CROWE LAWSON & WILLIAMS
Standing Tall and Tough
Mountain Home 15022

mountainhomemusiccompany.com
 

There are only a handful of the original bluegrass pioneers still active and performing or recording in any measure at all – Ralph Stanley, Jesse McReynolds, Bobby Osborne and Mac Wiseman come to mind, but precious few others. The seminal bands of the late 1940s and the decade of the 1950s were not only showcases for these trailblazers of an entirely new genre of American music, they were incubators and training grounds for the next wave of talents who would cut their teeth on stages across the country – and occasionally, at the Opry – before going on to found their own legendary bands. One of the strongest roots of this bluegrass “family tree” is the Sunny Mountain Boys, led for nearly a half-century by the late Jimmy Martin. The stories relating to Martin’s pugnacious and mercurial personality are legion – he was said to have on occasion fired band members on stage – but many of his “graduates” such as banjo legend Bill Emerson have also described him as a “musical genius”, and his body of recorded work largely substantiates that.

Though their tenures were not fully concurrent, Doyle Lawson, J. D. Crowe and Paul Williams were all integral parts of the “Martin Sound” in the late ’50s and early ’60s, and that has been a strong thread in the friendships they’ve woven with each other since. Crowe was still a teenager when he debuted with Martin, and his distinctive banjo style eventually elevated him into the pantheon that, for most bluegrass aficionados, only Earl Scruggs and Don Reno otherwise inhabit. After starting up his own band, the New South in the late 1960s (which introduced talents like Tony Rice and Jerry Douglas to the bluegrass world at large), Crowe retired from active touring a couple of years ago, but still makes time for special projects like this.

Lawson is, at 70, the youngest of the trio. Following his time with Martin he joined the Country Gentlemen before striking out on his own with Quicksilver, and four decades later he remains one of the top draws on the circuit. Among younger fans of the music, Williams is probably the least known of the three, in large part because he retired from music for a number of years before returning to the gospel tour with his own Victory Trio. Like Crowe, Williams has recently retired from full-time touring. Four years ago they reunited for the appropriately titled “Old Friends Get Together”, a cruise through the Martin gospel catalog in the classic Martin style.

This time around, it’s more of the vintage Martin Sound – as very few other than these guys can do it anymore – and while there are still some songs of faith (“Do You Live What You Preach”, “Insured Beyond The Grave”, “Little Angel In Heaven”), the disc includes some of the more secular material Williams wrote with Martin, notably “My Walking Shoes” and “Pretending I Don’t Care”. Also worth mentioning are “Martinized” versions of ’60s-era mainstream country classics like Bobby Helms’ “Fraulein” and Connie Smith’s “Once A Day”. Both Williams and Lawson have been primarily mandolin players throughout their careers, but in this setting Lawson moves over to guitar, ably emulating Martin’s trademark rhythm backup. Crowe is as steady as ever, but in the harmony parts he gets to remind us that he’s always been a pretty good baritone singer as well.

The real attention grabber on the album though, is how good Williams still sounds, now in his early eighties. Where many of his contemporaries are dialing their voices down a key or two, his tenor is still clear, strong and vibrant on songs like the title track and “The Hills of Roane County”. That by itself is worth the price of the disc, but you just don’t find people making bluegrass this good anymore.

— John Lupton