Stars Are Keeping It Country

Stuart, who served six terms as president of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, has been particularly prolific of late: The Ryman album was one of three released in recent months on his new Superlatone label (the others being the gospel "Souls' Chapel" and "Badlands: Ballads of the Lakota," a concept album about South Dakota's Oglala Lakota tribe). Four more albums are in the pipeline this year, as well as five photo books, including "The Marty Stuart Collection," which will draw on his huge historical holdings. Turns out Stuart has been a photographer almost as long as he has been a professional musician. Stuart says that his mother was a shutterbug and that he became one at 14 "so I could go home and show my mom and dad my new life on the road. And I saw history everywhere I looked that was basically being undocumented."

Two pioneering figures in bluegrass history are part of the festival: banjoist Earl Scruggs, Tuesday on the Millennium Stage, and Virginia's Ralph Stanley, who'll talk with Country Music Hall of Fame senior historian John Rumble at Monday's "Roots of Country Music" discussion in the Rehearsal Room.

One of the genre's current stars, Del McCoury, will be part of the March 26 Grand Ole Opry concert in the Concert Hall. Last month, McCoury won his first Grammy for "The Company We Keep," and that award will certainly have plenty of company. Since 1992, the Del McCoury Band has been the most acclaimed group in bluegrass, its 40 awards including a record eight "entertainer of the year" honors from the International Bluegrass Music Association. (McCoury won one by himself as well.)

It's easy to understand how the 67-year-old McCoury earned those awards. With his thick, steel-gray hair combed back neatly and high on his head, McCoury looks every inch the bluegrass patriarch, and with his high, lonesome tenor, he sounds like one, too. Stanley was a major vocal influence on McCoury, and McCoury's band plays in the hard-driving traditional style of Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys and Lester Flatt and Scruggs with the Foggy Mountain Boys. But the Del McCoury Band's repertoire of bluegrass chestnuts and nontraditional fare makes it as popular on the jam-band circuit as at bluegrass festivals.

It's fitting that McCoury be a part of the Grand Ole Opry concert, and not just because he became a cast member three years ago. He became a bluegrasser for life in 1948 after tuning in to an Opry broadcast and hearing Scruggs (still with Monroe at the time) deliver a rollicking "Roll in My Sweet Baby's Arms."

"Earl was the first man I heard when I was a kid that excited me about any kind of music," McCoury says of his transformative experience at age 11. "When I heard Earl, it just knocked me over. It's why I'm playing music today."

In the early '60s, Monroe hired McCoury to play rhythm guitar and sing leads for his Blue Grass Boys, and a few years later, he was fronting his first band, Del McCoury and the Dixie Pals.

You see more reverence for Monroe-era tradition in the way McCoury's band performs onstage, from the natty suits and ties they wear to the way they cluster around a single microphone. Most groups use multiple mikes; the Del McCoury Band shares one, nimbly stepping in and out for instrumental solos and lead vocals, coming together for the harmonies and ensemble flourishes.

McCoury's sons, who've played in his band since the '80s, have done pretty well by the IBMA also: Ronnie McCoury, who started playing with his dad in 1981 at 13, has been named top mandolinist eight times, Rob McCoury top banjoist twice. (Bandmate Jason Carter has been named top fiddler three times.)

"When they were growing up, my boys were influenced by Southern rock bands, but still they liked bluegrass and realized that some of the early rock 'n' roll came from this music," McCoury says. "It was their first love to start with, and I guess you can't get away from that."

-- Richard Harrington