Growing up far from Kentucky, bluegrass always came through an old tube radio (a 1948 Zenith; it still works), on scratchy vinyl, distant, desperate, hungry voices scratching at black night like a wet cat at the window. I’m still an outsider, and that shape-note exultation, those soaring, anguished harmonies, that rural rawness remains the music’s chief attraction.
Fifty years after Bill Monroe invented bluegrass, parts of Kentucky remain dirt poor, but his music has evolved, recording technologies have grown, standards have changed, and that particular keening sound has grown into a highly professional art form. Neither good nor bad, that, just the nature of things. Still, it’s hard to find a hand-hold with many of the glossy new bluegrass releases. Oh, they can flat play, most of the new breed, but their music sounds more like a populist kind of jazz than anything grown from hill hunger.
Blue Highway have all the polish a pop band might wish for, and their latest has a sparkling studio sound. But Midnight Storm also, in its best moments (that is, most), soars with the rare joy that no amount of technique can produce. Mind you, Wayne Taylor, Shawn Lane, Rob Ickes, Jason Burleson and Tim Stafford are all fine pickers. But they have managed to keep the songs in front of the solos.
And the songs are first-rate. “Some Day” is a touching collaboration between guitarist Stafford and his wife’s Aunt Olive Stockton, who penned the words as a eulogy to herself. “Last Dollar Blues” sounds like something from the Haggard songbook, but comes courtesy Illinois songwriter Mark Mathewson. The title track is a Stanley Brothers classic. Stafford’s gospel “Whither Thou Go”, given an a cappella treatment here, is glorious. All benefit from tasteful performances and a pleasing vocal meld, no matter who’s singing lead.
It’s a kind of curse, this hungering for the ragged edge married to the certainty that one never wishes to live like that. And it’s unconscionable to wish that life on musicians, simply for the voyeuristic pleasure of hearing them suffer so on the stereo. That does not justify the triumph of technique over passion. Happily, Blue Highway simply triumph.
