Review: D.C. Bluegrass Festival

In the 1970s and early ’80s, Washington was arguably the center of the bluegrass world. It had the clubs: the Birchmere, the Red Fox Inn, the Shamrock and more. It had the radio stations: WAMU, WGAY and WARL. And it had the bands: the Country Gentlemen, the Seldom Scene and the Johnson Mountain Boys.

The center of gravity moved to Nashville by the end of the 1980s, but for a while Washington was the place where bluegrass musicians wanted to play — and often wanted to move. To remember that era and to rebuild Washington’s importance as a string-band hub, the D.C. Bluegrass Union is sponsoring the DC Bluegrass Festival at Langley High School in McLean on Saturday. The headliners include Robin & Linda Williams, the Claire Lynch Band, Wayne Taylor & Appaloosa and the Gibson Brothers.

“Your average Washingtonian has no idea what a hotbed for bluegrass the city has been,” says DCBU President Randy Barrett, a noted performer himself.

The Washington region didn’t merely provide a platform for bluegrass, the area changed the way bluegrass sounded. The Country Gentlemen made a series of recordings in the 1960s that bridged a gap by borrowing new songs and warmer, more personal vocals from the folk-revival world and setting them to arrangements from the bluegrass world. The band’s key soloist, banjoist Eddie Adcock, similarly bridged the gap between bluegrass and jazz.

Here was the beginning of “new grass,” a more urbane form of bluegrass that no longer felt obliged to sing about the “Mule Skinner Blues” or stick to three major chords. When two ex-Gentlemen, mandolinist John Duffey and bassist Tom Gray, founded the Seldom Scene in 1971, they further refined bluegrass with even smoother vocals and even more contemporary material.

“That was important because people could relate to it,” says Mike Auldridge, the Scene’s dobroist at the time. “It wasn’t about the cabin in Carolina; it was about modern situations with modern harmonies. You didn’t have to turn it down at the stoplight because you were embarrassed. Washington has always straddled the North and the South, and that Washington bluegrass sound attracted both audiences. Here was a version of bluegrass that linked the two worlds.

“Guys like Duffey took folk music and put that bluegrass edge on it,” he adds. “It had this supercharged feeling to it; folk fans said, ‘Pete Seeger was good, but he’s nothing like Earl Scruggs. This is the real stuff.’ ”

The sound had an impact far beyond the Beltway. Claire Lynch was a fledgling bluegrass singer in Alabama when the Seldom Scene’s original lead singer, John Starling, moved there in 1977 to pursue a medical career.

“John took me under his wing and mentored me,” Lynch recalls. “I was a big Emmylou Harris fan, and because John could tell us stories about working with Emmy, we listened to everything he said. He sat us down and taught us about arranging, about presenting a song. I had grown up on Peter, Paul and Mary and Joan Baez, so when I heard the Country Gentlemen, it made sense to me. That D.C. sound made bluegrass more cosmopolitan, more worldly.”

Mark Schatz, Lynch’s current bassist, spent the ’80s in Nashville playing with the Tony Rice Unit, but even then he was aware of Washington’s role in birthing “new grass.” Schatz moved to the area in the early 1990s and now lives in Crownsville, where he is music director of the Footworks Percussive Dance Ensemble when he isn’t touring with Lynch or Nickel Creek.

“D.C. is such an interesting place,” he says, “because it’s right near the Mason-Dixon Line. You had Southerners who were looking for a taste of home, but you also had these government workers who were interested in folk music, and they came together in this same place.

“Music has always been this strange catalyst for bringing people from different cultures together. A lot of the material that was written came out of this change in environment. . . . Suddenly you had these rural, Southern migrants in urban bars, and all these songs came out of that angst.”

Robin and Linda Williams moved from Nashville to the Shenandoah Valley in 1973 — close enough for them to notice that D.C. had a more active bluegrass scene than Nashville. They were especially fascinated by the Seldom Scene.

“There was this weird mystery about the band,” Robin Williams recalls. “They had all these unusual influences; they were a little left of what the Country Gentlemen were doing. But even after they had three or four records, you had to go to the Birchmere to hear them, because they didn’t tour. About the same time, the Country Gentlemen had Ricky Skaggs and Jerry Douglas in the band. There were all these young guys and you wondered, ‘Where did they come from? How did they get so good? How did they end up in D.C.?’ ”

The DC Bluegrass Festival gives its Washington Monument Award to a local legend. Last year it was Bill Emerson, an original member of the Country Gentlemen, and this year it is Hazel Dickens, the trailblazing bluegrass singer-songwriter who has lived in Washington since 1969. Dickens came from West Virginia’s coal country, but when she teamed up with West Coast folkie Alice Gerrard, the duo not only proved that women could lead a hard-driving bluegrass band but also personified the hillbilly/folkie alliance that the D.C. sound was all about.

“One of our big missions is to get that history out there and add to it,” says Barrett of the D.C. Bluegrass Union.

“When you think of the acts that came out of Washington — not just the Gentlemen and the Scene, but also Buzz Busby and Bill Emerson — you realize the city has been seminal in the creation of modern bluegrass. We want to get back to a point that when you have a bluegrass show in Washington, you have more people who want to come than tickets available. It hasn’t been that way in a while.”

Himes is a freelance writer.