is not the show’s guest Bryan Sutton but that of his first guitar hero, the late North Carolina folk icon Doc Watson. More than 20 years ago, Sutton sat down with Doc in a hotel room in Colorado, as part of his longstanding effort to capture duo jams (“musical conversations” he’s called them) with other guitar pickers wherever he could.
The track features the sonorous voice of Doc announcing “Here’s one of my favorites” before he kicks off Merle Haggard’s “Working Man Blues.” Bryan slips right in, supporting Doc’s fingerstyle with his flatpick technique. This gem has been out for a year as the first of a series of monthly singles from Mountain Home Music. In late August, the cuts were compiled into From Roots To Branches, Vol. 1, featuring duos with peers, friends, and heroes, including Jake Stargel, Cody Kilby, Sierra Hull, plus another posthumous track, this one with Tony Rice. Despite its volume one title, it’s something of a sequel to Bryan’s similar 2006 anthology Not Too Far From The Tree: A Collection Of Guitar Duets With Heroes And Friends. It’s just a way he loves capturing his life and musical relationships.
“I could do many, many more volumes of these things and probably still not be done,” Sutton says in a portion of our interview that didn’t make the show. His aim for this ongoing project is based on three priorities: “One, hanging with (my) pals. Two, playing good music. And then just sort of seeing this project grow. All those things kind of feed into this.”
Bryan makes an ideal guest for this special tenth birthday edition of The String, a show that launched in September of 2016 along with the inauguration of WMOT’s Roots Radio all-Americana format. For one thing, he’s arguably the most awarded and recorded acoustic guitar player of his generation, with ten IBMA Guitar Player of the Year awards and his name on the credits of many vital roots albums, including Bela Fleck’s My Bluegrass Heart, Dolly Parton’s The Grass Is Blue, and the (Dixie) Chicks’ Home. He’s also a fine singer who has led bands on several solo albums and a respected music educator who’s one of the leading draws on the popular Artist Works online school.
There’s also my personal connection, which is significant. I was just a fan, pre-journalism, when in 1997, Bryan burst on the scene as the buzzed-about new 24-year-old guitarist in Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder. I saw him at Merlefest and the Ryman and bought the band’s breakout album Bluegrass Rules!. I was gobsmacked in all cases by Bryan’s speed, concision and imagination. I’d been steeped by then in the world of roots guitar, including the homespun virtuosity of Doc, the jazz-inflected precision of Tony Rice, and the Coltrane-like wizardry of Clarence White. It’s a well-studied thread of bluegrass history, and Sutton told the world that hot flatpicking was a young man’s game again.
Over the years, I followed and eventually chronicled Bryan’s journey, including liner notes for a couple of his albums and a feature story for Acoustic Guitar magazine. I wrote at least one artist bio for him and consulted on his early forays into online teaching. I’ve enjoyed knowing him a lot, as it’s given me insight into the humility of a genius-level player and the versatile professionalism of a leading Music Row session musician. To cap it off, he did me the favor of cooking up and recording a theme song for the early years of this show, and I dusted it off for this episode.
In the hour, we talk about the demands of playing at superhuman tempos, about adapting to the Music Row studio session life (what he calls being “a character actor”) while maintaining a top-tier bluegrass career, and about his relationship with Billy Strings, today’s young guitar phenomenon.
As a teacher who engages with students worldwide online, Bryan has an eye on the wider ecosystem of musicianship as well. “I see more people wanting to play more, and to me that's the ultimate health of the community,” he says. “It's not just one-way, artist-to-fans. And bluegrass has always been about people drawn into the music that want to do it, that want to play it. Serious musicians are having more of a day.”
The episode ends with an excerpt from Bryan's take on "Crazy Creek" with new flatpicking hotshot Jake Stargel. Here's the full track.
