Homespun Harmonies from The Corey Zink Band

To quote the great bard Anonymous: “’Spring has sprung, the grass is ris./ I wonders where the birdies is.” Yes, here in Boston, we are going through the three-day pageant New Englanders call “Spring”— a cruel joke for us transplants from warmer climes. Before we get too comfortable leaving the house with but a single layer of down, here’s a souvenir of a season New England pulls off with gusto:

That’s The Corey Zink Band performing “City Folks Call Us Poor” at a day-long mini-fest in the Berkshires a couple of months ago. Bluegrass veteran Larry Sparks recorded the song some eight years back. Spark’s recording is the first instance where the tune comes onto my radar, but any information on it from our loyal readers is welcome. As you can see from the video, the song’s lyrics paint a vivid picture of rural contentment that fits well with the warm, down-home atmosphere at the Berkshire event.

So endeth our brief winter idyll. Those of you who are country folk can now get back to tilling the loam while we poor city slickers await that true sign of warmer days: the first iced latte.

Yer Pal— Curly

Berkshire Postcard: The Corey Zink Band

Winter may be the season for woodshedding those fiddle tunes, but if you stay huddled by the stove too long, you’ll go stir crazy. Up in the Berkshire Mountains, the local bluegrass community understands this, so for years now, they’ve turned out in force in the depths of winter for an indoor picnic featuring several New England bands. This year’s event took place within the cozy confines of the VFW Post in Dalton, Massachusetts. It was dubbed The Corey Zink Band Concert Series in recognition of the guiding role Berkshire native Zink plays as both performer and impresario. Here’s a video that we hope captures the flavor of the show and the character of Zink’s band:

Stepping through the threshold at the Dalton VFW Post is a little disorienting. From the basement bar to the portraits of past leaders on the walls, the setting seems largely untouched by the past half century. Then you look over at the stage, and there’s Corey Zink, sporting a crisp suit and a crew cut and singing a country song that was last climbing the charts when JFK was president. It’s a “Back to the Future” experience, no supercharged DeLorean needed.

The tune Zink and the band are playing is “Another Day, Another Dollar,” by Wynn Stewart. Along with the likes of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, Stewart was an architect of the Bakersfield Sound, a hard-driving, honky tonk-flavored style of country music that flourished in the 1960’s. Adapting that sound to bluegrass is nothing new— folks like J.D. Crowe were doing it back when the original recordings were hot off the presses— but traditionalists like Zink are cementing the connection between that bygone era and the bluegrass canon.

The Corey Zink Band (Zink on guitar, Larry Neu on banjo, John Roc on mandolin and Ray Evans on bass) is still a relatively young unit, but because several of its members played together previously in the group Acoustic Blue, they have a comfortable rapport both with each other, the audience and their material. Mandolin player John Roc is the most recent addition, having just joined the band last fall, but his decades of experience show in the ease with which he fits into the band’s arrangements.

We’ve got more souvenirs from our frosty and rustic road trip coming up, so set yer GPS for this site and circle back often.

Yer Pal—Curly

P.S.— Truth in advertising: “Another Day, Another Dollar” is a vintage number, but it has come back on the radar in popular culture in recent years thanks to Volkswagen featuring it in a Jetta commercial a few years back. So perhaps rather than taking us back in time, Zink & Co. are actually engaged in some postmodern neo-retro hipsterism? No chance— these guys’ old school approach isn’t a passing fancy; it’s a way of life.

Cousin Curly in the Temple of Twang

Before I get all distracted, let me show you this edition’s video, which comes from my travels to Nashville last spring…

From a certain point of view, the Ryman Auditorium could be seen as a microcosm of Nashville. Like the Music City as a whole, the Ryman is a really nice place that seems to hide its deep connection to bluegrass. While the back of the building is lined with display cases, you have to go to the third floor to find any significant bluegrass-related material. In some respects this isn’t a surprise, in that the Ryman hosts all manner of performances today, from Aretha Franklin to ZZ Top. But while I’m sure that ticket sales for bluegrass acts aren’t keeping the auditorium’s pews polished to a fare thee well, I reckon that the streams of pilgrims who are paying close to twenty bucks for the backstage tour are primarily drawn by the venue’s storied past. No doubt many grew up listening to the Grand Ole Opry, which called the Ryman home for several decades. If I’m correct about all that, it would follow that a good number of these are folks interested in an era when bluegrass was an integral part of the operation. So what gives?

But as I say, I found Nashville puzzling in the same way. A quick rundown of musicians based in Nashville reads like a directory of present-day bluegrass:

Alison Brown, Roland White, Bryan Sutton, Jerry Douglas, Jim Buchanan, Josh Williams, Valerie Smith, The Steeldrivers, Ron Block, Blake Williams,  Ricky Skaggs, Mark Schatz, Jerry Salley, Keith Tew, Gail Davies, The Infamous String Dusters, Melonie Canon, Casey Driessen, Sam Bush, Gillian Welch,  Daily & Vincent, John Weisberger, Dierks Bentley, Kathy Chiavola, Mike Bub, Larry Sparks, Tim Carter, Paul Brewster, Ronnie Reno, Tim O’Brien, Billy & Terry Smith, Fred Carpenter, Doug Dillard,  Tim May, Wayne Southards, Brad Davis, Barry & Holly Tashian, David Crow, Kevin Williamson, John Cowan, Mike Compton, Tim Hensley, Larry Cordle, Marty Raybon, Sharon Cort, Keith Sewell, The Chigger Hill Boys, Stuart Duncan, David Talbot, Ed Dye, The Grascals, Pat Enright, Scott Vestal, Donna Ulisse, The Farewell Drifters, Marty Stuart, Rickie Simpkins, Pat Flynn, Kim Fox, Pam Gadd, J.T. Gray, Tom T. Hall, Aubrey Haynie, Casey Henry, Tom Saffell, Randy Howard, Jim Hurst, Rob Ickes, Eddie Stubbs, Vic Jordan, Cody Kilby, Randy Kohrs, Alison Krauss, Jim Lauderdale, David Grier, Keith Little, Ned Luberecki, Del McCoury, James & Angela McKinney, Larry McNeely, Luke McNight, Ken Mellons, Patty Mitchell, Alan O’Bryant, Bobby Osborne, Heartstrings, The Overall Brothers, Continental Divide, David Peterson, Missy Raines, Lee & Elaine Roy, Carl Jackson, Darrell Scott, Jimmy Campbell, Ronnie McCoury, Larry Perkins, Larry Stephenson, Jim Van Cleve, Terry Eldridge, Andrea Zonn.

Whew. That’s just a start; I’ll bet there are literally hundreds more worth noting.  Even so, the music itself doesn’t even register as background noise. During my visit, I would regularly spin the radio dial from one end to the other. I never heard so much as a note that sounded like bluegrass. I know there is a vibrant house party scene in the Nashville bluegrass community, but that doesn’t explain why bluegrass isn’t a more visible— or, more the point, audible— part of the landscape.

But don’t get me wrong: I really like Nashville. As long as the Cumberland River behaves itself, it’s an elegant metropolis that also manages to be comfortable and friendly. Can’t wait for my next visit, by which time I hope I will have been granted the secret password and welcomed into Nashville’s occult (in every sense of the word) bluegrass scene.

Yer Pal— Curly

Cherryholmes Serves Up Sizzlin’ Self-Help

Dang. Anybody know which way 2010 went? I believe I left some stuff in the back seat…

Cousin Curly’s got whole stocking full of good stuff to share with you in the New Year, but first I’ve got to wrap up our “Cherryholmes Season.” What with the calendar turning over and all, it seems appropriate to close out this brief series with a bit of soul-searching— a Cherryholmes specialty.

For those of you not up on Team Cherryholmes, a quick recap: Since leaping full-blown onto the stage a decade ago, this six-member family band has become one of the most popular acts in bluegrass. I’ve already commented on the band’s technical virtuosity and its puzzling mix of piety and razzle-dazzle. There’s one key ingredient to the group’s music that I have yet to delve into, however, and that’s the way it continually draws on the language of self-improvement in its lyrics.

Take the latest release from the band, Cherryholmes IV: Common Threads. After listening to that album for a while, I realized that I wouldn’t need to buy a Daily Affirmations calendar for 2011— all I had to do was press “play” on my Cherryholmes playlist every morning and I’d be good to go. True, a number of their compositions mine a millennialist vein— not surprising, given the family’s deep Christian roots, to say nothing of its affiliation with the born-again Ricky Skaggs— but more often than not, the group’s songs take a psychological tack. When working in this mode, the group trades notions of damnation and salvation for an ethic focused on redemption through self-realization.

This self-help theme turns up in songs written by many members of the family, but the expert in the genre would seem to be banjo-slinging daughter Cia. I caught the whole Cherryholmes brood performing Cia’s composition “How Far Will You Go” at last summer’s Lake Champlain Bluegrass Festival. Contrary to what the title suggests, the song has nothing to do with the question so often posed by one teenager to another. Rather, it’s an up-tempo ballad about a troubled girl for whom the song’s narrator has plenty of advice. Have a listen:

I hope this video captures a little of the energetic interplay that is a hallmark of the band’s stage presence. As I’ve noted before, this is a group that really knows how to swing. All that good mojo can make you overlook what’s being said. In the midst of all the ruckus, Cia is laying it out for her tormented friend:

Why do you cling so desperately to the hurt that you don’t need

You can’t let go of the fear in your mind, and leave it behind

While I admire the song’s ambition— its attempt to capture a certain inner turmoil in words and music— I confess that I recoil a bit from its artless approach. Cia Cherryholmes is a gifted songwriter, but her work would be stronger if she could find a way to evoke rather than merely address. More often than not, the songs that stand the test of time paint a picture, leaving audiences over the ages to find meaning in the composition. Take this old line about another young woman who is “passing away her troubles:”

Last time I saw little Maggie

She was sittin’ by the banks of the sea

With a forty-four around her

And a banjo on her knee.

In contrast with the concrete imagery of this lyric, songs from the Cherryholmes family are laced with references to a purely inner world (the word “mind” crops up repeatedly). The problem with this on-the-nose approach to addressing psychology is that, ironically enough, it forestalls any attempt to look deeper. When, in another song, Cia sings, “I’m left with anger and annoyance,” well, what more is there to say? The songwriter has already analyzed her mental state, leaving the listener no role beyond “being there for her.”

Perhaps I have a point, or perhaps I “just don’t get it.” It occurs to me that my beef with Cherryholmes’ particular brand of confessional songwriting might be of a piece with a broader disconnect on my part. I’ll spare you the sermon, but let’s just say that contemporary American culture is riddled with values that, from a more traditional perspective at least, seem contradictory. After pondering long and hard about the mixed signals I get from Cherryholmes, it finally dawned on me that the problem is with me, not them. I’m trying to reconcile all these disparate cues the family sends out— the hints of rusticity, the pouting glances, the homespun values, the tattoo fetish— when in fact I just need to let go. Instead of trying to look under the hood of the band’s tour bus to see what makes it run, perhaps I should be more focused on the sleek exterior, because maybe that surface level is all there is— or at least all that matters in this case. When you look at the group’s work this way, it starts to add up: everything you need to know is right out there, at once as glossy and raw as a photo of a steak in a supermarket circular.

Yer Pal— Curly

Pedantic Postscript: Ever since I first heard Cia Cherryholmes sing, I’ve asked myself, “Where have I heard that voice before?” The other day, I had a Union Station song on the iPod and— bingo! In interviews, mother Sandy Cherryholmes has confirmed that the kids listened to Alison Krauss & Union Station early on, and Krauss’ influence on Cia’s singing is unmistakable. It’s interesting to hear influences like this crop up in the work of younger performers; it reminds us that their points of reference are as likely to be current, still-active artists as it is to be the forefathers and mothers of the genre.

Broke Guitar Blues

We interrupt the regularly scheduled programming to bring you this public service announcement… John Martin Holland has long been a fixture on the streets of Burlington, Vermont, where he bills himself as “The Human Jukebox.”  While at the Lake Champlain Bluegrass Festival this summer, Holland lived through every musician’s worst nightmare when he tripped and busted his prized instrument, a ’72 Martin. Here he recounts the tale— with musical accompaniment, no less…

Again, if you want to contact Holland and offer help or encouragement, he can be reached at johnsmusic@comcast.net

Cherryholmes: Intelligent Design or Mutation?

Bluegrass has been a family enterprise from the outset. Bill Monroe honed his craft playing first with his uncle and then his brothers, but well before his Bluegrass Boys first took the stage, there were family minstrel acts traveling the byways. Today, there are still family bands across the spectrum of acoustic string music, from The Whites to the Parkington Sisters and all points in between.

Yet even given this musical legacy, it feels odd simply to lump the group Cherryholmes into the long tradition of bluegrass family bands. Their story is so singular, their ascent in the field so vertiginous and their style so distinctive that parallels with other music acts seem to miss the point. Rather than compare them to Del McCoury & Sons, I’m tempted instead to place them in the company of famed aerialists the Flying Wallendas or pyrotechnic legends the Grucci Family, idiosyncratic clans that have raised the business of grabbing attention to an art form.

I caught up with the Cherryholmes juggernaut last month at the Lake Champlain Bluegrass Festival, a homey event that takes place each year on a farm just a mile from the Canadian border. The band anchored the Saturday evening line-up, and as soon as they took the stage, my narrow little mind started to seize up. The band is a semiotic puzzle, a jumble of cultural references. First there’s mom Sandy, the Amazonian queen girded with a Celtic arm band, then there’s dad Jere, looking like Sean Connery playing a mountain man, and finally there’s the whole gaggle of offspring, all of whom— but for their instruments— would not look amiss backing Justin Timberlake.  Add enough rhinestones and sequins to make Liberace blush and more tattoos than you’ll find in a prison yard and— well, see for yourself…

Jere Cherryholmes likes to call the band’s style “bluegrass on steroids.” The show has an energy that can take away the collective breath of the performers and viewers alike. Before you blink it seems, they’re five songs into their set and you’re thinking, “You know, maybe steroids aren’t so bad…” Still, when it’s all over, you wander away asking yourself, who are these born-again bow-hunting hippies in lip gloss?

It helps to know they’re from that great cultural blender known as California, and that Ma and Pa Cherryholmes met in church. This goes some way towards explaining their “Red Hot Chili Amish” aesthetic and lifestyle. I’m not joking about the Amish part either. The kids were home schooled, and the family code of conduct was not typical of most Southern Californian households: no television, internet, nor even headphones allowed, and no driving or dating until the child had reached eighteen.

Small wonder, then, that a heady mix of Old Testament rigor and hormonal sizzle fairly oozes from the stage at a Cherryholmes show. In truth, in interviews, members of the band seem entirely grounded and reasonable. The professions of faith that turn up frequently in their songs sound like genuine and heartfelt testaments, not bumper sticker slogans. The number in the video above— “Changed in a Moment”— is a gospel-inflected original tune penned and sung by Sandy that summons up both the Holy Spirit and a devilish swing rhythm. It’s remarkable how you can hear the background chatter give way to hoots and hollers as the audience gets swept up in the song.

I can’t help wondering if the transformative moment that Cherryholmes refers to in this composition was the death of the family’s eldest child, a daughter named Shelley who passed away from respiratory failure in 1999. As the oft-told story goes, it was in seeking solace in the wake of this tragedy that the family embraced the idea of playing bluegrass together and began their meteoric trajectory.

Of course, playing connect-the-dots between a songwriter’s biography and his or her art is a dangerous game, and I would resist the temptation were the members of the band not so devoted to keeping this personal loss in their— and our— thoughts. Each album they release bears a dedication to Shelley’s memory, the latest— Cherryholmes IV: Common Threads— being no exception.

I have a small arsenal of Cherryholmes material from Lake Champlain that I’ll fire off in the coming weeks, but it makes sense to start with a number that has an overtly spiritual theme, and not just because band makes no secret of its faith. It’s hard to spend an hour looking at this photogenic ensemble and listening to their impeccable musicianship without pondering some Big Questions. The whole ensemble is so perfect, right down to the name Cherryholmes, which sounds like a brand of some sort— perhaps for a pipe tobacco? Anyway, you take the whole thing in and, depending on your metaphysical inclinations, you either think, “Only the Great TV Producer in the Sky could come up with this,” or “It took nearly seven billion people and all the ages of history, but here they are.” Yer call.

Yer Pal— Curly

Acoustic Blue: Making Connections

When a star of classical music plays a concert at, say, Symphony Hall here in Boston, it’s common practice for just a handful of carefully vetted music students and aspiring professionals to be permitted into the green room after the performance. When a pop music act plays a venue like the Boston Garden, a select group of fat cats, friends and contest winners are given backstage passes.

In bluegrass, such gate keeping hardly exists. When I go to even very large festivals or concerts, I’m always struck by how accessible some of the biggest names in the business can be. Not only will performers generally come down to the merchandise tables after a show; it’s not uncommon to find them picking around some campsite in the wee hours.

This is one of the charms of bluegrass: that it’s an intensely social form of music at every level. Virtuosity is certainly prized, but there’s a human element to the music that’s harder to quantify yet equally important. Whenever we catch a bluegrass act, we’re particularly attuned to how the performers relate to each other, and how they connect with the audience.

This theme of connections— both within a band and with the public— is the subject of Cousin Curly’s final installment of Ye Olde Performer Showcase featuring the New England-based bluegrass outfit Acoustic Blue:

The song accompanying this segment is Merle Haggard’s rowdy ode to heartache and hard living, “Back to the Barrooms.” Just listening to it makes me thirsty.

To explore all the Performer Showcase segments, click here. A tip of the hat in gratitude to the members of Acoustic Blue for sharing their thoughts and experiences with me. Here’s to our paths crossing again soon!

Yer Pal— Curly

Bill Monroe: Ninety-Nine and Counting…

William Smith Monroe was born on September 13^th, 1911. Yep, while we were busy playing the countless tunes that Uncle Bill contributed to the canon, the centennial of the “Father of Bluegrass” has been creeping up on us.

Monroe died in 1996, and while we no longer have him around to share his music and glare at his sidemen, there is a veritable army of masters of “Monroe Style Mandolin.” Among the upper ranks of this faithful cohort is Skip Gorman. Gorman has played a variety of traditional music. For many years, he performed with guitarist Richard Starkey as the duo Rabbit in a Log. As the name suggests, they favored repertoire from the dawn of Bluegrass. Gorman and Starkey still play together when they can. Here they are performing a classic Monroe fiddle tune in a workshop at this year’s Joe Val Bluegrass Festival:

That composition— “Get Up John”— uses a highly unorthodox tuning for the mandolin. Working from the lowest to highest strings, the tuning is AF#-DD-AA-AD!* Gorman tells the story of Monroe borrowing his mandolin to play “Get Up John” at a show in the late sixties. Gorman was just a lad at the time, and it was of course an honor to have the Great Man play his instrument. In truth, however, Monroe probably made the gesture so as not to risk busting a string on his own mandolin.** That tale, some version of which I’ve heard from more than one picker, seems emblematic of Monroe in many ways, in that it shows him at once engaging with the audience and operating from some squirrelly personal motive.

Although several Monroe tunes feature alternate tunings, in and of itself, that doesn’t define Monroe Style Mandolin. What does? Well, here’s a very partial list:

• A percussive use of the right hand. In addition to inventing the classic “bluegrass chop,” Monroe’s playing was characterized by what mandolin ace Ben Pearce calls a “really aggressive and often rhythmic tremolo.”
• Building lots of “open” intervals into his harmonies
• Allowing open strings to ring while playing notes on a neighboring string

Monroe liked to talk about the “ancient tones” that he built into bluegrass, and those big harmonic intervals and chiming open strings did indeed forge a connection with music from bygone eras such as shape note singing and other still more archaic traditions.

But bluegrass— the genre Monroe helped invent— has never been purely a retrograde musical style, and Monroe was always equal parts throwback and pioneer. Ricky Skaggs, among others, likes to draw the connection between Monroe’s propulsive playing method and the early rock n’ rollers. Skaggs points out that Monroe’s boogie-woogie riffs on certain breakdowns prefigure rockabilly by a decade or so.

So, Happy 99^th, Mr. Monroe. Cousin Curly predicts a Global Bluegrass Awakening this time next year, so let’s all keep practicing.

Yer Pal— Curly

* PEDANTIC POSTSCRIPT #1: There is some discussion out there as to the order in which the G string should be tuned on “Get Up John”— AF# or F#A— with the consensus leaning toward, “It don’t make no differ’nce!”

** PEDANTIC POSTSCRIPT #2: The risk of busting a string is mostly in returning to normal tuning, when you crank the top strings back up to E.

Acoustic Blue: Song Craft

Where do songs come from? It’s a question without answer that we keep asking through the ages. Music is such a pure and direct expression of the human spirit that when someone summons forth a new song, it’s natural enough to wonder: how did that happen? Complicating the issue is the fact that a song, like any form of communication, is an act of translation. We use an array of musical conventions to turn the primal noise inside us into something universal. A successful song must find a balance between inspiration and craft.

Not surprisingly, the paths songwriters follow when navigating this thorny terrain are endlessly varied. Peter Rowan likes to tell the story of co-writing one of the all-time great bluegrass tunes, “The Walls of Time” with Bill Monroe. The Bluegrass Boys’ bus had broken down on a mountain pass. Rowan was standing next to Monroe, watching dawn break over the hills, when Monroe pointed out a sound— the song literally coming to them on the wind. Think of this the next time you sing the lyric “I hear a voice out in the darkness…”

On the other hand, Woody Guthrie, the archetypal Dust Bowl rambler, wrote his songs on a typewriter. I always like to picture the lyrics of “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh” scrolling up out of the carriage of the ol’ Underwood. Different strokes, indeed.

In the latest installment of Ye Olde Performer Showcase, Corey Zink and his bandmates from Acoustic Blue talk a bit about the alchemy of songwriting. If nothing else, this brief clip is worth watching just to get a better look at Mike VanAlstyne’s custom built resophonic guitar. Have a look and a listen:

Two Acoustic Blue originals make brief appearances in that clip— “Sweet Perfume” and “An Empty House”— both of which can be found among the band’s recordings. As Zink explains, the latter tune was essentially written as an assignment, inasmuch as Zink and guitarist Shaun Batho specifically set out to write a song that would sum up the dark themes in an album that the band was working on. Not all Acoustic Blue songs take shape in such a deliberate fashion, however. Another Zink original, “Carved Into a Stone” grew out of a breakfast meeting with a friend. The friend’s wife had just passed away. In expressing his grief, the man said something to the effect that the memories of his partner could never fit onto a tombstone, a sentiment that Zink translated almost verbatim into the song he wrote that same day: “There’s no room for her memory carved into a stone.”

Another fundamental chicken-versus-egg question that pops up when song craft is being discussed is this: Which comes first, lyrics or music? Judging from the treasure trove of orphaned lyrics he left behind, it seems that the lyrics always came first for Mr. Guthrie, but of course more than a few songs started out as instrumentals, only to have lyrics added later.

But never mind the words; what about the melody itself? Where does that come from? I recently spoke with musician and music educator Mike Holmes (founder of Banjo Camp North and Mandolin Camp North, among many other credits). Holmes was commenting on the Greenbriar Boys’ composition “A Minor Breakdown,” and this led to an interesting observation on what makes a tune work.

What say you? Do you have a process for calling forth the muses, or any routines you avoid, for that matter? Do rabbits’ feet or rattle snake tails help? Let us know…

Yer Pal— Curly

Josh Williams Causes Heartache Outbreak

In our last entry of Ye Olde Performer Showcase, members of Acoustic Blue offered the observation that the bluegrass circuit had become the default home for traditional country music. With everyone in the country music firmament from Dolly Parton to Jim Lauderdale releasing bluegrass albums and with country stalwarts like Gene Watson performing at bluegrass festivals, it’s hard to take issue with this view.

Even an event like the Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival, whose line-ups often read like a genealogy of the New Grass bands of the 1970’s, has of late been tinged by a touch of twang. This year, country songbird Kathy Mattea brought her recent collection of coal mining songs to the Grey Fox main stage, and Josh Williams returned with his band to perform a couple of sets that drew heavily from the country canon.

Of the flavors that country music brings to the bluegrass tradition, none are more pungent than those found in a good break-up ballad. Whereas the classic bluegrass ballads tend to deal with drowning, poisoning, dismemberment and other crimes of passion, the destruction documented in country tunes generally takes the form of psychic wounds. Case in point:

For a man who has yet to turn thirty, Williams does an uncanny job of summoning the ghosts of the best crooners of country’s bygone eras. Like Randy Travis and George Jones before him, he can pull off that trick of somersaulting from an opening bass note right up into the tenor range. He’s also mastered a down home version of melisma, a technique whereby, as he approaches the climax of a song, the singer turns a single syllable into a miniature cadenza of heartache. Check out what Williams does to the word “tried” in the final chorus.

Like so many fine songs, “The Great Divide” never was an outright hit (it reached #41 on the country charts in 1989), but it has since become something of a standard. Latter day bluegrasser Gene Watson recorded the tune and is still closely associated with it, but it was actually written by Randy Travis (in partnership with John Lindley). In album notes he wrote at the time his recording was released, Watson referred to “The Great Divide” as “my favorite song.” He also credited Travis for persuading him to keep performing when he was ready to chuck it all. Cool how so many of the dots connect here, from Travis to Watson to Williams.

Yer Pal— Curly