Not long ago, Del McCoury’s manager offered the iconic bluegrass singer a suggestion. McCoury will turn 77 next month; he’s been playing music professionally almost his entire adult life, either full-time or balancing blue-collar jobs as a truck driver and logger with weekend gigs.
“He said, ‘How about 25 shows this year, Del?,’” says Robbie McCoury, who’s played banjo in the Del McCoury Band since the early 1980s. “And Dad said, ‘How about 50?’ Which turns into about 60, or maybe more.”
The McCoury Band may not play as many dates as some other hard-touring bands, or release as many albums—it’s been more than two years since The Streets of Baltimore was released, in 2013—but the group has pretty much set the standard for high-quality traditional bluegrass for more than 25 years. And don’t mistake a two-year gap between albums for semi-retirement. The band has just started recording the official follow-up to Streets of Baltimore, and another unexpected project is finished and ready to be released sometime this year.
“It’s all Woody Guthrie songs,” Robbie McCoury says. The McCoury Band performed at two celebrations for Guthrie’s centennial celebration in 2012, in Tulsa, Okla., and Washington, D.C. “We did those, and Woody’s daughter, Nora, said she had lyrics that her dad wrote but there’s no music to them. She asked Dad if he’d be interested in putting melodies to them.”
That partnership with Guthrie highlights two subtle skills that have been keys to the Del McCoury Band’s success. First is collaboration—they’ve recorded interesting albums and toured with Steve Earle and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, among others. The second is song selection. Over the years, they’ve recorded songs by Tom Petty, Robert Cray, Richard Thompson, Mark Knopfler, and Steve Earle—songs that stretch the boundaries of the bluegrass repertoire without breaking them. (Another recent album, from 2011, featured Del’s favorite Bill Monroe songs—not unexpected, perhaps, but almost all first rate.) Picking the right songs requires open ears, good instincts, and a lot of work.
“Sometimes you don’t really know,” Robbie says. “Sometimes you’ll hear a song and think aw, you could do that bluegrass, no problem. But there’s others, it’s like, that’s a really good song, but you’ve got to work at it to figure out what you can do with it to kind of ’grass it up, if you will.
“Once, we were at Jerry Douglas’ house rehearsing—at that time, Jerry was producing us. We were working on a Tom Petty song called ‘Love’s a Long Road,’ trying to get it going, listening to it and trying to figure things out. Jerry said he didn’t think it was going to work. Then he got a phone call and left the room. When he came back, we had it going by then, and he said, ‘That song is going to work!’ It turned out to be, for us, a pretty big song. People love that song.”
It’s tempting to think of Del McCoury as one of the last of the first generation of bluegrass players, but he’s a decade or so younger than the men who first mixed up old-time mountain music, country, gospel, and string jazz in the 1940s. But McCoury is about as old-school as anyone whose last name isn’t Stanley or Monroe. He learned to play banjo by listening to Earl Scruggs in Bill Monroe’s band in the 1940s, and did a stint with Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys himself in the mid-1960s. And for the last 40 years, first with the Dixie Pals and now with the Del McCoury Band, he’s stayed true to the format established by Monroe and faithfully carried traditional bluegrass into the 21st century.
“If we do one of those old traditional tunes, we’re all such students of it—everybody in the whole band is—that we try to do it the same way as the original,” Robbie McCoury says. “If it’s a fiddle kickoff or a banjo kickoff or a mandolin kickoff, you emulate it as closely as you can. You try to get the same tempo and play the same arrangement. All of that is what made that music so great, so if you’re going to attempt to do those songs, you need to do them that way, if you can.
“There’s nothing wrong with changing it up. With the jam bands, they’ll take some of those songs and do things with them—that’s been happening for years. Newgrass Revival did that. But very few bands can take those old songs like that and change them up where they’re still great.” υ
Senior Editor Matthew Everett manages the Knoxville Mercury's arts & entertainment section, including the comprehensive calendar section—Knoxville’s go-to guide for everything worth doing in the area. You can reach Matthew at matthew@knoxmercury.com.
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