David Grisman / John Hartford / Mike Seeger – Retrograss
The concept: Recast a big bunch of bluegrass and rock ‘n’ roll favorites in a variety of old-time country styles, using an array of vintage instruments. In the hands of the wrong musicians, that could be disastrous, but David Grisman, John Hartford and Mike Seeger — all masters of traditional music — get the job done nicely. Their love for (and knowledge of) both the material and the styles lifts the effort well clear of novelty-only status.
The idea isn’t really new. Skaggs and Rice did the same sort of thing almost 20 years ago, turning bluegrass songs into old-time brother duets, while Tom Sauber, Brad Leftwich and Alice Gerrard put three “retrofitted” bluegrass songs (including “Blue Ridge Cabin Home”, which also appears here) on 1998’s Been There Still. But it hasn’t been done before with as much variety as is delivered here, or with as broad a range of material. Early attention has focused mostly on the rockers (“Hound Dog” as a Charlie Poole parlor piece, “Memphis” done jug-band style, a ragtime/Jimmie Rodgers “Sittin’ On The Dock Of The Bay”), but the majority of the tunes here come from bluegrass, anchoring the treatments in a stylistic and historic context that makes a good deal of sense.
If all this starts to sound a bit like an academic exercise, be assured that it isn’t. There’s plenty of humor here, such as Hartford’s inversion of Bobby Osborne’s sky-high tenor vocal on “Rocky Top” to a rumbling bass one, and lots of twangy sounds from instruments such as the mandolin-banjo that never really made it into the mainstream.
Not everything works. Hartford’s slippery fiddle lines and growling vocal on “Memphis” threaten to lose the song’s melodic outlines altogether. But at its best, as on the “primitive” rearrangement of Jimmy Martin’s “My Walking Shoes” or Seeger’s Dylan-as-Dock Boggs take on “Maggie’s Farm”, the album more than justifies Seeger’s liner notes claim that “it won’t be boring — at least not for long.”