Del McCoury Band – Me And The Boys

The same tension between tradition and innovation that has long played out in mainstream country music is fiercely fought in the smaller, more doctrinaire world of bluegrass. Having led inarguably the best traditional bluegrass band in the world for most of a decade, Del McCoury is far too wise a man to embrace much change.

And yet he records for Ricky Skaggs, who conducted his most pointed battles for traditional music on a larger stage. And he cannot be unaware of the youthful rustlings of Nickel Creek, whose videos show on CMT and whose take on bluegrass is somewhat reminiscent of Chick Coreas approach to jazz in the 70s.

Then theres the matter of the McCoury Bands fraught collaboration with Steve Earle, which put bluegrass before a national audience long before O Brother. That collaboration also meant that the McCoury Bands last album, 1999s The Family, was recorded in a bit of a rush.

Two years later, Me And The Boys departs only slightly from the bands well-grounded sound. They remain a formidable ensemble, in no small part because theyve been together since 1993, unlike their peers, who seem to trade bass players with the same frequency rock bands change drummers. Del McCoury is still (of course) one of the finest, most expressively blue vocalists at work. The mix of songs an intriguing cover, a gospel number, a couple of Dels own tunes, an instrumental is largely unaltered.

But clearly they are paying attention to the environment in which they work. The sound has been changed, just a little bit (and presumably by Ronnie McCoury, who produced unassisted for the first time). Dels vocals have been pushed more to the foreground than before, and sound as if he has been more closely miked than usual. That same studio gloss has also been applied to the instrumentation.

In fact, it sounds as if more than a little of the final mix was recorded in isolation booths, or at least with microphones carefully positioned to avoid the kind of messy ambient bleed that makes their single-microphone live shows so powerful. Thats not to say the band plays with perceptibly less emotion, simply that their penchant for precision has been emphasized. Its not quite intrusive, this new prettiness, and they may all have too much edge to their playing to let it take over. One hopes.

The bands taste in material remains as impeccable as their wardrobe. This albums rock cover is a gemlike recutting of Richard Thompsons 1952 Vincent Black Lightning, transposing the English town Boxhill to Knoxville. Thompson sings it with a snarl, identifying with the young rogue; McCourys vocals root the song in a more ancient tradition, adding young Red Molly to the litany of Knoxville girls led astray by bad boys.

It is not the kind of song McCoury typically records. He is mostly drawn to solitary studies of lost love (Jeannie Pruetts Count Me Out here), found God (Pharisee), and McCourys principal strength, the blues (Learning The Blues, etc.). Theres not much rogue to his persona, but it may be an unconscious pickup from The Mountain, for its exactly the kind of song Earle writes, and in any event a fine addition to their repertoire.

Or perhaps McCoury is simply rediscovering story songs, for The Kings Shilling, a Mike ORieley song about young men lured into the English Navy (and returned, one blind, his friend dead), suggests just how well his voice and his band do with this kind of material.

The rest is well worth listening to, but not as interesting to write about, for it takes few words (and fewer notes; try the storming Gone But Not Forgotten) to remind one that they are still the best at what they do.