Bradley’s second solo effort, Old Southern Porches, recapped essentially the same musical formula as the first — a healthy portion of originals, an out-of-left-field cover (Stealer’s Wheel’s 1973 hit “Stuck In The Middle With You”), pristine, restrained production, and some gorgeous singing. It didn’t have the same impact on radio, though the elegantly regretful title track, penned by singer-songwriter Tanya Savory, reached #4 on the bluegrass airplay chart.
The album did signal, albeit indirectly, one important change: Though they weren’t identified as such, members of Coon Creek appeared on the album, and for the first time, they were men.
Today, Coon Creek continues as a mixed-gender outfit, with Eddie Miller playing mandolin and Michael McLain, a veteran of Claire Lynch’s Front Porch String Band and, before that, the renowned McLain Family, adding sophisticated banjo and guitar work. Simmons continues to hold down the bottom on electric bass, and though she doesn’t appear on the new album — Union Station member and Doobie Shea stalwart Barry Bales plays instead — she is still well-represented, with one songwriting credit and five co-writes. She and Bradley have found a songwriting groove, and with each successive release they’re more self-assured and — well, better.
“When the New Coon Creek Girls contemplated starting on our first album after I joined,” Bradley recalls, “Vicki said, ‘You know, you can pick up some change there if you’ve got any songs.’ Well, I didn’t have much confidence in my stuff, you know, but I brought it to the band, and she said, ‘Well, that’s great, we need to do that,’ and she brought some, too. We each had a song that we hadn’t finished, so we just one day got together and each helped finish the other’s song. And from there we just started writing about everything that was happening around us, happening to our kids, happening to us or families or neighbors, or things that we were observing in society.”
“The hardest thing for me is to come up with an idea that’s not overworked,” says Simmons, “because there’s so many love-gone-wrongs. I guess we’ve kind of gotten into trying to capture, like she said, things that have gone on around us, life experiences. And we find when we do that, those are the songs that people really relate to. We’ll have ten or twenty people a show come up and tell you they’ve been through a similar experience. Especially that one called ‘Caught In The Middle’ [on Our Point Of View], that domestic violence, they’ll come up…The first time we did that, we had women crying and saying, ‘That’s my life story.'”
Indeed, much of what really lifts Cumberland River Dreams and its predecessors above the realm of ordinary bluegrass are the songs. “She’s so strong on the melodies,” Simmons notes; “they’re not like your basic melodies.” But it’s more than that. In a realm populated mostly by men writing from the pattern set by Monroe, Lester Flatt and other first-generation writers — “cabin songs,” as they’re not-so-jokingly called — Simmons and Bradley go against the grain.
Sure, they write their share of “love-gone-wrongs,” but they also unearth childhood memories and family stories. The title track of the new album draws on Bradley’s youth: “I’d grab my old guitar, make sure that I had paper and a pen/And I’d write and sing my heart out to the waters of the Cumberland River”). “Granny Cat” is built around the story of Simmons’ great-great-grandmother Catherine. “Beyond The Shadow Of A Doubt” is a gospel song that sets the assurance of faith against the grim reality of cancer.
Assigning the specifics of an artistic creation to gender is a risky proposition, but as Bradley says, the duo writes from what happens around them, and whether the songs are literally true in all respects or not, they have a kind of particularity that seems rooted in their experience as women.
Given all that — the voice, the songs, the perfectly tailored arrangements of the new album — it would be a real shame if Dale Ann Bradley & Coon Creek stay hemmed in by the confines of bluegrass, and not because there’s anything wrong with the genre. It’s just that what’s on Cumberland River Dreams is music that can resonate even more deeply in places where there aren’t so many rules and strictures.
Bradley and Simmons know that; they’ve played for some Americana audiences, and “they seem so much more accepting of things that are not straight down the middle,” Bradley concludes. “They like music for what it is and what it can convey. If we can get to that audience, that’s where we’ll probably do the best.”
ND contributing editor Jon Weisberger lives with his wife and two sons in Northern Kentucky. He is presently involved in the creation of bgrass.inc, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and support of Cincinnati-area bluegrass and its rich heritage.
