On the strength of their recordings and extensive broadcast and live appearances, they joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1964, moving to Nashville shortly after and releasing their first Epic album. The Opry “opened up a lot of markets for you,” Jim says, but “it reached a point where most promoters would buy your act by what you had on the charts. I think that at that point a lot of the radio stations had been switching over to full-time country music, and they started with the charts and the top recordings, and if you didn’t have a record being played or in the charts, it was hard to get on those package shows. Basically, the promoters were buying from Billboard magazine, so we leaned more toward the country side to try to stay on the package shows.”
The result was a series of albums through the remainder of the decade that earned the disinterest, if not the scorn, of hardcore bluegrassers, yet kept the act just high enough on the charts — they had three Top-40 country singles between 1965 and 1970, including 1967’s #18 “Diesel On My Tail” — to stay busy with the personal appearances that were a requirement for making a decent living.
Yet though their decision to “lean to the country side” had its commercial implications, the results were nonetheless noteworthy from an artistic viewpoint. Jim & Jesse were comfortable with country music, and though they didn’t always see eye-to-eye with smoother, Nashville Sound-oriented producers like Billy Sherrill and Glenn Sutton — “it was hard to go in the studio with those country producers and try to tell them that this is what the fans want to hear,” Jim notes — they nonetheless made some outstanding music.
There was a lovely Louvin Brothers tribute album and a sensational set of electric mandolin-driven instrumentals, as well as a series of thematic albums covering country humor, trucks and trains, plus an entire album of Chuck Berry songs — another quietly revolutionary piece of work that had implications beyond just the musical.
Virginia country music authority Joe Wilson recalls that when the collection came out, it was during the heated days of the civil rights movement. “Kluxers and National State’s Rights Party types began scorning jazz, blues and other black forms and praising bluegrass as ‘white man’s music,'” Wilson wrote recently. “Jim and Jesse are from the coal field mountains of southwestern Virginia, elegant in thought as well as attire. They made no speeches. But their affection for the music of Chuck Berry was suddenly public in live appearances and television. An LP appeared, Berry Picking In The Country, and to ensure that the point was not missed, the brothers asked Berry to write the liner notes. Some twenty-five years later I noted that Berry Picking was still in print and for sale at one of their shows. When I mentioned this to Jim McReynolds, he grinned and said, ‘When you try to do good, you can also do well.'”
Despite their accomplishments, the duo’s relationship with Epic ended in 1970. They signed briefly with Capitol again, issuing another album for the label, but after that, drawing on their earlier experiences with independent production and their solid grasp on what their fans were looking for, they took the almost unprecedented step of creating their own production company and label, Old Dominion Records.
Jim says mildly, “We thought that if there wasn’t an interest in what we wanted to do, we knew what the fans wanted, so we talked about it and started our own label. We were playing all the time, 150 dates a year, in some years maybe more, and you know, if the people come around and ask for your autograph and buy your records, if you talk to them for a little bit, they’ll let you know how they feel about what you’re doing, and the songs that they like. We play to these people all the time, and if we don’t know what we should record or what they want to hear, then we made a mistake somewhere.”
Over the next two decades or so, Jim & Jesse released a steady stream of Old Dominion albums. Selections from those releases, which included material from their syndicated television show, gospel albums, a tribute to Roy Acuff, patriotic and historical songs, old favorites, live recordings and radio shows, were issued in 1999 on a four-CD box set by their current label, Pinecastle. As they had all along, the recordings featured crackerjack bands, strong songs, Jesse’s groundbreaking mandolin leads, and the brothers’ haunting duet voices, by now blending with an unexcelled uniformity of sound and feeling.
At the same time, they released albums with the Los Angeles-based CMH label in the 1970s and Rounder in the late 1980s, enhancing their reputation with new audiences even as they sold their own releases to legions of faithful fans. Though they leaned back toward the bluegrass side with these recordings — gone were the steel guitar, piano and drums, while the banjo and fiddle resumed prominence in the hands of such gifted instrumentalists as Allen Shelton, Vic Jordan, Carl Jackson, Joe Meadows, Buddy Spicher and Blaine Sprouse — they continued to use the electric bass (as they had since Don McHan brought it to the group for the late ’50s Florida recordings), and kept an eye on developments in country music from their vantage point at the Grand Ole Opry.
“There’s still an audience there that will come out and see a good country show,” Jim asserts in the course of explaining why they’ve decided to release a country collection at a time when hardcore bluegrassers and mainstream country programmers alike might look askance. “You know, we do what we want to, because since we started the label we’ve been producing our own things. Jesse and I were talking about doing a new album, and I said, ‘Well, we could go back and do another country album,’ and the next thing I knew, Jesse had called the studio and set up studio time and had picked out the songs.”
“I went back and got some things that I knew we could do, that fit it,” Jesse says. “It’s good country music, to me — not because we sang it that well or anything,” he adds in a fit of excessive modesty, “but it’s the music on it that really got me. Jeff Newman on the steel guitar, he’s amazing, he’s one of the few that can play that country steel. There’s no doubt about what this album is. I had so much material there, I listened to Ray Price’s CD, and Buck Owens, a whole boxed set, and there was enough there that we could have done more than one.”
