Bluegrass giants, best friends, play separate Kentucky musical events 5 days apart

It was a dark and stormy night...

Seriously, it was. Outside the Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts in Raleigh, Hurricane Helene was beginning to make her devastating presence felt. While her full wrath went west of the city, the North Carolina capitol region was still hammered by rain, wind and unavoidable unease.

Inside the center, though, the mood was considerably lighter. There, two members of the Bluegrass Hall of Fame stood onstage. One, Sam Bush, had just inducted the other, Jerry Douglas. It was fitting as Bush himself entered the Hall of Fame last year. But what made this ceremony seem so, well, obvious was the fact the two artists have spent the last five decades redefining the string music vocabulary that has long been the DNA of bluegrass and applying it to all kinds of multi-genre settings. Some were rooted in tradition, others explored wildly progressive terrain. The cool aspect to all this, though, is how many of these half-century adventures the two have explored together — with Douglas on dobro and Bush on mandolin and fiddle — as bandmates onstage or as studio players on the same recording sessions.

Best friends

Not surprisingly, Douglas and Bush are the best of friends who live in the Nashville area roughly a mile from each other. While they won’t be together when they return to Kentucky over the next week — Douglas co-headlines the Moonshiner’s Ball in Rockcastle County on Oct. 12 while Bush performs here in Lexington at the Kentucky Theatre on Oct. 17 — the string sounds they have defined and refined together through the years, as well as the bountiful enthusiasm that sets them on fire in a performance setting, will be in abundance.

“Sam is my brother, but he’s also my foil in a lot of situations,” Douglas said. “Or I’m his. Sam is the best drummer in the world, but he plays the mandolin. The two of us together create this rhythm thing that we both try to raise wherever we find it. We try to leave the music better than we found it. But, man, when Sammy comes in and lands that first mandolin chop, it’s like, ‘Okay. There is the mark.’ That’s the only one you need to pay attention to. I play off that and then I paint around him while trying not to paint him into a corner.”

Bush readily reciprocates: “In that induction speech, I said something to the effect of ‘You can’t imagine the feeling I get playing alongside Jerry when he hits those strings and lays the bar seemingly in the perfect spot every time.’ His timing is tremendous. Jerry has a rhythm chop that is metronomic. There isn’t a more influential person on his instrument in the last 50 years.”

Youthful collaborators

As their musical voices grew in breadth and innovation, often utilizing bluegrass strategies within jazz-like improvisational settings, both artists were sought out by some of the most formidable names in modern music, be it onstage, on record or both.

Douglas has worked with James Taylor, Paul Simon, Elvis Costello and John Fogerty, among a few hundred others. In addition to his own career as a bandleader and producer, Douglas has served as a member of Alison Krauss and Union Station since 1998. Bush’s credits include music with Linda Ronstadt, Dolly Parton and Lyle Lovett (again, among many others), along with a five-year stint in Emmylou Harris’ bluegrass rooted Nash Ramblers band.

But perhaps the most important collaborations Douglas and Bush have undertaken have been with younger artists.

Douglas produced the last two albums for new generation bluegrass star Molly Tuttle, the second of which, “City of Gold,” won a Grammy in February and was named Album of the Year by the International Bluegrass Music Association at the same Raleigh ceremony that inducted Douglas into the Hall of Fame. Douglas will also spend Halloween evening playing alongside bluegrass megastar Billy Strings at an arena show in Baltimore.

Bush was jamming alongside a then-unknown nine-year old mandolinist here in Lexington over 20 years ago for the WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour. Today, that player is 33-year old Sierra Hull, one of the most acclaimed mandolin artists of her generation.

“Getting to play with the younger musicians ... I mean, of course they’re thinking of things I haven’t thought of,” Bush said “It’s great for me to appreciate that and learn from them. And it brings me joy. I can only sit and marvel at the level of musicianship that has risen over the last several years.”

“Music is always going to morph into other things at times,” added Douglas. “But artists like Molly and Billy, they are right up front with people who go, ‘Whoa, you’re the greatest thing in the world.’ They tell them, ‘Well, you should hear Bill Monroe. You should go back and listen to what we come from.’ This is the hive we’ve robbed the most. That’s what we’ve all done. We’ve all done it.”

New music

While their respective careers have had Douglas and Bush rubbing shoulders with esteemed artists in and out of the bluegrass world, both return to Kentucky over the next week with recent recordings of their own to showcase.

For Douglas, it’s a new album with his band (bassist Daniel Kimbro, fiddler Christian Sedelmyer and guitarist Mike Seal) titled “The Set.” A mix of freshly recorded versions of vintage Douglas compositions and new works, it focuses on the spacious atmospherics created by a band that formerly employed drums, but is now percussion free.

“When we did the John Hiatt record (the collaborative 2021 album “Leftover Feelings”), he wanted to work without drums. So I said, ‘Well, let’s use my band and we won’t use my drummer.’ That’s when we all heard the same thing. There was just so much space in there that we hadn’t heard before that we could decide to fill or not. Most of the time we decided not to. We would just play our parts and not try to take up the same space that the drums were in. It really clears things out. You hear the tones of all the instruments so well. We take big pains in recording, so all that should be heard.”

Bush’s Kentucky Theatre concert will sport his band (banjoist Wes Corbett, guitarist Steve Mougin, bassist Todd Parks and drummer Chris Brown), although his most recent album, “Radio John,” is a predominantly solo tribute to the late bluegrass/Americana journeyman John Hartford. The project grew out of homemade recordings Bush made while vacationing in Florida that were intended initially as demos.

“I was just trying to write some tunes, but, every once in a while, I would get stuck,” Bush said. “So, I just looked at my old book of John Hartford lyrics and thought of his songs. I started buying his records in the late ’60s at the Ernest Tubb Record Shop in Nashville. Before I knew it, I had nine tunes recorded of John’s songs. That music means a lot to me. I went from what were some of John’s most beautiful love songs to things from his goofy period, such as ‘Granny Wontcha Smoke Some Marijuana,’ which I sang and played on originally (in 1975.)

“Then John Pennell and I wrote the title song, ‘Radio John,’ about John’s many talents and accomplishments. We had something like 22 verses, but we pulled that down. We used the whole band for that one.”

Love of playing live

Perhaps the most striking aspect to their music, especially in a concert setting, is the level of effortless cheer Douglas, 68, and Bush, 72, continue to display. It is the collective mark of artists who, even after exhaustive careers, still have plenty to say and share.

“It’s always been a gift in that when it’s time to play, my mind just goes to the music that we’re doing,” Bush said. “In a way, we travel for a living. Getting to play music, that’s the joyful part. When the rhythm section is really popping, it feels so good. It’s like what I was talking about with Jerry. When that timing is there, it’s a feeling that’s indescribable. I can’t describe it because it’s a feeling.”

“I hate leaving home to go to gigs,” Douglas said. “But once I get out there and get onstage, all that nervous energy goes. I calm down. It’s like a dopamine rush for sure. It’s such a different world. It’s not real, but it is. You are re-imagining your own life as you get onstage. You take everything up there with you but you leave the negative stuff behind. I mean, it’s the greatest thing ever.”

The Jerry Douglas Band

When: The Moonshiner’s Ball, Oct. 10-13. The Jerry Douglas Band plays Oct. 12 at 6:30 p.m. on the Main Stage at The Moonshiner’s Ball.

Where: Rockcastle Riverside, 4211 Lower River Rd. in Livingston.

Tickets: $25-$220 at themoonshinersball.com/tickets.

The Sam Bush Band

When: Oct. 17, 7:30 p.m.

Where: Kentucky Theatre, 214 E. Main St.

Tickets: $55 at kentuckytheatre.org/troubadour.