Tracks:
Hallelujah In My Heart; Always There; The Cross Road; I Wasn’t There; Someday, Somewhere; Highway To Heaven; Power In His Name; The Golden Hills Ahead; I Want To Live So I’ll Be Ready; The Hills Of Glory; Show Me The Way; Just A Few More Days; On The Other Side .

Browsing one day in Christian World, Manchester, I came across this CD and decided to take a chance on it. I’d never heard of Doyle Lawson before I took the plunge, but I needn’t have fretted... As you probably know, old Doyle has played in some pretty exalted company - not least with Tony Rice, J.D.Crowe, Bobby Hicks and others, on the Rounder CD ‘The Bluegrass Band’ (Rounder 11502), and elsewhere.

Traditionally, life in rural America revolves around the church. The same musicians who lead the praise and worship on Sunday provide the music for the church hoe-downs and dances that form the social focus of the community. No surprise, then, that trends in ‘gospel grass’ mirror those of the commercial music marketplace.

The arrangements on this album are as traditional as you could hope to find. The vocals have the unmistakable cadences of Reno & Smiley and the songs have that simple, direct and naive language that might be associated with Bringing In The Sheaves or We Will Gather At The River.

Pagans will find the sentiments cloying, but the picking and singing is a delight. Five part harmonies abound, the musicianship is authoritative without being flashy, and Doyle Lawson’s production is crisp and authentic. Perhaps we are guilty of neglecting a vast resource of wonderful material. Wouldn’t it be churlish to ignore the possibility of North West bands adding exciting new material, simply because someone filed the songs under ‘sacred’? For instance, The Cross Road is a wonderful piece.

Get hold of a copy and give it a listen - I promise you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Oh, and by the way, I’d like to hear from readers who’d like to develop a Christian bluegrass set...

‘Bill Keith and Jim Collier’

Tracks :
Smoke Smoke Smoke; Phlebitis; I Think About You All The Time; Would You Believe It?; There’ll Come A Day; Eighth of January / Twelfth of Never; Beating around the Bush; Texas Cowboy; Bouree #2; Crab Waltz; Two Twenties.

It won’t do you any good to think too deeply about this one. Is it bluegrass or jazz? Is it a delicate melange of both? Really, who cares. I love this album. For my money, no-one matches Bill Keith in terms of the sheer variety of texture and sound he coaxes out of the banjo. Likewise the choice of material that’s wound up on this masterpiece. Smoke opens the show at rip-roaring pace, followed closely by Phlebitis, a Keith composition that owes more to Stephan Grappelli than Bill Monroe. Tracks 3 & 4 repeat the dose - ‘jazz’ follows ‘bluegrass’. Stand out track is a dazzling version of standard Twelfth of Never, with Eighth of January thrown in as middle 8. The arrangement is so simple, the vocals - Nicole Wills teaming up with Jim Collier - so finely balanced that you just want to hit the remote control and play the whole thing one more time.

But there are gems to be found in every track. Colliers rendition of Texas Cowboy earns more than just a lone star; Bass man Henri Texier dazzles on Crab Waltz. But, make no mistake, there’s not a wasted note on the whole record, so stunning is the musicianship.

Yes, some of the material will be challenging to ‘died in the wool’ tradgrassers, and to those who’ve come to bluegrass via the UK folk scene. The album goes from Hank Snow yodelling to J.S.Bach and stops at a lot of stations in between. Old Joe Clark it ain’t. You might want to buy this album and keep it hidden away to protect your credibility, but buy it if you can. It’s never far from its next play at our house, that’s for sure.

Ian Reynolds, Blackley, 1 May 1997

Updated 23rd Jan 1999