Shawn Camp – Live at the Station Inn

Once a fiddle player for the Osborne Brothers, singer-songwriter Shawn Camp managed one major-label country release in the early ’90s before retreating into the Nashville seams where all the forms of country music, from bluegrass to mainstream, are knit together. He’s written hits for Garth Brooks and Brooks & Dunn, but he also works with Cowboy Jack Clement, co-writes with Guy Clark and Jim Lauderdale, rabbit hunts with Jimmy Martin, and plays a mean “Methodist Preacher” on the fiddle (though not on this album).

Recorded at two performances last year, Live At The Station Inn shows Camp’s bluegrass side to great effect. He revisits a few of his songs previously recorded by artists including Clark, the Del McCoury Band and the Lonesome River Band, and presents a half-dozen others of equal quality, abetted by overlapping ensembles that include Nashville Bluegrass Band members Mike Compton (mandolin), Stuart Duncan (fiddle) and Dennis Crouch (bass), as well as banjo players Dave Talbot and Scott Vestal, bassist Dave Roe and rhythm guitarist Bucky Baxter.

Matching the feel of Camp’s supple, elastic voice, the band is loose and congenial, but there’s plenty of verve and emotional range in the readings. His background comes through on selections such as “Sis Draper” (previously recorded by co-writer Clark and newly cut by Ricky Skaggs) and the simultaneously ghastly and humorous “Soldier’s Joy 1864”; old fiddle tunes are neatly woven into both. Also of note is the Lauderdale co-write “Forever Ain’t No Trouble Now”, a reworking of Flatt & Scruggs’ fiddle-driven “Someone Took My Place With You.”

Once a fiddler, always a fiddler seems to be the operative principle. And, at least in this case, it’s an artistically productive one.