Band members regularly bring in songs they think might be good for recording, too.
“Of course, they already know,” Del laughs, “that if I’m not going to like to sing it, I’m not going to record it!”
“I never know what I’m looking for in a song,” McCoury maintains. “I either like the story, or the melody, or something about it I can’t even put my finger on.” But it’s clear Del’s central role as leader of a hard-working band that’s out playing live half the days of the year has much to do with what songs he actually picks. He clearly seeks material he’d feel good about singing repeatedly — and upon which the band can put its distinctive stamp.
“When I heard ‘Nothin’ Special’, I thought, ‘Man, this would be a great band song; we could slow it down and the trio could repeat behind me, then when we got to the next part, we could pick it back up again.”
Working out the arrangements for these numbers has been a full-band process. Ronnie McCoury has ideas for how to attack songs most often, Del notes, but all of them contribute.
Bass player Mike Bub has a distinctive role, Del says. “Bub will listen to a song a lot of times and say, ‘Well, in the instrumental break, instead of playing the last part of that verse, do part of the chorus and then the verse, because it would suit that instrument better.
“The thing about all of these guys is that they all work together and they’re not prejudiced about things,” he continues. “I’ve got, in Jason Carter, for instance, a fiddle player who might say, “Part of this break would sound better on the banjo — and they’ll all do that.”
(In point of fact, and perhaps partly by accident, there’s a lot more of Rob McCoury’s banjo up-front on this record than on the most recent ones.)
The basic good-natured camaraderie and sense of cooperation and solidarity that all four younger members bring to this band — family and non-family alike — would seem to be central to its longevity as a unit (more than a decade together now) in a bluegrass field where breaking off and forming new groups has always been the rule.
“That’s it,” Del agrees. “They never get disgusted or disheartened if they don’t get it the way they want it. Once a song’s done another way, they’ll say, ‘That is the best way.’
“Back in the middle ’70s I had a band where we were all the same age, and we stuck together quite awhile, but then they decided to go off on their own — that whole band! So I’d prepared myself, just expected that sooner or later somebody would leave this one. But now I think even if I got tired of them they’re still gonna stay! These guys, man, make it so easy; I believe they know what I’m thinkin’. It’s kind of scary.”
As of late, Del himself has been giving serious thought to the future of the band and his own legacy — musical and familial. That shows in short-term plans for a bunch of recordings in the coming months — live shows, a gospel collection — “because I’m singing good still, and at my age, who knows, I could start going downhill!” (Allergy problems that affected his voice for a while this past spring led to such thoughts.)
He’s also taken legal steps to regain clear control over the publishing rights to some of his early songs that had been in an ambiguous ownership limbo typical for the era in which his career began.
Del and Jean also have seen to it that their gifted instrumentalist sons will have a couple of extraordinary instruments to play. They recently obtained for Ronnie an extremely rare and fine Bill Monroe generation mandolin, one of the Gibson F-5 prototypes created by acoustic engineer Lloyd Loar in the early 1920s, which today sell for six figures — when they can be located. (This one had spent some 40 years untouched on a shelf in Mexico.) That gift was followed by a banjo of similar stature — a 1940 Gibson Mastertone RB 75 — for son Rob, which he began playing at that Charlie Daniels show at the Hall of Fame.
In 2005, Del McCoury goes right on singing in that searing, blue, high and lonesome-as-can-be style he attributes partly to following the pattern set when Monroe and the late, great Jimmy Martin sang together. (Del’s work with that band is finally documented publicly on CD with Acoustic Disc’s recent release of Bill Monroe & the Blue Grass Boys’ Live At Mechanics Hall from 1963, with Del firmly readjusted to guitar and Bill Keith on banjo.)
The past is in the music — as is youth. And the future is in the songs — as is tradition.
Focusing as intently on bluegrass as he did from the age of 11 in 1950, when the form didn’t even have a name yet, once made teen Pennsylvanian Del McCoury an odd man out. Even his own sisters were interested first in the Frank Sinatras and Johnny Rays and then in Elvis while he was excited by Earl and Bill. But that past helped make him as ready for anything as he is today.
“Even when I started playing,” Dell recalls, sounding only a little bit cocky, “I had all the confidence in the world. I could play that banjo pretty good!”
One thing those small Mason-Dixon line Pennsylvania towns like Chambersburg and Hanover had going for them was places for McCoury to reach audiences — little radio stations with live, local country shows — before he and his earliest band graduated to the honky-tonks around nearby Baltimore.
“I think people in the deep south, where the music kind of came from, didn’t have these chances, didn’t have these places where they could go and play every day,” Del suggests. “It was the best practice in the world.”
Unexpected settings and unusual audiences are still part of Del McCoury’s legacy, and so he’s out there now, tight with a younger band that walks to the stage in front of another diverse audience, with some new songs added to the mix again — but without a set list.
“That’s right,” he says. “We can get onstage and don’t even have to think about what we’re going to do when we get up there; we just go up there and do — whatever! And you know, when somebody requests something from out of the audience, the only person I have to worry about knowing it is me. It’s such an easy thing.”
No Depression senior editor Barry Mazor graduated from William Penn High School in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1967. You could listen to WWVA from West Virginia.
