ALBUM REVIEW: Billy Strings Stretches Out on Full-Spirited First Live Album

Billy Strings had to throw a tantrum to get his first real guitar. Exposed to dad and friends jamming in the kitchen of the family trailer from the vantage point of his high chair, Strings was gifted a toy guitar at the age of 3. A year later he spotted a guitar in the window of an antique shop and commenced to come down with a full-grown fit to get his stepdad to spend his last 30 bucks to get it for him. His stepdad, who he considers his real father, taught him the basics, but always took the lead, making Billy his rhythm player. But Billy was an apt pupil, observing how his dad built solos, using those techniques to construct his own jaw-dropping leads.

A video of Strings playing the harrowing drug tale “Dust in a Baggie,” made in 2012, when Strings was 20, got him nationwide attention and his fleet fingers did the rest.

Billy Strings (photo by Dana Trippe)

His first live album, Billy Strings Live Vol. 1, was recorded last year and earlier this year at venues across the globe, including in Austin, Paris, New Orleans, and Atlanta, with two cuts from a February performance at the Ryman in Nashville.

The album, technically 8 tracks but adding up to well over an hour of music, kicks off with “Dust in a Baggie,” which Strings has said is about a friend who he thought had done his time and licked his problem, only to slide back into using and prison. If not for the lyrics, you’d think you were listening to some vintage Flatt and Scruggs superpickin’ with spot-on high and lonesome harmonies.

Strings has surrounded himself with a cadre of touring musicians (Billy Failing on banjo, Royal Masat on bass, Jarrod Walker on mandolin, and Alex Hargreaves on fiddle) who not only supply the framework for his solos but add their own musical thoughts to the conversation as well. Nobody is shouting for attention; it all blends into a seamless flow.

But seamless or no, some bluegrass traditionalists think what Strings is doing is blasphemy, much as newgrass pioneers like Sam Bush and Bela Fleck encountered when they first came on the scene. Strings maintains that he is a traditionalist who respects and understands the genre, but just likes to stretch out a bit with it. “Heartbeat of America,” from the Ryman performance, certainly falls into that category: It’s a jammy, jazzy meander sandwiched between a bluegrassy intro and outro.

Strings has said that he always tries to include at least one traditional bluegrass tune in his sets. In this case it would be “Reuben’s Train,” which surfaced in Appalachia in the 1800s, taken once again from the Ryman performance. But even that one doesn’t stay totally straight, with fiddler Hargreaves doing some acid-soaked meandering.

Strings fans, who dub themselves Billy Goats (as in “greatest of all time”), don’t expect the tunes he does live to sound like they do on his records, and he doesn’t disappoint. Strings’ solos go anywhere he feels in the moment, but always seem to land in the right place. One offering that doesn’t waver much from performance to performance, though, is the a cappella rendering of Strings’ original “Richard Petty.” It closes the set here with righteous harmony; you’d swear it was a bluegrass gospel staple if you knocked off the first two lines: “One of these days / I’ll wake up tired of the life I’m living / and feel inspired to get off my ass and be on my way / One of these days I’ll wake up steady and ready to go like Richard Petty.”

From the sound of things on his first live album, it seems like Strings has already won that race.

Billy Strings’ Live Vol. 1 is out July 12 on Reprise Records.