Summer Sunday Flashback Ten: Doc Watson, Bootsy Collins & Co., Funkin’ Round The Mountain
Don Allred
Posted On August 26, 2018
‘Nother one from the Voice. Sorry if the formatting looks a mite odd, as tends to happen with these transfers, despite my attempts to compensate (I am just a country boy). Here goes:
GrooveGrass Boyz get a-Roused.
May 26 – June 1, 1999 Issue 21
The GrooveGrass Boyz
GrooveGrass 101
Reprise
A natural blend, really: Bluegrass and other high-travelin’ styli get their obsessive beats tunefully trounced and bounced on a new-cut road, courtesy ‘Grassmaster Scott Rouse, confessed student of Zapp II (Roger Troutman R.I.P.) and the new Kid Rock album. Rouse is in the house with fellow hillions Doc Watson, Del McCoury, and P-Funkabilly Bootsy Collins. GrooveGrass sometimes two-steps hi-Texno, like Rednex’ barnturner “Cotton Eye Joe,” but with bigger feet, sounds like.
The single-only “Rocky Top,” Rouse’s John The Baptist foretaste of GrooveGrass, mixes freshwater Osborne Brothers harmonies in a beer-can piston, chug-strutting ’round the mountain, spilling nary a drop.
101 wrestles with the restlessness of the Delmore Bros’ “Deep River Blues,” dancing its fatalism jaunty: “Let it rain /let it pour/let it do/a whole lot more.” The slide-guitared arrangement glides us down; Bootsy’s Bob Wills–ian ocal zingers partially deflate the Big Lonely; Rouse moodily messes with a sample of Doc saying “sample.” Sink, swim, or tread, you better keep kicking.
Maybe you’ll get to that “Little Cabin on the Hill”, where little Suzi leaves you “Stuck Like Glue,” “feelin’ kinda frail/like the check is in the mail.” So go overboard (“LetmebeyourSaltyDog / orIwontbenomanatall”), ’til the “Blue Moon of Kentucky” sees you dumped. Scared straight, Doc and Scott bid the moon “shine on”—later for “the one who made me blue,” boyeee, let’s roll!
The emailorder-only GrooveGrass Boyz (www.GrooveGrass.com) whomps Skynyrd’s “Mississippi Kid” like a little brother, serenades “Macarena” Willie Nelson–style, and ignites the fieriest straight bluegrass Del’s ever sung in these ears, “I Feel the Blues Movin’ In,” next door to the illbilly “White House Blues”: “You better die/you better cash yore checks.” Word from McCoury to McKinley. Now y’all save your Dead Presidents for Chemical Grass, coming soon.
