Bluegrass Cardinals – Self-Titled

In the mid-1970s, bluegrass music was shaken up by several albums that offered innovative combinations of the traditional and progressive to a polarized scene. Though some have achieved deserved fame, one the Bluegrass Cardinals self-titled debut on Sierra Records slipped into obscurity within a few years, even as the band itself enjoyed a period of high visibility and influence on the bluegrass circuit. Now, just when founder Don Parmley has announced the Cardinals retirement, Copper Creek has reissued the album, offering the opportunity to take a fresh look at what all the fuss was about, and to hear some outstanding music.

A Kentuckian transplanted to Los Angeles, Parmley put together the Bluegrass Cardinals with a pair of Southern California natives his teenage guitarist son David and mandolinist Randy Graham and a pair of almost-natives, bass player Bill Bryson and fiddler Dennis Fetchet. Working in a Hollywood studio in late 1975, the quintet produced this album, introducing significant new talents and approaches that have played important roles in bluegrass to this day.

It certainly wasnt the instrumental work that made Bluegrass Cardinals stand out from the pack. The picking is competent Don Parmley in particular was a master of making the most out of modest skills, and Graham developed into a pretty fair mandolin picker but it isnt much more than that. What set the Cardinals apart were powerhouse vocal trios applied to well-selected, inventively arranged material. Though David Parmley was barely 17, he already had a rich, expressive and relatively deep voice, while Grahams tenor/high lead was clear, powerful and distinctive, Indeed, as harmony singers, the two of them overwhelmed Brysons four game efforts at lead singing, even on his own Girl At The Crossroads Bar, though not Dons more savvy harmony singing.

The chief result was an approach that incorporated full trios, high-lead trios, and part-switching on standard trios where David sang the lead on verses and dropped to baritone on choruses, with Don picking up the lead. On the seven numbers featuring the Parmley/Parmley/Graham trio, there is a palpable sense of confidence and sheer joy in creating vocal textures that hold their own against any trio thats ever sung bluegrass. On numbers such as the a cappella arrangement of There Is A Fountain, the clever version of Ira and Charlie Louvins Are You Missing Me, Davids treatment of the albums most modern song, Leaving Harlan, or Grahams soulful high lead on Eddy Arnolds I Couldnt Believe It Was True, the Cardinals combined the smoothness and precision of the Osborne Brothers with the open-throated power and heightened emotionalism of more rural-oriented singers such as Ralph Stanley, achieving a sound that even now can stop a listener dead in his or her tracks.

Its not surprising, then, that when the Cardinals moved east in 1976, their impact was immediate and profound. Though the band went through extensive personnel changes (starting with the replacement of Bryson and Fetchet, who remained in California), they always featured outstanding singers, lured by the opportunity to harmonize with the Parmleys, who only got better as time passed. Unfortunately, the vagaries of the music business, abetted by Dons notoriously prickly relationships with record labels, have kept the Cardinals catalog from being more widely known to more recent audiences. Though they recorded extensively and influentially for Rounder, CMH and Sugar Hill in the late 70s and early 80s before starting their own BGC label, scattered cuts from that period on various Rounder and CMH samplers have been the only things available on compact disc. The reissue of their debut album on CD goes some small distance toward giving the band its due.