Rhonda Vincent – More than a feeling
That’s a formal way of looking at authenticity — locating it in the sound rather than in the lyric or the personality of the performer — but it’s also undeniably an artistic view. If Vincent frames it in terms of audience acceptance, too, it’s acceptance of her music that she’s after, and those terms have been instilled in her not by Nashville’s oily marketeers, but by her own experience and upbringing. After all, she and her family were sharply dressed — and sounded great — on that Illinois weekend, too.
“My dad was the greatest influence on me,” Rhonda says, “because I performed with him for like 25 years. But it really wasn’t what it looked like. There weren’t categories; this was our lives, and it was just a way of life, and my dad is everything. He’s the entertainer, he’s the… He taught us morals; I’ve never drank, smoked, done drugs, cuss or anything like that. But at the same time, I had a man who’s not only my father but who I’m also working with, and he’s telling me… He said, ‘I’ve never tried drugs either. If you ever want to do that, just bring it home and we’ll all try it.’
“So I didn’t feel like I was suppressed in any way, because his outlook on this was open to anything. There were no limitations, there wasn’t anything that we couldn’t do, because it was constantly, ‘Here it is. If you want it, then you can attain it.’ And I really thank my father for that.”
Still, Vincent’s most constant musical partner has been her brother, Darrin, a sensitive yet powerful bassist and brilliant harmony vocalist who spent years playing with fellow Missourian John Hartford and is in his fourth year as a member of Ricky Skaggs’ Kentucky Thunder. He played on Back Home Again, as well as on Rhonda’s earlier solo albums for Rebel Records, and performed with the Sally Mountain Show before that.
For her new album, Rhonda says, “Darrin did a lot of consulting, too. ‘What do you think about this? Can you come over and listen to this?’ we’d ask each other. So I called him a consultant this time. To me, Darrin is the greatest harmony singer there is. He’s the best, and I want the best.”
Which leads back to her band, and to the music. If there’s a single distinctive characteristic of The Storm Still Rages — beyond the compelling singing, that is — it’s what bluegrassers call the timing. It’s not the rhythm, exactly; rather, it’s the way the rhythm is executed, a matter of feel. Vincent says it took her a while to realize what she wanted, and even longer to be able to put a name to it.
“It’s the same sort of timing I had playing with my brother,” she says. “That’s the timing and the feel that I guess I have been going for and not realizing that it was the Jimmy Martin timing — not putting the label on it, but always wanting this certain feel. There was always this timing issue, and I don’t think I fully understood it until it became more and more clear as these guys joined. And what I’ve been feeling, they can explain it to you, or say, ‘No, that’s not right, it needs to be like this.'”
The guys can do that because, for a couple of them, it was drilled into them by Martin himself. Banjoist Tom Adams, who joined the Rage at the beginning of October — “his first day with the band was in the studio,” Vincent laughs — and guitarist/singer Audie Blaylock, who’s been with her for a year and a half or so, are both former Sunny Mountain Boys. So, too, is the bass player, Matthew Norton, who is, depending on who you ask, making his debut this evening either as the newest member of the band or as a fill-in.
Though the Martin timing forms the tough, exciting core of her sound — you can hear it in, among others, the album’s two originals, “Cry Of The Whippoorwill” and “On Solid Ground”, and especially on “Drivin’ Nails In My Coffin”, a honky-tonk tour de force — it’s hardly right to see Vincent’s music as a simple spinoff from the King Of Bluegrass, made with the King’s musicians. Once again, as she talks about it, the line in Vincent’s mind between deepest feeling and instinct on one end and a professional focus on quality becomes evident.
Though the Rage already had most of its present members when Vincent began work on The Storm Still Rages, Adams is the only one who appears on even a majority of its thirteen tracks. Instead, Vincent leaned heavily on brother Darrin and studio guitarist Bryan Sutton, with supplementary contributions from Blaylock, Rage fiddler Mike Cleveland, former bandmember Randy Barnes, resophonic guitarist Rob Ickes, Scruggs-style guitarist Jim Mills, studio fiddle players Stuart Duncan and Aubrey Haynie, and singers Alison Krauss, Ray Deaton and Ben & Sonya Isaacs. Even her dad and other brother Brian climb aboard on a lively version of Jack Clement’s Porter-and-Dolly hit “Just Someone I Used To Know”.
“I was going for feel,” she says emphatically of this rare departure from bluegrass protocol, which — though it’s starting to change — dictates that the band you have on the road is the band you use in the studio. “I always go for who is the first person who fits this song. Mike Cleveland rocks on ‘Drivin’ Nails’. He rocks. And that’s how I pick the players, and the guys know this up-front. When I go in, I’m using the best person for the job; I love you guys to death, but if something else fits better, this is what I’m going to use. Because a recording is forever, and this is what I want.
“This is my personal taste. If I record ten songs with the exact same band…I want different tastes and different flavors and to shake it up a little, instead of having the same thing all the way through. I do that even more with the songs, and then picking the musicians is the same way. I don’t know that I can explain why I do, because most of what I do is from the heart. I instinctively do it, I do it from my gut and my heart, and not…I don’t consciously say ‘I only want to use this person,’ or ‘I only want to do this.’ I go from the ears to the heart to the gut.”
If that approach means drawing on a wide variety of musicians for the album, it’s largely because, as she says, its songs have different flavors. Here, too, the inadequacy of the Jimmy Martin “label” to capture the range of Rhonda Vincent’s music is evident. For one thing, as she notes, “The Osborne Brothers are the biggest influence on my family’s music.” The truth of that is borne out by the fact that four songs recorded by Bob & Sonny appear on the album: Bob’s “Bluegrass Express” (on which Adams deftly alludes to Sonny’s idiosyncratic yet driving style), Hank Williams’ “My Sweet Love Ain’t Around” (“I got that one from them, definitely,” she says), “Drivin’ Nails” (of which the same is true), and “Each Season Changes You”. Vincent wasn’t aware the Osbornes had recorded the last of those, but her high lead vocal arrangement echoes theirs.