J. D. Crowe & The New South (studio album) by J. D. Crowe & The New South

From Rug 02/21/2022 19:35

Every young genre has an artist that bridges seemingly every growth spurt, every miniature era. In middle-aged genres, this generation-spanning man becomes a rare breed: in bluegrass, which has been around since the 1940s, that man is J.D. Crowe. He's played the roles of child prodigy banjo-picker with Jimmy Martin, genre-bending (and, ultimately, redefining) auteur with The New South, bluegrass tastemaker, and, until his death in December 2021, elder statesmen and old wise man.

The chisel with which he etched his face into bluegrass's Mt Rushmore is this self-titled record, affectionately referred to as "Double O forty four" by its admirers (its call number in the Rounder Records catalogue). It's your favorite bluegrass musician's favorite bluegrass album. 0044 reinvented a tradition that, at only three decades old, was already growing stale; Crowe played curator by assembling a group of young upstarts that included (no joke) eventual "greatest bluegrass guitarist of all time," Tony Rice; Ricky Skaggs (yes, that Ricky Skaggs); and Jerry Douglas, universally accepted lord of all things dobro.

What's important about the selection of these specific musicians is that, at the time, they were all essentially unproven: TR had played guitar with The Bluegrass Alliance, but their reach was limited and he was ultimately still green. Ricky Skaggs was sideman to Emmylou Harris and did some picking with The Country Gentleman, but his primary reason for joining The New South was "to keep my singing warmed up," something he inexplicably wasn't being enabled to do by those groups. Jerry Douglas, despite what his playing on the record might suggest, was a teenager.

All of this speaks to Crowe's willingness to experiment and wrangle boundaries to achieve his vision, something the bluegrass community of his day wasn't always terribly interested in. Using The New South's 6-nights a week gig at The Red Slipper Lounge in Lexington as his testing ground, Crowe gave his bandmates freedom to propose new material that would provoke skepticism in many a 'grass diehard: without that freedom, modern folk artists like Gordon Lightfoot might never have become an essential component of the bluegrass lexicon.

Every musician on this record (besides the bass player, who seems to have stepped away from music) appears in some capacity on another album on my chart. Most appear multiple times. That is J.D. Crowe's legacy...and we didn't even talk about his picking.

The "Kind of Blue" of the bluegrass genre. All the performers on this one have been immensely successful in the bluegrass and country music scenes.