Ao lado de Lou, o álbum apresenta mais luminárias do bluegrass, incluindo Alison Brown, Molly Tuttle e Sierra Hull.
Vocalist and guitarist Lindsay Lou had played songs such as Ricky Skaggs’ “All I Ever Loved Was You” and Ralph Stanley’s “I Only Exist” in bluegrass jam sessions for years, before realizing that some of the songs so closely associated with the bluegrass canon’s most popular trailblazing male artists were actually written by women.
Explore Alison Brown Molly Tuttle Sarah Jarosz See latest videos, charts and news.
Lou’s new album, Bluegrass Women, out Friday (Aug. 14) on Work of Bart Records/Soundly Music, aims to balance the scales, placing a long-overdue spotlight on an older generation of women bluegrass songwriters whose musical creations have been often overlooked.
Lou co-produced the album with Shani Gandhi.
For the album, and an accompanying four-part mini-documentary about the making of the project, Lou assembled a who’s who of today’s top women bluegrass stars; alongside Lou, there’s Molly Tuttle, Sierra Hull, Aoife O’Donovan, Alison Brown, Sarah Jarosz, AJ Lee, Gena Britt, Laurie Lewis and more.
Lou points to projects such as Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will The Circle Be Unbroken and David Grisman’s Home Is Where The Heart Is as models of works that have paid homage to classic songs, though they are oriented toward the music of male stars.
Bluegrass Women inclui uma versão de “All I Ever Loved Was You”, gravada por Skaggs e Keith Whitley e incluída em seu álbum colaborativo Second Generation Bluegrass.
A canção foi escrita pela mãe de Skaggs, Dorothy Skaggs. Em outro lugar em Bluegrass Women, o trabalho de Rosa Lee Watson, compositora e esposa de Doc Watson, é destacado em “Your Lone Journey”.
For Lou, hearing some of these classic bluegrass songs, and knowing they were written from a woman’s perspective shifted how she connected with the songs.
Appalachian folk singer and banjo player Ola Belle Reed is one of the few women of that generation whose songs did make it into the spotlight; Reed released a series of albums in the 1960s and 1970s, and Bluegrass Women includes two songs from Reed – “High on a Mountain,” which was later included on bluegrass group Hot Rize’s 1979 self-titled album, while “I’ve Endured” has been recorded by Del McCoury and Tim O’Brien.
For many women bluegrass artists, participating in those picking scenes and jam sessions in a male-dominated music community often meant being the sole woman involved.
Era igualmente importante para Lou que o estúdio transmitisse um senso de camaradagem e apoio para os músicos que participavam do projeto.
Lou gave the same advice to everyone. “I told everyone the same thing — ’You’ve been preparing for this your whole life. Just show up. We’ve all jammed on these songs and you are here because you are you and that’s enough.
You don’t have to do any work beyond that.’ We circled up and played them like we’ve jammed them hundreds of times before and listened for what made sense for the arrangement.”.
The environment lent itself for different women to take and then handover the lead. “I’ve got a lot of leaders on those sessions, like Alison Brown, Sarah Jarosz and Laurie Lewis,” she adds.
The accompanying mini-documentary (see episode 1 below) showcases not only the project’s recording sessions, but also interviews with many of the artists, in the process giving the next generation of women bluegrass artists a fuller picture of today’s female bluegrass stars.
Get weekly rundowns straight to your inbox.
Seu endereço de e-mail não será publicado. Campos obrigatórios são marcados *.
Want to know what everyone in the music business is talking about.
Fontes
Informação baseada em material público de Billboard, reescrito pela redação ULTRA NOTÍCIAS.
