Various Artists – Can’t You Hear Me Callin’ — Bluegrass: 80 Years Of American Music
Nothing so ambitious as a 109-track history of recorded bluegrass can possibly hope to please everybody. Inevitably fans and historians have favorites and prejudices, and will voice them free of the vicissitudes of licensing and lawyers. Still, veteran reissue producer Gregg Geller — whose credits include compilations of Frank Sinatra and Tom Petty — seems an odd choice for this task, and has made provocative selections.
As a traveling soundtrack, this four-disc set made passage across Montana and much of Wyoming quite pleasant, for it is inescapably filled with great music, and the stuff of long argument. Some of the early sequencing is quite clever, hinting at links between songs and artists and the expansiveness of the tradition. But as serious musical history — as the definitive introduction the title promises — Can’t You Hear Me Callin’ is problematic. At best.
Half of the first disc is devoted to the evolving string band music that led to Bill Monroe’s breakthrough 1946 recordings with Blue Grass Boys Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, Chubby Wise and Cedric Rainwater. While more extensive string band compilations remain in the marketplace, this is a reasonable primer (save for the curious omission of Uncle Dave Macon), running from Gid Tanner, the Carter Family, Charlie Poole and Roy Acuff all the way into Monroe himself.
Monroe’s “Can’t You Hear Me Callin'” leads off the second disc, which focuses principally upon his emerging competitors, imitators and rivals: Flatt & Scruggs, the Stanley Brothers, Wilma Lee & Stoney Cooper, the Osborne Brothers, Carl Story, etc. Indeed, Monroe makes only one more appearance here, a 1950 recording of “Uncle Pen” placed mid-disc.
Which means that, so far as Can’t You Hear Me Callin’ is concerned, Monroe’s bands recorded nothing worth anthologizing after the fall of 1950. None of the legendary sides featuring Jimmy Martin, for example, make the cut. (For those about to keep score, Martin and his Sunny Mountain Boys are represented by two tracks; Martin joins the Osborne Brothers for a third.)
By 1950 Monroe had left Columbia, furious that they’d signed the Stanley Brothers, and there may be licensing issues to explain the choice not to follow his career to Decca and beyond. Sony owns the Columbia archive; Universal controls the Decca trove. Nevertheless, while much of this set is (not surprisingly) assembled from among Sony’s extensive holdings, a good handful of tracks have been licensed from other firms.
In fairness, Monroe is represented by nine tracks, plus one shimmering Monroe Brothers cut. Nevertheless, the unstated argument of this compilation is that Flatt & Scruggs (also summarized by nine tracks) were the more creative forces behind the evolution of bluegrass in the 1950s-’60s, and that Monroe’s role as the music’s creator, as its pre-eminent bandleader and songwriter, is either overrated or not worth exploring.
This would be an interesting thesis if it were offered up for discussion, but it’s an argument made implicitly in the track listing, not explicitly in the liner notes. Even more to the point, it’s such an aggressively contrarian point of view that it probably should not be advanced in a package that seeks to provide a definitive history of the music Monroe is widely credited with having invented.
The choices become increasingly idiosyncratic on discs three (roughly the 1960s) and four (everything after). If Jim & Jesse really are sufficiently important to justify eight cuts (double the Osborne Brothers’ total), the songs selected don’t make the case. And it’s a real pity there’s nothing from their early ’60s homage to the brown-eyed handsome man, Berry Picking. Four covers from the Byrds and nothing from the Dillards? The Del McCoury Band merits inclusion only as support to Steve Earle’s “Carrie Brown”? It’s a glorious song, but surely the McCourys, winners of 40 IBMA awards since 1990, deserve more than this glancing mention. And just as surely the O’Kanes — though it’s a nice surprise to see them included here — deserve better than “If I Could Be There” as their sole entry.
But it’s the omissions that become particularly galling. Apparently very little happened in bluegrass from the early 1970s through the late 1990s, and so we hear nothing from J.D. Crowe, Doyle Lawson, Larry Sparks, the Seldom Scene, or IIIrd Tyme Out. Though the door is opened to bluegrass heresy with Edgar Meyer & friends, we hear nothing from New Grass Revival (nor, save as a sideman, from Bela Fleck), the Earl Scruggs Revue, Hot Rize, Nickel Creek, David Grisman, or any of the younger groups who flourish on the edge of the jam-band world, such as Yonder Mountain or Donna The Buffalo.
And while we’re at it, if we’re to have a Dixie Chicks track (“Tortured, Tangled Hearts”; too bad they didn’t go back to one of the first three pre-Natalie Chicks albums, when they were on the bluegrass circuit), why not something from Dolly Parton’s last three glorious bluegrass albums? Or Don Rigsby, or Paul Williams (particularly if we’re to have so much of Carl Story’s gospel — the tradition does continue). Or, gasp, the Bad Livers?
You can’t please everybody, and if nothing else, that list of artists argues strongly that this should have been a five- or six-disc set. Then there’s the sequencing, which seems joyously coherent for the first two discs but falls apart by the last (save for the well-chosen “Soldier’s Joy” Mark O’Connor fiddles at the conclusion). The first track from Edgar Meyer (with Fleck and Mike Marshall), “Big Country”, is placed as a particularly leaden weight.
Billy Altman’s liner notes offer a decent introduction to the music, but were clearly written around the selections and so rarely comment on — much less explain — the internal logic of the track listings. And sometimes that logic is quite good: The three Grandpa Jones cuts that appear across the set, for example, prove unexpectedly revealing; kudos for focusing on Wilma Lee & Stoney Cooper, and on Molly O’Day (though it would have been nice also to include a Rose Maddox bluegrass side, and something from Hazel Dickens). But in general, some greater explanation is due, even if it’s simply an admission of licensing constraints or idiosyncratic aesthetics.
All of this is a problem. Sony Legacy is one of the premier North American reissue imprints, and typically does first-rate and comprehensive work. Doubtless this will be the only retrospective of such ambition to enter the marketplace for the next few years, its success or failure precluding another, more accurate compilation for a good long while.