J.D. Crowe – Bluegrass Holiday

In 1972, Carl Fleischhauer photographed J.D. Crowe at his mobile home in Lexington, Kentucky. Black and white. Cadillac parked out front. Window-unit air conditioner. The epitome of cool. This is that J.D. Crowe. Almost. If your Crowe touchstone is his classic Rounder 0044 with the New South, that was still three years away. And this, Crowe’s first full album with his own Kentucky Mountain Boys, was already four years past. But what the album proves, beyond dispute, is that Crowe was not merely a great bandleader; he was a monster banjo player. Cool, indeed. The Kentucky Mountain Boys included the venerable Red Allen on guitar and lead vocals, Doyle Lawson on mandolin and tenor, and Bobby Slone on bass and fiddle. The band recorded four sides for King (included here as bonus tracks) before cutting this album at Lemco Studios in 1968. The menu is classic bluegrass: “Train 45” and “Pike County Breakdown”; Jimmy Martin’s “She’s Just A Cute Little Thing” and Lester Flatt’s “Little Girl In Tennessee”; the first recording of Crowe and Lawson’s “Black Jack”. Certainly nothing that would suggest they’d spent time listening to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in ’67. Still, when they played their regular gig at the Holiday Inn, you know they were rock stars.