Lilly Brothers & Don Stover – On The Radio 1952-1953
Inductees into the IBMA’s bluegrass Hall of Honor this year, the Lilly Brothers & Don Stover earned the distinction largely on the strength of their 18-year sojourn in Boston between 1952 and 1970. Though they recorded intermittently, their reputation was built mostly through personal appearances, especially nightly shows at the Hillbilly Ranch.
The West Virginia natives blended Stover’s devil-may-care approach to the banjo with the brother duet harmonies of Everett (mandolin, fiddle) and Bea (guitar) Lilly to produce a unique kind of bluegrass that exerted a powerful influence on local youngsters such as Peter Rowan, Bill Keith and Jim Rooney.
The 20 cuts gathered here are culled from transcriptions the trio made for a daily radio show during their earliest Northeastern days. These 15-minute shows were heavy with songs from the catalogs of the Monroe Brothers, Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs — Everett was fresh from a stint as a Foggy Mountain Boy — and thus provided tangible evidence of the process by which the pace-setting work of Bill, Lester and Earl was beginning to be transformed into a genre.
Yet the Lilly Brothers & Don Stover weren’t simply imitators. Without hordes of rulebook-toting bluegrass fans to scowl at deviations from the emerging pattern, they were free to do whatever suited them, whether that was a free-spirited rendering of Grandpa Jones’ “Here Rattler Here”, a soulful recreation of the Monroe Brothers’ “Sinner You Better Get Ready”, or the already classic “Prisoner’s Song”. As these examples suggest, the Brothers themselves were more likely to be looking back at their formative years; Stover, on the other hand, though he could bang out some fine clawhammer picking, was more likely to be charging into the future as he developed his own twist on the Scruggs model.
The tension between the two approaches might have produced nothing more than a mess. Instead, it resulted in a rich, distinctive body of work, all too little of which made it to disc. On The Radio is plenty valuable as a historic document, but its ultimate worth lies in the unpolished beauty of the music.