Ronnie McCoury: Bluegrass in the blood
by Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., July 23, 2000) -- Just because Ronnie McCoury grew up the son of one of the great bluegrass singers and has been singing and playing in his father's band for nearly two decades doesn't mean he's not aware of the music most of his contemporaries are listening to: not his, but Limp Bizkit's.

In fact, if McCoury was to the bluegrass manner born, it wasn't for lack of trying to rebel against the music that he grew up hearing around the house, the music of his father, the award-winning bluegrass singer and guitarist Del McCoury.
"I grew up around bluegrass, and didn't even think of any other music until I was sixteen," said McCoury, who will perform at this weekend's Noppet Hill Bluegrass Festival in Lanesboro with the Del McCoury Band on Saturday. [The festival runs July 28-30.]
"But when I was sixteen, I started to get rebellious. All my friends were listening to everything else, and I went to my first rock concert, which was the band Rush. I couldn't believe all that music was coming out of three guys, because they had lots of keyboards. It was pretty amzaing for the first time.
"My friends turned me on to other kinds of music, and I started listening to everything: the Allman Brothers, Molly Hatchet, lots of Southern rock, and the Grateful Dead. Everybody kept saying you like bluegrass, and they'd mention the Grateful Dead, so I had to figure out the connection between the two. I went to a concert of theirs in Philadelphia. Bob Dylan was also on the bill, so I saw them both. This was only my second concert."

The experience, while a heady one, didn't sour McCoury on bluegrass. Rather, it fed his musical interests, and he kept trying to make connections between what he was hearing in rock and the music he grew up with.

In fact, those connections ran deep. McCoury knew that mandolinist David Grisman had played with the Grateful Dead; it so happened that Grisman also had played with his father back in the mid-'60s. So McCoury started listening to more of Grisman's albums, which were considered the cutting edge of progressive bluegrass at the time.
"They steered me into another direction, his music, with more jazz influence. And I started listening to more rock and roll. I'm a roots person. When I hear something I want to find out where it comes from. So I listened to a lot of Fifties and Sixties rock. So you see I was able to be influenced by a lot of music while growing up playing in a traditional bluegrass band."

McCoury's first instrument was violin. "When I was nine or so I played violin in the school orchestra," he said. "I always called it the fiddle. I played that for two years, and then I had to decide my after-school activities: orchestra rehearsal or basketball. I was bored with orchestra because we'd only learn a few tunes all year. It was really slow paced. So I jumped to basketball and baseball, and laid down music 'til I was thirteen." When he was 13, McCoury saw his father perform with bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe, and his fate was decided then and there. "I saw my dad with Bill Monroe and something clicked and I knew I wanted to play mandolin. The next year I started playing with my dad." McCoury hasn't stopped since. He says he's only missed two dates in all that time; one after having his wisdom teeth removed, the other to attend the birth of one his two boys.

McCoury recently released his first solo album, "Heartbreak Town" (Rounder). The first thing a listener hears on the album is drums, which might raise some eyebrows among the more diehard bluegrass traditionalists who view drums as anathema, especially when they come from a scion of bluegrass traditionalism such as a son of Del McCoury.
"My dad is so open-minded," said McCoury. "He's never told my brother or me to practice, and he's never really told us what to play. In the early days he showed us a lot of stuff and the way his music is supposed to go, but for a long time now – and I've been playing twenty years with him next year -- he's not told us what to do. We just do what we do. He's never said anything about it.
"He heard the rock and roll we were listening to, and he liked some of it. We call ourselves a tradtional-sounding band, but dad's done a Tom Petty song and a Robert Cray tune, so he's stepped outside of that, too, doing music bordering on contemporary."

McCoury had a host of bluegrass peers and idols join him on his album, including all the members of his father's band, including brother Rob, father Del, bassist Mike Bub and fiddler Jason Carter, as well as such well-known modern players as Gerry Douglas, Bela Fleck and David Grisman. The new album also features a new song that McCoury is particularly eager to play this weekend. It's a fiddle tune that was actually premiered at Noppet Hill last year.

At the time, McCoury hadn't named the melody yet, so on the spur of the moment he decided to call it "Noppet Hill Breakdown." Referring to Noppet Hill promoter Robbie Steele, at whose family farm the festival takes place, McCoury said, "Robbie is a great guy and he loves the fiddle. I got Stuart [Duncan, of the Nashville Bluegrass Band] up there to do the twin-fiddle number, and I said we had just wrote the tune, and for the day I called it 'Noppet Hill Breakdown.'
"The name just stuck. I could've changed it -- I could've named it 'The Nashville Breakdown' – but I like Robbie and the folks who work there. It's a beautiful spot, and it's one little way to help them out."

So for a guy who was born to play bluegrass, is there any chance he'd ever make an album totally outside the pale of his father's music?
"I've always liked bluegrass, it's in my heart," he said. "But I have an electric guitar and still once in a while I grab it and play it and I like to play it. I think it feeds my playing on the mandolin. "But the music is just part of me. I've known it since before I was born. I' ve played other kinds of music, but I still just love the feel and sound of bluegrass. It's definitely from your heart."

[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on July 28, 2000. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2000. All rights reserved.]

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