There was only one prize-winning teenager with gumption enough to say, “thanks, but
no thanks” to Roy Acuff. Only one son of Kentucky both finding a light of inspiration
from Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys and catching a fire from Bob Marley and The
Wailers. Only one progressive hippie allying with like-minded conspirators, rolling
out the New Grass revolution, and then leaving the genre’s torch-bearing band behind
as it reached its commercial peak.
There is only one consensus pick of peers and predecessors, of the traditionalists,
the rebels, and the next gen devotees. Music’s ultimate inside outsider. Or is it
outside insider? There is only one Sam Bush.
On a Bowling Green, Kentucky cattle farm in the post-war 1950s, Bush grew up an only
son, and with four sisters. His love of music came immediately, encouraged by his
parents’ record collection and, particularly, by his father Charlie, a fiddler, who
organized local jams. Charlie envisioned his son someday a staff fiddler at the Grand
Ole Opry, but a clear day’s signal from Nashville brought to Bush’s television screen
a tow-headed boy named Ricky Skaggs playing mandolin with Flatt & Scruggs, and an
epiphany for Bush. At 11, he purchased his first mandolin.
As a teen fiddler, Bush was a three-time national champion in the junior division
of the National Oldtime Fiddler’s Contest. He recorded an instrumental album, Poor
Richard’s Almanac, as a high school senior and in the spring of 1970 attended the
Fiddlers Convention in Union Grove, NC. There he heard the New Deal String Band, taking
notice of their rock-inspired brand of progressive bluegrass.
Acuff offered him a spot in his band. Bush politely turned down the country titan.
It was not the music he wanted to play. He admired the grace of Flatt & Scruggs, loved
Bill Monroe – even saw him perform at the Ryman – but he’d discovered electrified
alternatives to tradition in the Osborne Brothers and manifest destiny in The Dillards.
“I started working at the Holiday Inn as a busboy,” Bush recalls. “Ebo Walker and
Lonnie Peerce came in one night asking if I wanted to come to Louisville and play
five nights a week with the Bluegrass Alliance. That was a big, ol’ ‘Hell yes, let’s
go.’”
Bush played guitar in the group, then began playing mandolin after recruiting guitarist
Tony Rice to the fold. Following a fallout with Peerce in 1971, Bush and his Alliance
mates – Walker, Courtney Johnson, and Curtis Burch – formed the New Grass Revival,
issuing the band’s debut, New Grass Revival. Walker left soon after, replaced temporarily
by Butch Robins, with the quartet solidifying around the arrival of bassist John Cowan.
“There were already people who had deviated from Bill Monroe’s style of bluegrass,”
Bush explains. “If anything, we were reviving a newgrass style that had already been
started. Our kind of music tended to come from the idea of long jams and rock-&-roll
songs.”
Shunned by some traditionalists, New Grass Revival played bluegrass fests slotted
in late-night sets for the “long-hairs and hippies.” Quickly becoming a favorite of
rock audiences, they garnered the attention of Leon Russell, one of the era’s most
popular artists. Russell hired New Grass as his supporting act on a massive tour in
1973 that put the band nightly in front of tens of thousands.
At tour’s end, it was back to headlining six nights a week at an Indiana pizza joint.
But, they were resilient, grinding it out on the road. And in 1975 the Revival first
played Telluride, Colorado, forming a connection with the region and its fans that
has prospered for 45 years.
Bush was the newgrass commando, incorporating a variety of genres into the repertoire.
He discovered a sibling similarity with the reggae rhythms of Marley and The Wailers,
and, accordingly, developed an ear-turning original style of mandolin playing. The
group issued five albums in their first seven years, and in 1979 became Russell’s
backing band. By 1981, Johnson and Burch left the group, replaced by banjoist Bela
Fleck and guitarist Pat Flynn.
A three-record contract with Capitol Records and a conscious turn to the country market
took the Revival to new commercial heights. Bush survived a life-threatening bout
with cancer, and returned to the group that’d become more popular than ever. They
released chart-climbing singles, made videos, earned Grammy nominations, and, at their
zenith, called it quits.
“We were on the verge of getting bigger,” recalls Bush. “Or maybe we’d gone as far
as we could. I’d spent 18 years in a four-piece partnership. I needed a break. But,
I appreciated the 18 years we had.”
Bush worked the next five years with Emmylou Harris’ Nash Ramblers, then a stint with
Lyle Lovett. He took home three-straight IBMA Mandolin Player of the Year awards,
1990-92 (and a fourth in 2007). In 1995 he reunited with Fleck, now a burgeoning superstar,
and toured with the Flecktones, reigniting his penchant for improvisation. Then, finally,
after a quarter-century of making music with New Grass Revival and collaborating with
other bands, Sam Bush went solo.
He’s released seven albums and a live DVD over the past two decades. In 2009, the
Americana Music Association awarded Bush the Lifetime Achievement Award for Instrumentalist.
Punch Brothers, Steep Canyon Rangers, and Greensky Bluegrass are just a few present-day
bluegrass vanguards among so many musicians he’s influenced. His performances are
annual highlights of the festival circuit, with Bush’s joyous perennial appearances
at the town’s famed bluegrass fest earning him the title, “King of Telluride.”
“With this band I have now I am free to try anything. Looking back at the last 50
years of playing newgrass, with the elements of jazz improvisation and rock&roll,
jamming, playing with New Grass Revival, Leon, and Emmylou; it’s a culmination of
all of that,” says Bush. “I can unapologetically stand onstage and feel I’m representing
those songs well.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.wku.edu ’
