To call Peter Rowan a legend is an established truth, though it doesn’t quite capture that innovative spirit, which persists despite his 71 years. Rowan was born a Yankee in Boston, Massachusetts, but he has long been associated with Nashville, bluegrass and the father of both, Bill Monroe. He’s written songs like “Midnight Moonlight,” “The Walls of Time” and “Panama Red,” which have been covered by everyone from Willie Nelson to Railroad Earth to the String Cheese Incident. He was also a member of one of the first and most inspirational jamgrass bands, Old and in the Way, with the likes of David Grisman and Jerry Garcia.
His new album, The Old School, features an impressive roster of Nashville cats and honors Doc Watson, Bill Monroe and the musical inheritance they’ve left us all. If you get a chance to see Rowan with Twang and Groove however, you might reconsider what you think you know about his music. He is famous for his yodel, his versatility and his passion for at times staying in the lines, yet also knowing when to color outside of them. Rowan told me “Bill Monroe was “keep it between the lines” old school, [while] Jerry Garcia was, “Hey man, where are we going now? What’s the adventure now?”” The Festival Shaman and his legacy, falls somewhere in the middle.
How he came to play with Twang and Groove
A lot of it had to do with the songs, you know I’ve been doing them a certain way for a long time with a heavy bluegrass influence. I felt like elongating the lines of the story of “Land of the Navajo.” A good friend of mine out here, Jack Elliot, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot—he’s a guy I admired a lot when I was just starting to pick, when I was like twelve or fourteen, he was of the older generation, a pal of Woody Guthrie’s and he’s still on the road—I noticed that he didn’t try to keep everything within a strict boundary, like bluegrass does. You can stretch it for sure, but there’s a certain form that’s expected of a tune, and when you play it solo you don’t have that restriction. You can stretch it out a bit, sort of have it linger on lines. Especially in ballads, like ‘Land of the Navajo’ that tell a story.
So I’ve been doing this with a bluegrass band where we just take a beat and stretch it out, so that the story is being told rather than just the tune being played. When I got together with my buddies in Austin, Twang and Groove, the drummer is a guy named Jamie Olbaker from Tulsa, Oklahoma who played with Eric Clapton. He was in his band for four or five years back in the day when [Clapton] recorded down in Florida and was using Tulsa guys because he was enamored with J.J. Cale. Eric liked that groovy, kind of chilled out but rocking feeling. I met up with Jamie when we did our first gig a few months ago in Texas.
Immediately, I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is really different.” Because Jamie comes from roots that are as strong as bluegrass but they come from Tulsa, Okalhoma, which is a combination of western twang and R&B. But all those guys were really enamored with…black guys playing black music. Jamie grew up in Tulsa, and I said, “Well what’s the influence out there?” And he said, “Black blues and Indians.”
Oklahoma is Indian Territory, you know I’ve written about it and I’ve been exploring the southwest again. It’s so stark out there that the vividness of things is very present, and musically too. You get out there in the desert and you hear space and you realize that music is going on, it’s very vivid in your mind, the sound of the wind and everything like that, it all contributes to it.
A lot of bluegrass oriented jam music is still going boom-dicky-boom-dicky-boom, but it kind of ignores the R&B side of it and really, it’s great to be able to adapt. Right now I’m finding these old recordings of soul singers and how they approached their ballads was really deep, deep, deep down in the groove. So that’s kind of where I’m coming from on this project, is from that place where there’s just more of a soul beat to it than a drum based bluegrass beat. However, we still do all the bluegrass tunes and some of them in that beat. It’s just tunes like ‘Land of the Navajo’ that stretch you know, really stretch them so the words are drawn out. It’s country with a R&B feel is how I look at it. Electric bluegrass with a deep R&B sensitivity to it.
From Boston to Nashville
Well, you know as a kid I was addicted to the radio. So, I would hear a world of music that was way beyond my years. When I had to take a nap when I was four years old my mother would let me listen to the radio and I pretty much listened to what was then country music coming out of WBZ in Boston, which became Channel 2, the great TV station that brought documentaries and really in-depth programming to the world. Before that started they were a radio station and they broadcast all kinds of music. I remember the pop music was kind of uninteresting, you know Frank Sinatra and stuff was still pretty popular, but it was a world I had no sensitivity to. It was my parents’ music. My parents loved Broadway shows and things like that.
When I was a kid the radio played bluegrass. I had no idea what it was. As soon as I was six years old my parents got me out going to square dances. And in square dances I got to experience people playing the instruments: I could see the fiddle, and the banjo and the guitar. And that was pretty exciting. So I started to strum on a tennis racket—I had no self-consciousness about, you know, “I’m going to play an instrument,” until I was about twelve years old and then my dad gave me a ukulele. There was this guy on the radio named Arthur Godfrey and he had a talent show on the radio and it broadcast from Hawaii. There was also another show on there called Hawaii Calls. My ears were just delighted to hear what I could hear. I heard the steel guitar, didn’t know what it was, but I could imitate it with my voice. So I’m singing with the yodeling.
Between twelve and thirteen I had this little rock and roll band and we’d go out and play concerts and then somebody turned me onto this club in Boston, two clubs. One was Club 47, where all this folk music was being played and the whole of Boston, Cambridge scene in the early 60’s was people jumping on it. Just people wanting to learn how to play, learning from other people, and I liked the bluegrass thing because it had the blues, it had the ballads, and it also had the harmony. Bill Monroe came to town and he liked the way I played and he had me join his band. That was cool.
I’m more of a Yankee, I could still be a Yankee, but I went south. I went away from the scene where people were trying to make it as folk singers and I went down and just apprenticed with a master in a style. We were on the Grand Ole Opry every weekend and it introduced me to a world where it wasn’t quite as intellectual as the New England folk scene. Living in a society with major racial discrimination at the time, and then the freedom marches, civil rights—we were in the middle of it. I used to wonder how I ever played bluegrass being a liberal Yankee, but over time everything—as best as it could—worked itself out.
Recording The Old School live and in a circle
I don’t really know. It’s people sitting around microphones breathing [laughs]. I always record that way, it’s not like that’s a different thing for me. I always try and record live. But in this one it was like, “Let’s not try and make it all separated by what they call baffling, or keeping the sound in. Let’s go for whatever happens in the room and I think it sounds real good.” There’s a theory where engineering and everything is afraid of what they call leakage, and I think leakage is what gives the magic to the sound.
[We recorded it] in Nashville, in a studio. I got to give credit to Alison Brown, the producer—it’s her record company. I brought the idea of the Old School to her and she said, “We got to do this, we have to bring not just the Bluegrass Boys, but let’s go to the old school players that are still going.” And those are the ones who are right around time and it could have included Sam Bush but it’s even a little further back between the lines than Sam.
Sam Bush
Well, he and I—I give him lots of room. I’ve known him since he was twelve years old. He used to come down to Nashville and hang out backstage at the Grand Ole Opry with his dad. I don’t know how many years older I am then him, but yeah, he was part of that new generation that was open to the jam.
You can jam so many ways: one tune can develop into another tune, you can get into free sound, combinations too.
Notes on The Old School
It’s like getting people that play old-school style and get them in the studio and have them contribute—like Bobby Osborne, Jesse McReynolds. I mean, I don’t know what is apparent to the listener, but as far as creating it, it was very, very exciting. Our music is just like wow, it’s here; it doesn’t exist until you make the music that you’re hearing in your mind. Those guys are my heroes: Jess McReynolds, Bobby Osborne, Sonny Osborne, Carter Stanley, Bill Monroe. So I think of every tune as kind of homage.
‘Drop the Bone,’ I wrote that with David Gans who does the Grateful Dead hour. As soon as David Gans told me that title, I knew it was going to be like a Jimmy Martin song. To me it sounds like something Jimmy would have sung, while Carter Stanley would have sung something like ‘True Love to Last.’ That song is about regret and concession and still pledges that the feeling isn’t dead, it’s just in transition. ‘True Love to Last’—in this darkest hour if you give, there will be love. Life is fleeting, true love to last.
Then there’s the ‘Letter from Beyond’ and that’s definitely a Bill Monroe channeling. Me and Ronnie and Rob McCoury, we went out and we were touring as a combined act to do the music of Bill Monroe in his hundredth year and we did quite a good run. After one week, the first week, he [Bill Monroe] just sat down next to me after the show and said here’s the song I never finished. You know I never heard him say that, but I wrote the ‘Walls of Time’ with him and ‘Letter from Beyond’ to me is that haunting, bluegrass thing. To me the essence of bluegrass is a music that goes beyond one life, this life; it kind of creates an ambience of the mystery of it all.
On the new record the song ‘O’ Freedom’ is a song I did for Odetta. It is one of the freedom marchers songs. When I was in Nashville they were going down to south to sing for the freedom marchers. There’s a huge history there that’s never talked about. The students of Tennessee University choir dropped their books and skipped their finals and went down to Montgomery and marched with Martin Luther King. It was their music that was made the music of the civil rights marching. To have that on the record is kind of bringing it around full circle.
Old and in the Way
Old and In the Way itself was more of an adventure. I had this rock and roll band Seatrain that I was playing with [that] found expression in this bluegrass band because of a guys like Jerry Garcia and Vasser Clements. We brought to the band our own want, need, for adventuresome playing, but you have to land with the right people that would support that. And Jerry was—he would just smile, you know? My early versions of ‘Land of the Navajo’ were certainly not one of the best. Like we didn’t know what we were doing with Indian chanting, but I knew that it was part of song and needed to be there. But Jerry never discriminated and said, “That’s kind of weird, what were you thinking.”
This idea of being progressive in bluegrass has two things. One is in terms of tunes, songs, and then the other is in terms of the instrumental work. David Grisman was all for learning jazz tunes and playing Thelonious Monk. And we all loved John Coltrane, the whole sense of freedom, playing outside the lines, you know? But in the end when you get down to material, if a bluegrass band has got enough going for it—and most of them do, especially Old and in the Way—you had both elements.
You could do a tune like ‘Wild Horses’ and then also do a tune like Vasser Clement’s ‘Lonesome Fiddle Blues.’ You know a certain level of musicianship is required and, this is the important part with a guy like Jerry Garcia, an adventuresome spirit that allowed us to be more adventuresome than we ever had been before.
David and I had worked a lot in different bluegrass ideas and even had a band called Earth Opera, which was a very slow, underground sounding kind of acoustic/electric sound and we opened for The Doors. We were bluegrass guys getting exposed to another world. In those days in the 60’s it was the beginning of that eclecticism where if it’s rock and roll you can use anything. Of course if it’s bluegrass you’re supposed to keep it strictly dobro, mandolin, guitar, bass—so we were always just straddling those two worlds. And then David went more towards jazz and I kept the song and harmony thing going.
Whereas Bill Monroe was “keep it between the lines” old school, Jerry Garcia was, “Hey man, where are we going now. What’s the adventure now?” The tunes he brought to Old and In the Way were not far out tunes, they were just good tunes: ‘Catfish John,’ and ‘White Dove.’
What’s Next
It’s too late to think about career trajectory, but at the same time that’s what drives what there is of the music business. It’s sort of that idea that you shouldn’t change, that you should always be that musician people expect you to be. It’s what Bill Monroe said, “Always respect the people,. Don’t let the fans down.” You know?
But I think the fans are broad minded these days. I love keeping his songs going, but in a short while I’ll be trying to do something, more of a solo thing. But at a bluegrass festival you got to play bluegrass and I love that. And those other festivals they want something outside, they want something jammy, they want different textures and that’s when I go towards the bass and drums.
On being called the Festival ShamanI’ve seen them write it. Well I always felt those things, you know, those things that go beyond the walls of time, so I’m at home with that.
