‘No plugs, no pedals, only bluegrass:’ Asheville Mountain Boys release new album
Asheville Mountain Boys will play Asheville Feb. 12.
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The Asheville Mountain Boys’ self-titled debut album drops on Feb. 12, heralding the arrival of a new era of old-school bluegrass from the Buncombe County quartet.
Recorded at The Shop Studio with master bluegrass engineer Van Atkins (Doyle Lawson, Balsam Range, Town Mountain), the record blends heartfelt originals about love and loss with a hand-picked selection of bluegrass standards and deep cuts from the catalogs of the band’s musical heroes.
At a time when roots music is undergoing something of a progressive revolution, The Asheville Mountain Boys offer a look back into one of bluegrass’ golden ages, drawing inspiration from titans like Jimmy Martin, Earl Taylor and Paul Williams as they forge their own path in traditional acoustic music.
“In the sea of modern bluegrass there’s all sorts of fusions of different genres, extended jams and those sorts of things,” said guitarist Marshall Brown. “We want to offer people a way to hear a modern bluegrass band do old-school bluegrass material, and our originals center on timeless narratives that we hope feature the same sort of powerful storytelling you hear in the 50s and 60s bluegrass we like.”
Although the group has become a mainstay of the Asheville bluegrass scene over the past two years, the idea to release a full-length album wasn’t really on any of the band members’ radars when they started the recording process.
“When we started, it was with the intention of doing some singles to play on the radio and to be streamed next to modern bluegrass recordings. It has to have a certain quality that can be really hard to capture, but Van is a master of the modern bluegrass recording style,” Brown said. “We went in the first day and cut five songs to put out as singles, and then once we did another session it turned out we had enough material for an album.”
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The record features four original tunes including the album’s lead single, “Don’t Take Me Back Again,” a cautionary tale of the perils of rekindled romance, which is rooted in Brown’s real-life experience navigating a tricky breakup. The track highlights many of the band’s strengths with some hot picking, tight harmonies and a focus on the unrelenting groove heard in recordings of the bluegrass masters of the 1950s and 60s.
“‘Don’t Take Me Back Again’ is the most emblematic song of the whole band,” said bassist Jacob Brewer. “It’s a Jimmy Martin style tune; it’s got three-part harmonies, great split breaks from [mandolinist] Zeb [Gambill] and [banjoist] John [Duncan]. It’s the most complete picture of the band in one song from this batch of recordings.”
Other originals touch on everything from the heartache of love lost in Brown’s “Empty, Cold, and Lonesome” to a community’s grief in the wake of natural disaster in Gambill’s “Flood of 1916.”
The band also tips their hats to an all-star cast of bluegrass legends in covers ranging from Paul Williams’ “Deep River” to Bob Newman’s “That’s How I Can Count on You,” popularized by one of The Asheville Mountain Boys’ favorite iterations of Jimmy Martin’s band. The common thread tying all these songs together is a powerful emotional element that Duncan said he would like to see more of in mainstream bluegrass.
“It’s a really emotional album,” Duncan said. “It feels like a lot of modern radio stuff is meant to just be singles that last a couple seasons, but maybe the emotional impact isn’t as solid. The emotion is there on this record — it’s about tragedy and loss, overcoming adversity, living a difficult life. The songs pack a punch.”
While the band is best known for their straight-ahead bluegrass sound, The Asheville Mountain Boys also showcase their old-time chops in the classic Asheville fiddle tune “Lady Hamilton.” The tune is a staple of the region’s old-time scene recorded by such legends as Manco Sneed, Marcus Martin and Tommy Magness, whose recordings were the inspiration for the track.
“Going to old-time fiddlers’ conventions is how we all met, so having an old-time tune connected to Asheville on the record was important to us,” Duncan said. “We love old-time music, and it’s such a big part of what we do.”
The Asheville Mountain Boys will celebrate the release of their debut album on Feb. 12 at The Grey Eagle Music Hall in Asheville in collaboration with “Train Songz,” a Brooklyn-based quarterly bluegrass print publication. For more information on the band, visit ashevillemountainboys.com.
Want to go?
Acclaimed Western North Carolina bluegrass act The Asheville Mountain Boys will hit the stage at 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 12, at The Grey Eagle in Asheville.
Doors open at 7 p.m. The show is all ages. Standing room only. Admission is $25.10 per person (tax included).
For more information and/or to purchase tickets, visit thegreyeagle.com.
