When the rock ‘n’ roll boom hit country music in the late 1950s, some of the hardest-hit victims were among the first generation of bluegrass musicians. Pushed to the sidelines by their failure either to rock like Elvis or croon like Jim Reeves, the earliest exponents of bluegrass wound up spending most of the 1960s appealing either to earnest enthusiasts of the folk revival or to the more modern sensibilities of what was increasingly referred to as the country music industry.
Jim & Jesse McReynolds, who had been in business since the late 1940s, took the latter path, recording almost 140 tracks for Epic between 1960 and 1969. Typically featuring a soaring duet and uptown instrumentation, they applied their talents to a dizzying variety of material, ranging from gospel standbys to Bob Wills tunes to an entire album’s worth of Chuck Berry songs. Y’all Come collects 20 representative samples of these tracks, nicely (if briefly) annotated by bluegrass scholar Gary Reid.
The Epic sides were mostly recorded with backup that combined the brothers’ regular banjo players (Allen Shelton and Bobby Thompson) and fiddlers (Vassar Clements, Jim Buchanan, Jim Brock) with Nashville studio pickers including Pig Robbins, Lightnin’ Chance, Lloyd Green and Junior Huskey. The sound was never less than polished — most of the material was produced by Billy Sherrill — even when applied to standard bluegrass and country fare, but it was always soulful. Jim & Jesse were looking for a hit (Jesse is quoted as saying that “the first thing [promoters] would ask is ‘have you got a record on the charts’”), but their pure, clear voices, Jesse’s inventive mandolin, and the irrepressible bounce of Shelton’s and Thompson’s picking guaranteed that art never took a back seat to commerce, even if it sometimes rode shotgun instead of sitting behind the wheel (to use a metaphor particularly appropriate for the creators of Diesel On My Tail, an entire album of trucker songs).
Jim & Jesse’s Epic recordings are among the best to come out of the country side of bluegrass. Though several previous installments of Sony’s Essential series have been disappointments, this time the job has been done right.
