The Mandolin in Modern Music. Who Needs Rock?

(Originally published May 17, 2022, Mandolin Cafe)

Back in 1969, the mandolin seemed poised to become a sustaining part of rock 'n roll and popular music. Over the next three years, no lesser lights than the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Band, the Grateful Dead, and Rod Stewart would produce one or more songs that featured the instrument. Each of the albums went platinum. And Stewart's classic "Maggie May" simultaneously topped the pop charts in the U.S., U.K, Canada, and Australia.

The instrument's future in popular music seemed bright. Until suddenly it wasn't.

Over the ensuing seven decades, the mandolin has retained its beloved place in folk, country, and bluegrass, even classical, and occasionally in jazz. Generally, though, the instrument the Grateful Dead's Phil Lesh compared to "the ringing of a bell" has been absent from rock and pop, with bands like R.E.M, Wilco, the White Stripes, and others releasing a few one-off mandolin songs.

To find out why, the Mandolin Cafe talked to successful and highly respected mandolin players from three very different schools of music: Ronnie McCoury, John Skehan, and Sierra Hull at the 2022 Old Settler's Music Festival.

About the author: Steve Levine is a photojournalist and communication consultant based in Austin, Texas. Find his best words and pictures at linktr.ee/stlevine.

Their collective response: So what? The mandolin is making some amazing music these days everywhere it's played. It always has – even if some people have heard it only on those rock songs.

"When I was a young boy in the 80s, my buddies from Pennsylvania said, 'Oh, you play the mandolin? Oh, what like Led Zeppelin or Grateful Dead?'" McCoury said. "And I was like, 'Well, I don't know what you're talking about.'"

Photo credit: Steve Levine

It wasn't long before he figured it out. "I was in love with David Grisman's music," he said. "So I discovered the guy playing the mandolin on the Grateful Dead stuff was David Grisman." As he grew older, he met John Paul Jones, the Zeppelin bass player, who performed the mandolin parts along with guitarist Jimmy Page in that 1970 album and on tour.

Skehan was enthralled by Grisman as well. "Somewhere, somebody gave me a cassette tape of that first Grisman Quintet album," he said.

"That just blew my mind as far as what you could do with the mandolin, the fact that Dawg had created this signature form of music all his own that was such a melting pot of other styles."

His mandolin ear continued to grow.

Photo credit: Steve Levine

"To me the big epiphany discovery was how much mandolin music there is out there without even getting into popular music," Skehan said. "It has such a wide ranging reach and influence on American music."

McCoury recounts a story his dad, Blue Grass Boys alum Del McCoury tells. It credits a mandolin-heavy Bill Monroe song with inspiring the creators of rock.

"There's a tune that Monroe sang called 'Rocky Road Blues,' it was like 1943 or 4, before Earl Scruggs came and bluegrass jelled," the younger McCoury said. "And it had this beat, and Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee [Lewis] and Elvis and all these guys were hearing this. And Carl Perkins said, 'All we were doing was putting rhythm and blues and bluegrass together.'"

Chuck Berry, McCoury adds, "loved to listen to Bill Monroe" because his mandolin chop matched Berry's distinctive guitar sound.

Fast-forward 70 years or so, and Hull finds the instrument still at home in any genre.

Photo credit: Steve Levine

"It's such a diverse instrument," said Hull, whose multitudinous musical experiences belie her young age. "One of the things that I love about it is that it can find its way into whatever is missing in the context, whatever configuration or instrumentation."

Skehan says he hears the influence of the mandolin in popular music that is definitely not bluegrass, particularly in the sounds of one of his favorite bands – the Grateful Dead.

"There's that thing about the Grateful Dead that's not really country music, but it's not quite rock and roll and it has this free-wheeling jazz element counterpoint, everybody's improvising kind of thing to it," he said. "But that odd, odd tone, what Bill Monroe called the ancient tones, the modal quality and fiddle-tune music, it's so present in the Grateful Dead's songwriting and their approach, that out-of-left field thing."

All three learned to play mandolin in the Monroe tradition, where it acts as a percussion instrument in bands that have no drums.

Photo credit: Steve Levine

"I'd just as soon play rhythm all night than to play a lead, because it's just so fun when you groove and you get to be part of that pocket," said Hull, who – of course – earns rave reviews for her blistering solos. "At the same time, it's fun to kind of get removed from that context a little bit and then explore what else the instrument can do."

After starting out "a proper bluegrass player," Skehan has been playing alongside a drummer for decades in the jamgrass group Railroad Earth.

"I can function as the snare drum but in tandem with the snare drum, where the way I would voice chords in a lower register when doing a bluegrass chop is a way of kind of giving the snare drum pitch and relevance to the chord changes," he said. "But the snare drum is also giving my backbeat an extra pop and shot to it."

"I kind of got into this thing of doing backwards rakes against chords, then with a little bit of delay, it's an arpeggiated piano chord or something," Skehan added. "To just hit a long chord and let it ring out in that raked arpeggiated way and then start to join the chop but be able to step away again became a thing I do."

Photo credit: Steve Levine

All three have played mandolin with rock groups, and they love the sound it brings to those performances. "It will continue to pop up unexpectedly in some recordings," says McCoury.

"It just takes the right producer that hears it in their head, and wants to produce it," he said. "I guess they don't find it being useful on every song, and me as a mandolin player, I do."

Just a few weeks after this interview, McCoury found himself playing mandolin at Nashville's iconic Ryman Auditorium with an incredibly diverse group of performers, including Dead & Co's Bob Weir, guitarist extraordinaire Billy Strings, avant-garde bassist Les Claypool, and Marty Stuart.

Just a few months earlier and less than a mile from the venerable Ryman, at the brand new Brooklyn Bowl Nashville, Hull took the stage with a very different kind of ensemble. That night was part of a 21-date tour with Cory Wong and the Wongnotes. How does a mandolin find a voice with a funk band that includes a six-piece horn section?

"In the right context with the right musicians playing, respectfully and kindly and dynamically, it can really be amazing in a lot of different musical situations," Hull answered.

To translate those words into a musical experience, take a listen to "Over the Mountain" on Wong's recently released Power Station album. It opens with Hull playing a simple acoustic melody. She's quickly joined by Wong's guitar, and just as quickly the song transforms into a soaring tour de force with Hull and Wong trading solos over and around the funky, driving bass lines of Sonny T (who performed and recorded with Prince's band The New Power Generation in the 1990s).

After discussing her tour with Wong during a backstage interview at Old Settler's, Hull paused and listened as the sounds of Peter Rowan and His Free Mexican Airforce filtered in from the stage.

"The thing I'll say about the mandolin," she said with a smile, "it shines its brightest when you really can hear the instrument and the wood on a microphone."

Skehan recalls hearing acoustic music being played on acoustic instruments at his first Winter Hawk or Grey Fox festival.

"The Del McCoury Band stepped up to two microphones and made this incredible sound," he said, almost wistfully. "The mandolin is just cool. They are icons of cool because they wield such an unlikely instrument in such a powerful way."

Photo credit: Steve Levine. Drew Emmitt with Ronnie McCoury

Additional Information

• Old Settler's Festival
• Sierra Hull
• Ronnie McCoury and The Del McCoury Band
• John Skehan and Railroad Earth

Photo credit: Steve Levine

The Dead Cemetery

Cemeteries are generally sad places. Dead cemeteries even more so. The sorrow that pervades them seems a commentary on the living, not the dead.

I visited a dead cemetery recently. Even in its glory years, if it had them, it wasn’t much. A half-acre or so. All the gravestones flat on the ground – no monuments, no ivy, no shrubs, no flowers. Small American flags marking the plots of veterans who lay there its only adornment. Only a few small stones left by recent visitors.

The cemetery in question had been established by the congregation of the small Jewish temple where I grew up. The congregation is no more. Their cemetery is dead.

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Some people are cemetery people. Some aren’t. I’m not a cemetery person. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve been to this one: my dad’s funeral in 2004, the unveiling of his gravestone a few months later, my mom’s funeral in 2015, and her unveiling. My dad wasn’t a cemetery person either. Although both of his parents were buried in a slightly less dead graveyard a few miles from this one, I don’t recall ever going there with him.

My mom, though – mom was definitely a cemetery person. Several times each year – usually on a Sunday when dad was playing golf – mom and I would cross the state line to the big (or, at least, bigger) city cemetery where her father lay. I never knew my grandpa. He died about five years before I was born. My dad used to say that mom had worshipped him. I got that.

During our visits, we would plant fresh flowers and trim the bushes by his headstone and the ivy that covered the ground above grandpa and his casket. Judging from the number of spigots that sprouted around this cemetery, plenty of mourners did the same. The pipes grew out of the ground just high enough to allow a watering can to sit beneath them.

Then mom would talk to grandpa for a while, say a little prayer, and adjust the greenery a bit more, and we’d head home.

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There was another, more pragmatic reason I didn’t visit my parents’ graves more frequently. My family and I live about 1,400 miles away these days. Trips “up home” have typically been short and hectic. I simply didn’t have time for a low priority activity.

This visit, amid the COVID-19 pandemic and mass remote working, was different. We went for three weeks, mostly to spend time with my mother-in-law and others in my wife’s family who still live nearby. (I have one cousin who spends his summers there and moves to his Florida home when the temperature and leaves drop. This was November, so he wasn’t around.) Early one Wednesday (or Thursday?) afternoon, I took advantage of our relaxed schedule, climbed into the van, and drove to the cemetery. I didn’t expect to find anyone else there and wasn’t disappointed.

I pulled around the curved driveway, built for the hearses and parade of cars filled with mourners that no longer come to a dead cemetery. It was neat and tidy. The flat gravestones and absence of any plantings other than grass make mowing simple. Perpetual care for the residents isn’t costing the congregation’s cemetery trust fund much.

I spent some time wandering around the plots. I saw a few of my parents’ friends and a few of my friends’ parents. I recognized the names of many in the congregation I knew as a kid -- older men whose bald heads I would stare at and older women whose perfume I could smell from several pews away. Other names were familiar in a different way. They were the temple’s founding members who passed away before I was alive but whose support for the congregation was commemorated on the beautiful stained-glass windows in the sanctuary. I used to study those windows in boredom. Each depicted the 12 tribes of Israel – the Lion of Judah, the Grapes of Dan. (Or was that Asher? Or Gad?)

I found my parents’ site along the eastern edge of the graveyard. Unremarkable other than the flag denoting dad’s Army service during World War II. The plaque on mom’s gravestone, unveiled in September 2015 about nine months after her death, did seem shinier than the others. As I drifted back toward the van, my eye shifted from the names on the stones to the dates. Very few marked the graves of anyone who had passed away after dad did in December 2004. Only two – one of my parents’ dearest friends and a lady I recognized as a distant relative – had moved in since mom’s funeral five years ago.

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That’s when I realized this is a dead cemetery. To paraphrase the awful old pun, no one is dying to get in here anymore.

The contrast between my hometown and my current address is striking. I live now in one of the fastest growing cities in the country. Nearly 900 people move here every week – really more, because that number is net of people who leave. It’s a million-plus metropolis whose crane-studded skyline is under constant transformation.

Where I grew up was never a boomtown, but it once had a solid manufacturing base; it housed its share of the string of smokestacks that followed the Ohio, Beaver, and Shenango rivers north out of Pittsburgh. Today, it’s a Rust Belt poster child. Most of the downtown buildings that haven’t been torn down are condemned or boarded up or replaced by Dollar Trees. Near the city center, a corner that used to house a busy drug store now has an odd micro-park featuring graffitied signs claiming, “Progress is Visible.” (Really? I didn’t see any.)

The population peaked at almost 49,000 in 1950 – six years before I was born. It’s less than half that today – almost all of them gentile.

The town never had a large Jewish community, but enough for our temple and another – larger and more conservative – congregation. They included many shopkeepers and professionals. It was my generation that left; we went off to college and never came home. Many of us moved far away. Few new families moved there. The exodus forced the two congregations first to merge then to close altogether. The only ones left from our temple family are a few of the younger members of my parents’ cohort. I know of only one person my age who came back home.

Even my parents left – for a while. They bought a home in South Florida and spent all of dad’s final years and most of mom’s there. They had purchased their plots long ago, though, so both made one last trip home, resting comfortably in their caskets, en route to the nearly dead cemetery.

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The demise of the Jewish community back home isn’t a unique occurrence – or a new one. Small towns in rural America have been shrinking and dying off since the turn of the last century. Mass migrations south and west have meant the same fate for the old industrial centers of the north and east. And as the cities emptied out, so did communities within them – the neighborhoods, congregations, and social clubs. Just as the smallest towns were most at risk, so were the smallest communities. They leave behind only husks, or memories, or cemeteries. The Rust Belt is home to plenty of dead cemeteries.

On one of my last days up home, I drove down a street where many of the city’s once-grand old houses still stand under larger oak canopies. They once were home to the area captains of industry. Some are now occupied by non-profit groups that keep them looking at least presentable. A few, though, are sad relics. Walls and roofs are caving in. The once majestic yards overgrown with weeds. Windows gone or broken.

Those houses are not just dead; they’re abandoned. No one wants them anymore. I suspect they’ll eventually be razed and turned into parking lots that are never used – just like what happened to many of the buildings a few blocks away in the faded downtown.

These barely standing old mansions sit as reminders of what happened to the little city – the plants and mills left, jobs left, shops left, those of us lucky enough to move away left. What’s left is a hollow remnant of what once was, a town no one wants anymore.

Now that, is sad. So much sadder than my dead cemetery.

Old Settler’s recap: “Hippie festival” offers four days of people and performers being themselves

(Originally published May 7, 2022, Ear Traffic ATX)

A riddle: If you’re watching a Tejano band play Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady” at an Americana music festival, where are you? It’s got to be the 2022 Old Settler’s Music Festival, the Austin area’s longest running, multi-day, live music event.

Planted now at its “forever home” amid the rolling meadows and woodlands southeast of Lockhart, Old Settler’s continues to assemble a strong and diverse lineup for the pleasure of its faithful fans, most of whom camp for three nights (or longer) on the 29-acre site.

One camper and I spent a leisurely half-hour under a canopy trying to decide how best to describe the 35th annual installment of Old Settler’s. “It’s got lots of bluegrass acts, but it’s more than a bluegrass festival,” I offered, with which he agreed.

We went on to rule out “roots” and “country” and “folk” and “acoustic” – all much too limiting to define the 30-plus artists on this year’s bill.

“It’s a hippie festival,” the camper offered, and we both immediately agreed. “Hippie” aptly describes the crowd and the vibe and the culture and the music. Despite the amount of alcohol being consumed, I didn’t see nearly as many stumble-down drunks as I used to encounter at the Austin City Limits Music Festival. I didn’t smell as much weed as I expected, but I heard plenty of glassy-eyed men and women mumbling about acid and mushrooms. Ponytails, not man buns, flourished.

Like the idealistic early days of hippiedom, the fans and staff and musicians and volunteers (masses of dedicated, longtime volunteers make the festival work) value friendliness, sincerity, and sharing. Campers actually listened to the answers when they asked, “How ya’ doin?” Strangers shared “good mornings” with smiles and warmth and maybe a cup of coffee.

And the performers, whether at late-night, three-person jam sessions or on the main stages in front of thousands, brought their genuine, human selves to Old Settler’s. The crowd recognized it and appreciated it.

Several times my friends and I commented that shows felt like private concerts set among the vast open space of the main festival arena. When I asked Old Settler’s spokesperson Heidi Labensart for the attendance numbers and whether they met with organizers’ expectations, she replied, “It is best to say it was a great festival, and everyone who came out had a great time.”

So with that background, here are some of the musical highlights from my four days of Old Settler’s 2022:

Anjelika “Jelly” Joseph guests with Galactic.

The most high-energy show of the festival came at the last set played on the big stages. New Orleans funksters Galactic lit up Saturday night with a powerful performance fueled by trumpeter Eric Gordon and guest vocalist Anjelika “Jelly” Joseph. With tunes like “Yes We Can Can” and “Clap Your Hands,” Joseph pushed and cajoled and incited the crowd to clap, wave their arms, or shout their approval. Throughout, guitarist Jeff Raines, bass player Robert Mercurio, and drummer Stanton Moore laid a rock-solid funk foundation for Joseph and Gordon.

And, to put a magical touch on a gorgeous Texas spring evening, a favorable breeze blew an almost continuous river of glistening soap bubbles from atop a nearby hill, high over the audience, and beyond the stage.

From “99 Shades of Crazy” to “Lochloosa,” Friday night headliner JJ Grey & Mofro delivered what the crowd craved: a giant helping of smoky, southern-fried, blue-eyed soul. The band ripped through “House of the Rising Sun” like they owned that classic. Grey launched swampy ballads off the back end of mini-sermons on modern life. The group was unpretentious and obviously happy to be back on the road after the long COVID shutdown.

“We’re all like bears coming out of hibernation and ready to eat, ready to get down,” Grey told a hometown Jacksonville, Florida TV reporter before starting his current tour in mid-March.

Jam bands often get a rather raw deal from the tight schedule of a festival format. Unless they have a longer slot at a day’s end, musicians who frequently play a single song for 20 minutes-plus have to squeeze their entire shows into 60 minutes. Jam band fans call it “the festival set.”

Bluegrass jammers Railroad Earth not only had to work with the one-hour limit at Old Settlers, they also were celebrating the long-delayed release that day of their new album All For the Song. Todd Shaeffer, Tim Carbone, John Skehan, and company played four tunes from that album, brought bluegrass godfather Del McCoury on stage for his classic, “High on a Mountain,” and found time to stretch out a bit on old favorite “Mighty River.”

The legendary Flaco Jimenez.

Multi-Grammy-winner Flaco Jimenez of San Antonio joined his old friend Max Baca and Los Texmaniacs for a crowd-rousing rendition of the Texas Tornadoes’ “Who Were You Thinkin’ Of?” Mandolin legend Peter Rowan sat in for several numbers with the ensemble and later played a full set with Los Texmaniacs under the name of Peter Rowan’s Free Mexican Airforce. The Airforce earned rousing applause with a sweet and heartfelt version of the Rowan/Jerry Garcia classic “Moonlight Midnight.” (And by the way, it was Los Texmaniacs with guest guitarist Will Owen Gage who cranked out the “Foxy Lady” of the riddle.)

Rolling Stone calls American Aquarium leader B.J. Barham a “Southern Springsteen.” The songs he performed at Old Settler’s didn’t live up to that billing. His vocals do, however, recall his idol Tom Petty, and the band (including bassist Alden Heges, top photo) has some Heartbreakers-worthy chops. Aquarium fans must be happy that Barham stopped drinking, as that’s a major driver of his songwriting. It seemed at least half the songs in the set dealt with the travails and triumphs of sobriety, and lyrics like these (from 2020’s “The Long Haul”) are decidedly un-Springteenish: “See the hardest part/Of getting sober/Is learning a drinking buddy/Ain’t the same thing as a friend.”

Recommended, and not:

• Two artists I knew little or nothing about beforehand but enjoyed enough to look forward to seeing again: Maggie Belle, a wonderful singer from New Orleans whose voice has a lot of Amy Winehouse touches; and Sierra Hull, once a tiny mandolin wunderkind, now a thoughtful 25-year-old singer-songwriter with a tight backing band and still-wicked mandolin chops.
• I knew the California Honeydrops were a good band when I first saw them at the High Sierra Music Festival back in 2016. They’ve matured since: more fun, better songwriting, better performances. They put out a highly danceable funky, bluesy, horns-y mixture.
• McCoury is a bluegrass legend, and his family band is tight and top-notch. But McCoury’s high, nasal vocals grate my brain like an icy shower or a whiff of strong ammonia.
• Austin blues guitarist Zach Person is obviously talented, but the bass and rhythm guitar backing track that accompanied Person and his drummer detracted decidedly from his show.

Keeping with Old Settler’s tradition, Austin’s own Shinyribs played the final set on Sunday afternoon to close down the festival. Mic in hand, front man Kevin Russell sashayed through the crowd, dancing with the ladies, singing Freddy Fender’s “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights.”

That’s a great song, and Shinyribs rocked it, but it certainly didn’t describe the exciting days and enchanted nights I spent at Old Settler’s 2022. Something like Robert Earl Keen’s “Feelin’ Good Again” would have been a much better match.

Old Settler’s Music Festival day 1, after dark: When the music stops … it doesn’t

(Originally published April 24, 2020, at Ear Traffic ATX)

(CAMP BANJO, TILMON, TEXAS) – New Orleans-based chanteuse Maggie Belle crooned her last note close to midnight on the opening day of the 2022 Old Settler’s Music Festival. The lights went down, her five-piece band began packing up their gear, and the audience began to drift away.

Many in the crowd didn’t have far to go. The stage is tucked among the cedar and mesquite in a corner of the festival’s liveliest campground. And one of the event’s chief attractions — which, at least once in the past, has been an early showcase for future music superstars — was just about to begin.

“It’s what I come for,” said one smiling, toe-tapping middle-aged lady.

Across the crowded venue, jam sessions popped up and blossomed like the desert after a downpour. Guitars, banjos, dobros, mandolins, fiddles – just about every kind of wooden instrument whose strings can be plucked, picked, strummed, or bowed – appeared from cases and tents.

Traditional folk songs and blues numbers dominated the playlists under the stars. But this writer heard more than a few acoustic Grateful Dead covers and even a rendition of the Rolling Stones’ “Dead Flowers.” The honor of choosing the next song proceeded in an unwritten but genial code, a round-robin among the players.

Each gathering seemed to coalesce into a similar configuration. The busiest artists, those who led the way through every tune, sat or stood in the center. Next came a sprinkling of background vocalists and musicians who contributed quietly or offered up just the occasional flourish. Tapping, nodding, and swaying spectators made up the outer ring. Wandering strangers received warm welcomes.

Every available open space in Camp Banjo — said to be three-and-a-half acres, but it seemed bigger — was occupied by everything from immense RVs to classic, silver Airstreams to simple tents.

Campers had obviously made meticulous preparations for their spaces. They strung up tie-dye and mandala tapestries to create billowing walls. They decorated their sites with banners and streamers, rugs, couches, tables, blinky lights, and even a pair of hanging geranium pots. Grills and camp stoves produced late-night snacks or waited to sizzle bacon, sausage, potatoes, and eggs for tomorrow’s breakfast.

Lee Thompson, a guitar player formerly from Austin now living in Oregon, is a longtime Old Settler. The after-hours camaraderie is an important part of making the festival what it is, he says.

“Some people need music. They don’t want to make money at it, but they need it in a deep way,” Thompson told me the next morning. “They just want to be around people who also need that. And you find ’em here. It kind of boils the fat away. If you really want to play music, come do it here.”

The quality of the campground talent varies tremendously, from earnest novice to true virtuoso. The family-friendly festival has always attracted young players with obviously bright futures.

Thompson recounted a memory from the second Old Settler’s Festival in 1988. “A family came out of their tent, they had some coffee with me and then two little kids came out, 12 and 14,” he said. “One had a fiddle; one had a banjo. They tuned up and then just started ripping.”

Not many years later, those two sisters, Emily and Martie Erwin, became known as the founding members of the Dixie Chicks, now known as the Chicks.

“You can’t bottle it,” Lee’s brother Jay Thompson, of Dallas, says of the campground mystique. “It’s got its own flavor.”

This writer fell asleep well after 2 am, listening to the Thompsons and their friends, plus a few other groups of pickers in the immediate neighborhood.

It was beginning to grow light when I lifted my head from my pillow. Somewhere not far away, I heard one lonely guitar competing with a crowing rooster to welcome the dawn.