Del McCoury has been a major influence on not only bluegrass, but on multiple generations of jambands, country musicians, and various pop icons, too. With Old Memories: The Song of Bill Monroe, the newest member of the International Bluegrass Hall of Fame pays tribute to his greatest influence and one-time bandleader, bluegrass godfather, Bill Monroe. McCoury sang lead vocals and played rhythm guitar for only one year with the legendary musician back in 1963 but that would prove to be a pivotal year for the young musician, and a period of time that left a lasting mark on his life and music.
Jambands.com talked with McCoury in the midst of several key tour dates, including the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, Delloween, which featured Keller Williams and the Travelin’ McCourys in Kentucky, and the inaugural Orlando Calling Festival in a year that also saw him collaborating with New Orleans’ Preservation Hall Jazz Band.
McCoury is an insightful, inspired, sharp, and humorous man, who at 72, continues to play like a man half his age, while forging ahead towards the future and life beyond the road by getting “his boys” out there, so the McCoury family name continues on—as it should. And to be sure, like Bill Monroe, a man the Hall of Famer admired and respected, the bluegrass world has been shaped in a profound way by Del McCoury, as well.
RR: Tell me about Bill Monroe and his importance to you and your music.
DM: I’ve been listening to Bill Monroe since I first remember. Before T.V., my dad and my brother would listen to the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday night radio, and Bill Monroe would be on there. We lived on a farm, and when my older brother G.C. got old enough, he got a job working on a factory and he was making money so he’d buy records. This was still 78 rpm records. (laughs) He would buy Bill Monroe records, so that’s how I’d get to listen to stuff over and over that way, instead of just hearing things on the radio.
I became a great fan at a really early age, probably 9 or 10 or something like that back when I first heard Bill Monroe. I was fortunate enough that in the early 60s, I got to work a year for him through Jack Cook. Jack Cook was a guitar player and lead singer that had worked for Bill Monroe for several years. I got a job with Jack because he quit Bill and moved up to Washington D.C. first, and then he moved from D.C. to Baltimore, and he was playing with a guy by the name of Earl Taylor and the Stoney Mountain Boys, which was a great bluegrass band there in Baltimore. They mostly played clubs in that area there; they were the first bluegrass band to play Carnegie Hall before Bill Monroe, or Flat & Scruggs. Jack was working for Earl, then he quit Earl and got his own band, and when he did, I started playing banjo with him because I was a banjo player way back them.
Bill Monroe was going to play in New York City, and it was in the winter time, and for some reason, he didn’t have a guitar player or a banjo player, so he took me and Jack to New York. Jack knew his material because he had just recently played for him, so he
knew that he took Jack and then he took me with him to play banjo, and that’s how I got to know Bill Monroe. He offered me a job, and that’s how it all came about.
RR: This past September was the 100th anniversary of Bill Monroe’s birth, and you’ve got an album out called Old Memories: The Songs of Bill Monroe, and it is an absolutely wonderful work and fine tribute to the man and musician. Whose idea was the project, and how did you select the songs?
DM: Thank you. Well, you know, it was my idea. I always wanted to do Bill Monroe’s songs. I have recorded one on a record all through the years, I’ve picked one and recorded it on a record, but I always wanted to do his songs because of my voice. I can still sing in the register that he did, you know. (laughs) I thought I better do it now before I get too old, or I can’t do it.
I was talking with my manager about it and I said, “You know what? I’ll just make a quick list of songs that I could do on the record without any rehearsal, probably at all” because they are in my mind so much. I made this big list of songs; course I didn’t stick to that list, completely, because I felt that if I’m going to do this—a lot of people have recorded some of his most popular numbers that he sang all through the years—I’d like to do some that are kind of obscure, that he recorded and some of those songs he never really sang ‘em on stage. Or, he might have sang ‘em when they first came out, but within a year he quit singin’ ‘em. That’s kind of the way it goes when you do a record, and then, you do a new record and you start doing all those songs.
But, you know, when I worked for him, he had some songs that he did every show, and one was “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” “Press Your Little Footprints in the Snow,” “Uncle Pen,” and “Muleskinner Blues”—he did all those every show, but then, sometimes he’d ask for requests, and people would request songs he’d recorded through the years and, for the most part, he could remember ‘em. Like “Alabama Waltz”—I never heard him sing that; I just heard him on record do that song. I sang “I’m Blue, I’m Lonesome” with him and there were some songs that when he recorded them, he sang the lead on the verses, and then he’d sing the tenor on the chorus with the lead singer. But, on the road, sometimes he’d just let the lead singer do the verses, that way he didn’t have to sing as much. One of those was “In Despair.” I remember I had to learn that, and we sang that one a lot, so I felt like “well, I’ll put that one on [ Old Memories ]; it’s obscure and nobody does it anymore,” but I’ll bet now (laughs), with this 100 year thing, there will be a lot of stuff comin’ out that people have never heard of from Bill Monroe on other records by other artists. I did get some of the things that he didn’t do that were never overdone.
Ronnie, my son, is involved in a movie about Bill Monroe, and we recorded a lot of songs in that movie, also. Of course, I didn’t any of those on this record, but there was a lot of old songs of Bill Monroe’s in the movie on the soundtrack. Actually, we recorded about 70 some songs of Bill Monroe—not just me; they had a lot of artists come in and do songs like Jim James sang “Down the Highway of Sorrow,” which he sang. [Monroe]
sang that one quite a lot. Myself and Dan Auerbach [of the Black Keys] sang “Can’t You Hear Me Calling?” We got a lot of different artists to come in. Vince Gill sang on it. Peter Rowan came and sang. There’s a lot of songs.
But on [ Old Memories ], the way we did it, I told the boys to do it all in the same keys that Bill Monroe done them, and we’re going to do the same speed—course, I was used to doing it that way. Most of the time, people sing Bill Monroe songs too fast. They think it’s fast, and it’s not really that fast. And you lose a lot. Now, there are some fast numbers. “John Henry” was cookin’, man, and he always did that fast. (laughter) But, you know, some songs lend themselves to that, and there’s some that are pretty if you do ‘em in the same speed that he did ‘em in and in the same key. A lot of them had one fiddle, or two fiddles, or three fiddles. My fiddle player [Jason Carter], he said, “Who will we get to play the other fiddles?” And I said, “We’re going to get you to play the other fiddles”—one, two, and three fiddles. (laughs) He did a great job with those fiddles.
RR: Ronnie was able to do some parts that you used to do with Bill.
DM: Yeah, he did. He sang the lead on “I’m Blue, I’m Lonesome” with me and, also, “In Despair,” and I think another one in C. Oh, and another thing when I worked for Bill, we would come on the show—and I kind of did [ Old Memories ] like a show in a way—with that little “Watermelon on the Vine,” and just play a little short piece of that, and he’d either just start talkin’ as soon as that stopped, or we’d kick right into another song. At the end of the show, he would say, “Well, now, we record for Decca Records and our most popular songs are on that label,” and then he’d play his little mandolin thing [McCoury scats the melodic line] and sing, “Y’all Come.” [Author’s Note: “Watermelon on the Vine” begins Old Memories, while “Y’all Come” rests at its coda.]
RR: Great bookends to the show and the album.
DM: (laughs) Yeah. It’s like bookends for the album. He always did that. But me working for him, I knew all the little ends and outs that he had and things that he did. It’s funny; I gotta tell you this one, Randy. We used to play “Bean Blossom,” and this lady would always be there. I don’t know if it was an old acquaintance, or what it was, but she wanted to hear a song called “Linda Lou,” which was about West Virginia. Well, he would do that song, but he could never remember the words, and he’d look to me for the words, and I had no idea what it was. (laughter) I think he felt obligated to sing that song to her. She was from West Virginia, you know? But, that was an example of the fact that he recorded so many songs, and he couldn’t remember them all, so once in a while he would try one that he didn’t remember. (laughs) He was a great guy to work for. I got along really well with him, and I should have stayed longer, but I got this guy a job, Billy Baker, a fiddle player, with Bill, and we were young, and we decided we needed to go to California. That’s where we ought to be—California—(laughs) like a lot of young people do, and I only stayed exactly a year from February to February. If I had to do it over, I would have stayed longer [with Monroe], but I got married, too, in the meantime. I quit
Bill, got married, and moved to California all in one week. (laughter) Crazy stuff, man.
RR: And then Ronnie came along shortly thereafter.
DM: Yeah, and it all turned out good. I still have the same wife. It worked great.
RR: It did, didn’t it? Let’s talk about the movement on the record, as opposed to what you just mentioned in your personal life. There are some truck driving songs on Old Memories. You’ve had a bit of a connection with that lifestyle, right?
DM: Yeah, I thought about that. Before I went to work for Bill, I drove a truck. Back then, you didn’t need a CDL [Commercial Driver’s License], or anything to drive a truck. If you got your driver’s license at the age of 16, you could jump right in the biggest rig they made and drive it right out on the highway. Bill bought a bus when I was with him, and I drove it a lot, but, yeah, that hit home with me. I remember hearing [“Lonesome Truck Driver’s Blues”] so long ago. My brother had that record, and I listened to it over and over and over. I had the 78 rpms out, and that was one of them. And, you know, I don’t know if I ever heard him do that on the road, either. I like it—“Lonesome Truck Driver’s Blues.”
RR: You did some runs, or solos, to emulate the feel on the Old Memories.
DM: Oh, yeah. I know the one you are talking about [“Used to Be”]. I had to put picks on because I’m used to using picks, but the guy who recorded it in the beginning, I don’t think he used…well, he might have used picks to play a little short break on that tune “Used to Be,” and I thought Ronnie did a great mandolin solo on that, too. He does his little solo, and then I come in with the guitar and I change into the next chord and take a little short break, and then the fiddles come in, and I always like that. I always liked the way Monroe did that on the sound with those fiddles. But, yeah, I had to do that. I thought, “Well, it’s going to be up to me to do that little guitar break.” I use a flat pick all the time, and I haven’t used picks on my fingers since I quit playing banjo. That’s been a long time ago, but I still know how to use them.
RR: “Train 45 (Heading South)”—Bill Monroe originally recorded that with lyrics, but the piece has mainly been played as an instrumental.
DM: You’re right about that. Most people play it as an instrumental, but that song was recorded by Grayson and Whitter way back in the 20s, I think, but it was written by a guy that my dad went to school with, Steve Ledford, an old time fiddler from North Carolina. He and my dad went to school together, and they were probably kin, but I don’t know. Steve Ledford and Wade Mainer and maybe it was J.E. [Mainer], the three of them wrote that song, and they got credit for it. I didn’t even know that song had lyrics to that song, but I think my oldest brother did know that because Steve Ledford came to our house and stayed for a while one time when I was too young to even realize. He probably sang that song because he played on the fiddle. So, Bill, somehow he knew the words to it, but he recorded that way after I quit him, really. That was probably one of the latest songs that I recorded on [ Old Memories ]—that “Train 45” song with the words.
RR: Another song Bill covered “Alabama Waltz,” was written by Hank Williams.
DM: That’s correct. I have a radio show that’s syndicated, and the guy that scripts the show for us is Jon Weisberger. He told me that Hank actually recorded that song. I didn’t know that. He recorded it when he was still on Liberty Records in Alabama before he ever was in Shreveport, or up here in Nashville, and so I didn’t know that. Hank did record it, and that’s where Bill got it. Hank and Bill wrote “I’m Blue, I’m Lonesome” together, you know, and I think that Bill recorded these two songs on the same day—“I’m Blue, I’m Lonesome” and, also, “Alabama Waltz.” That was at a time when he and Hank Williams were traveling together. Jimmy Martin told me that. He said that Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys and Hank Williams were actually traveling together and doing shows at about that time, which I think was about 1950. That’s going back.
RR: “My Rose of Old Kentucky” is such a sweet song, isn’t it?
DM: Yes, it is. I couldn’t get a handle on it like I wanted to, but that’s the way it is with some songs. (laughs) I always liked that song, and I have sang it before, but for some reason, when I recorded it at that time, I just couldn’t get it like I wanted it. I thought, “Well, we’ll just leave this off the record” because we thought it was going to be too long anyway with all these songs, and yet it wasn’t. So we used it anyway. Yeah, I didn’t think we’d get it on there. We put it on vinyl, too. I thought it may work on a CD, but it ain’t gonna work on vinyl. But it did. It was just long enough for vinyl without going over with what I had. That was everything I recorded. When we went into the studio and recorded, I thought we’d have at least one too many, which is good. I always want at least one or two songs too many. (laughter) But it worked out. We were almost short. (laughs)
RR: What do you feel were the challenges in recording that song?
DM: I don’t know. It was something about…it was just something…it could have been the way I felt that day. I think that’s probably part of it. Some days, I can really nail a song, and the next day it’s a lot harder for me, and I don’t know. It’s the notes, the way they are, and it’s hard to explain—some of those songs that were higher notes than that were a lot easier. It’s crazy. (laughs) Right in that mid-range, that is kind of in my mid-range before I have to break into falsetto, and that’s pretty hard to keep singin’, for me to keep singin’ all the way through the song. But then there’s days when that comes real easy, but that day, I just thought, “Man, why is this song so hard to sing?” (laughter)
RR: On that note, let’s move out of the studio and go to shows where your performances are also very much based on how you are feeling, and how the band is feeling, and the crowd and all of that. You’ve recently played the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco. What are your thoughts on that festival?
DM: That’s really a great festival. Warren Hellman runs that, and it’s free to the public. He’s doing a great service to the people. I think he started it just for the San Francisco residents, so they’d have a place to go, but now, they’re comin’ from all over the world, man, for that. I don’t know what they are going to do with all of those people in the future. It’s really big. Randy, this year, we played it with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. We have had a lot of fun with those guys. One of our shows was at the Austin City Limits, and that’s really fun. Playing with them is really fun. It’s something different in a way, and in another way, it’s still same. All music is related. I love those horns. They really play well.
I don’t know this in the beginning, but Bill Monroe used to listen to jazz. Of course, he listened to Jimmie Rodgers. He recorded a lot of those Blue Yodeler songs. Somebody told me that he’d go down to New Orleans and stay a week and listen to these guys. But, then, too, there was a guy [Arnold Shultz] who came up from New Orleans every summer, out where Bill Monroe lived, and Bill played with him. He’d play guitar, and I think Bill got a lot of his influence from jazz through that guy when he was really young. [Author’s Note: Shultz’s influence cannot be overestimated. As well as being a blues and jazz influence on Monroe as a young, budding musician, Shultz also helped develop the thumb-style of playing guitar, and was a fine fiddler, too.]
You can hear that influence. And I can also hear jazz in some of the classic fiddle players of that century. When Kenny Baker was playing with Bill, Bill introduced him one time as “The Greatest Fiddler in Bluegrass,” so that’s saying a lot. One time, Kenny was playing something, and I said, “Kenny, where did you learn that?” because I worked with Kenny myself, too, and he said, “I learned that from a clarinet player.” (laughter) I said, “Really?” And he said, “Oh, yeah, yeah. I listen to those guys all the time.”
That’s when you find out it’s all related. You see, as a kid growing up, listening to Bill Monroe, I thought, “Man, this is this music,” and Earl Scruggs same thing, he learned a lot of those early banjo tunes he recorded from Dixieland and jazz like “Dear Old Dixie” and “Bugle Call Rag”—all that stuff came from New Orleans or St. Louis, or somewhere, but you don’t realize that as a kid. When I heard Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs, I thought, “Man, there’s nobody that plays like this and they just started this up themselves.” See—everybody learns from somebody. And those guys learned a lot of things from other people. (laughs) Yeah, they did.
RR: Interesting. I just spoke with another veteran musician who said that music came from somewhere; one had to have received it from some other source, and it is interesting where musicians get their influences and inspiration.
DM: That’s true. One time Bill Monroe told me, “I learned a lot of things from other people, but they don’t know it.” He said, “I could play it, but you wouldn’t recognize it.” Isn’t that funny?
RR: Perfect. Speaking of influences, I love the variety of collaborations, themed-shows, themed-weekends, and overall different lineups you play with, i.e. Del Yeah Weekend, or Delloween. You also share stages with musicians like Keller Williams, who are modern exponents of all you can do within one’s music, too.
DM: I’ll tell you, Randy, the boys are working with Keller right now. I’ve got the boys out doing their own thing. I decided, well, I’m 72 now, and me and my wife and my manager thought that we better get the boys out because you never know. I’m in good health, but I won’t be always, I’m sure. So we’ve got them out on their own doin’ shows, so [Travelin’ McCourys] do some stuff with Keller, and they rehearse with Keller here in town. They just see what they can do and then hit the road to do those dates with Keller. Keller played my festival, DelFest, up there in Cumberland [Maryland], too.
I think it goes back to this—I wrote a song one time, and Phish recorded it on a live album. After they did that, they wanted me to come out and play their festival with my band out there in New York. It was an abandoned airport [Oswego County Airport in Volney, New York on July 17 and 18, 1999]. I went up there and played the festival, and there was like 70,000 people there. (laughs) I couldn’t believe it. Here’s another thing—they did my song, which really tickled me to death because the royalty checks were really good from that song. (laughs) I got there, and Trey just walked up and talked a little bit, and said, “Now, what can we do together?” I said, “Oh, man. I have no idea.” He said, “Do you know “I’m Blue, I’m Lonesome”?” I said, “You know that song?” By then, I thought, “You know, this guy has had to really study this music. That is hardcore bluegrass right there.” Trey wasn’t expectin’ to do something that was easy. I said, “What part do you want me to sing?” And he said, “Why don’t you do Bill Monroe’s part, and I’ll do Jimmy Martin’s part, the lead.” So we did, and we did quite a few. They put us out to one of side of the stage [a second stage, which also featured The Slip and a few other acts], and we played our set, and they backed us up, too [on the second day of the festival during Phish’s first set on July 18, 1999]. They didn’t play real loud, but they backed us up on our songs, which was really great.
After that, a lot of those guys who were in jambands now realized that they came to my shows when they were young and before they got in a band, and when they got their own band, they’d want us to come play the shows with them. That is the way that all got started. We started playing with other bands, and, of course, I got to listen to these guys.
It is like what Sam Bush did years ago. Sam came in just after me. He’s not that much younger than me, but he started doing progressive bluegrass and he was one of the first. It was kind of like that. It’s good for the music to have all these different flavors and different variety. I like variety in everything, and like in a record and in entertainment. I don’t like to hear the same thing over and over.
I’ll give you an example. This is going all the way back to the 50s when I was listening. I grew up in Pennsylvania in the farming country up there, and we had a place called Sunset Park. There was New River Ranch, and a lot of hillbilly or country parks, up in that part of the country, too. There were a lot of bluegrass bands around. Like I said, Earl Taylor was the first bluegrass band to play Carnegie Hall. And that area was a hot bed for bluegrass—Baltimore and Washington, D.C. I think Detroit was the same, and Cincinnati—I was never out there, but back in those days, there was great music in that city. This is all hardcore stuff in those days, but then, John Duffey and the Country Gentlemen came around and came up, and this stuff was a little bit different. It was a little different, which is good for the music. The singing was different, the banjo playing was different—everything was different. By the time that bluegrass festivals came into being, which was in the middle 60s, Sam Bush had started a band and these guys were influenced by bluegrass, but they’re also influenced by some rock guys, too. So you hear that comin’ into the music, and it just kind of branched out.
Those festivals made our music international because I started seeing people comin’ from other countries, which was a surprise to me. They were comin’ from Japan and Europe, you know, all the countries in Europe, so that’s when it went international. Sam was one of the first progressive bluegrass bands, and then these jambands came along, and they had a mixture of electric and acoustic (laughs), and I like it. I do.
RR: Well, I like what you have to say.
DM: Hey, man, I enjoyed it, Randy. Yes, sir. Thanks, man.
