This is the third interview with Kathy Kallick that has been made available to DJs. The first one was released in 1999, shortly after the album Walkin’ In My Shoes was issued, and the second in 2010, along with Between the Hollow & the High-Rise. In both of these, Kathy talks about current and previous bandmates and musical associates, her friendship with and the influence of Bill Monroe, and many other aspects of her songs and music.
The first 14 segments of this “interview” – Kathy’s voice only – are linked to tracks from the most recent Kathy Kallick Band album, Foxhounds. The scripts provided (in italics) approximate the introductions used when this was broadcast in October, 2016, on KALW. The “title” of these segments indicates the track from Foxhounds that followed Kathy’s remarks.
The remaining 4 interview segments are not tied to specific songs, but I used live recordings as indicated with the first three of these.
INTERVIEW CREDITS:
Produced by Peter Thompson
Recorded by Derek Bianchi at Muscletone Studios, Albany, CA
Edited by Peter Thompson and Lou Judson
Mastered by Lou Judson at Intuitive Audio, Novato, CA
More information on Kathy Kallick and the Kathy Kallick Band
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1. FOXHOUNDS (3:07)
The title track of the Kathy Kallick Band’s most recent album – which happens to be Kathy’s 20th release – is one of her songs (and she’s now released nearly 150 of her originals). It reflects the most important influence on anyone involved in bluegrass, Kathy’s own musical journey over the past few decades, and memories of a very special experience.
Everybody that plays bluegrass is influenced by Bill Monroe, the Father of Bluegrass -- even young people who come to bluegrass because they saw the String Cheese Incident, and that made them start listening to bluegrass. Even if they never listened to a Bill Monroe record, they’re still influenced by Bill Monroe. The influence permeates every aspect of bluegrass.
But for me, one of the biggest influences: he’s the original bluegrass singer-songwriter. I started trying to write my own bluegrass songs about my own experience quite early on, and I was given the seal of approval by Bill Monroe, who I had the opportunity to meet several times and go back and play at his festival in Bean Blossom.
After all these years of trying to write my song in bluegrass about my particular story, I took the opportunity to really think about Bill Monroe and his story and his songs about his early life when he sings, “On my way back to the old home” and he talks about sitting and listening to the foxhounds with his dad in the old Kentucky hills. And this is the model for bluegrass songwriting: talk about yourself, talk about your life.
I had the great good fortune in the early ‘80s to go back to Tennessee and stay with Bill Monroe on his farm. He was very gracious, very welcoming, and I spent a week there, just going about his daily day with him, although I didn’t get up at 6 in the morning to check on the fences.
One evening, he had all of us come out and sit on the front porch and he let the foxhounds out of the barn where he kept them and invited us to sit and listen. And we couldn’t hear them at first because they took off running to the outer edges of the farm. But then we could start to tune in and hear them way off in the distance, yipping and barking and baying.
Eventually, he got his mandolin and started playing along with them, and you could hear that he was trying to catch the sound of the foxhounds. And it was so beautiful and powerful for us. Bill was maybe in his 70s, and he was still trying to catch that sound that was one of the first sounds that led him to play bluegrass.
And somebody asked him, ‘Bill, do you ever hunt foxes with your foxhounds?’ And he said, ‘Well, no sir, I don’t care about the foxes, I just like to listen to the hounds.’ It was all about the soundscape, the aural delivery and taking the sounds around him and turning it into music – what he spent his life doing. So I was inspired to write a song about that.
2. SO DANG LONESOME (4:00)
Since the two well-received and highly-regarded albums with the current iteration of the Kathy Kallick Band – 2010’s Between the Hollow & the High-Rise and 2012’s Time – there has been a personnel change in the band. And that’s resulted in not only a new player but also a new co-writer and new singer in the band of Kathy Kallick.
I’ve been playing in a band for the last forty years. Every time the band personnel changes, I grieve. I’m devastated. I hate to have somebody leave the band.
And I can tell myself intellectually, when that band member leaves or the band dissolves and I have to reinvent the wheel, it’s gonna be great -- because every time it happens, it’s wonderful. Each band does something new. Each band inspires me to write a whole new raft of songs. Each collection of musicians affects my music in a powerful and positive way. But when I lose a band member, I’m really sad.
The most recent band change, when Dan Booth left the band, I wished him well. I knew he was doing the right thing, but I had loved singing with that guy and I had written a bunch of songs to sing with him, and I didn’t know who was gonna play the bass and what the next thing was gonna be.
And then I was at a music camp, teaching with Cary Black. And I remembered: Cary Black - he’s an awesome, awesome bass player. He lives in Seattle, but, y’know, Greg Booth lives in Anchorage, and that doesn’t seem to stop us from playing music together. Annie moved to Portland; it’s okay, she comes down all the time, we still get to play music together. I think Cary Black could be a great fit for this band.
And we had him come and play one long weekend in the Northwest. And after the first rehearsal, there was a general consensus we would be lucky to have this guy in the band. And Annie just blurted it out, over dinner before the first night, “So, Cary, whatdya think? Do you want to join our band?” And he looked at all of us and said, “Yes, please.”
And he brought a whole bunch of new information to this band. He’s a wonderful bluegrass bass player. He also plays a lot of other styles of music. And he thinks deeply about music. He’s produced a lot of records. He’s a fabulous singer. Pretty soon he started to have ideas and inject his own information, opinions, suggestions, and everything he had to say was really smart and really cool.
And I had been working to write a song for this band, and I was really struggling to get a chorus going. I had the lyric idea, I just wanted the melody to be awesome. And Cary was in town and he was staying at my house. And I said, “Would you like to collaborate with me on this song?” And he said, “I would love to get in on that, I’d love to start doing some co-writing.”
So we worked together on the chorus of this song. And in my typical fashion, all the suggestions he was making were really scary, because they were really different from what I would do, left to my own devices, which is why I always ask somebody to co-write with me so the song will be something other than what I would do on my own.
And so this song, “So Danged Lonesome,” came out sounding so danged lonesome; it’s the lonesomest, sorriest, saddest lonesome song because of these melody and chord ideas that Cary Black came up with on the chorus.
And then we had the chance to investigate the new vocal trio with Cary Black and Greg Booth, and those two guys both just come up with the gnarliest, out of the box ideas for harmony combinations. I’m thrilled with the incredibly lonesome, gnarly, scary sound of this track.
3. I’M NOT YOUR HONEY BABY NOW (1:50)
Fiddler Annie Staninec is the most recent winner of IBMA’s Momentum Award for Instrumentalist of the Year as well as the newest member of the Rod Stewart Band. But she remains active in the Kathy Kallick Band, and inspires not only great playing from everyone in the band but also new songs written by Kathy Kallick.
Annie Staninec is such an entertaining person to play music with, but she’s even more entertaining to watch play music. When she starts to play the fiddle, her hair’s just flying around, she’s stompin’ her feet, she is so happy. She loves to play the fiddle. She looks like a fairy princess, she fiddles like an old man on a front porch. It’s a fabulous combination.
When I wrote “I’m Not Your Honey-Baby Now,” it was with the idea of her playing screaming old time fiddle throughout the track and singing at the same time, which she’s pretty good at doing, I’ve got to say.
She loves this old time track, and when we play the song, it makes her so happy, and, for the first ten times we played the song, she would say, “Thank you for writing this old time song for me to play the fiddle and sing. I love this so much.”
The content of this old time song is based on the experiences of a friend of mine. I don’t have a lot of misery and sorrow and struggle and challenges in my daily life. I’m pretty happy, things go along nicely for me. And I’ve gotta look for the content for my songs that’s not gonna be Everything’s going great for me, how’s it going for you?’ because that would be a really boring song.
But, luckily, there are always people around me, there are always things I can see, there are always interesting conversations, and the struggles of somebody trying to date in the modern world are fresh, and I get to hear about it all the time. And to take those conversations and to set them in an old time context was really fun for me.
4. I’LL FORGIVE YOU (2:49)
Kathy Kallick has been playing and performing with Pittsburgh’s Mac Martin for the past 15 years, and has learned a great deal from this bluegrass pioneer who has been leading his own bands since 1954. Mac is the repository of literally thousands of songs, and has taught some of them to Kathy.
Mac Martin is a wonderful first generation bluegrass singer, guitar player, mandolin player, and he has become a mentor to me.
He came to California to perform three times. He came on his own without his band, and asked me to put together a band. And we put together a band that got called the California Travelers. And I had the opportunity to sing with him on these three wonderful tours. And then I was lucky enough to go back and visit with him in Pittsburgh a couple of times.
And I’ve learned so much from Mac Martin about performing, about playing in a band, about not making music be your whole life, but when you play music being really in the music, in the moment. I’ve learned so much about singing from him: his slippery, complex, elegant bluegrass phrasing. When I try and sing with him, I’m in a Masters Class Of Bluegrass Singing.
He’s just the warmest guy, and I wanted to pick a song that I loved singing with him to put on this album. And I talked with him about “I’ll Forgive You (But I’ll Never Forget),” and asked him: Where did he get that song? And he said: Well, he got it from the Lilly Brothers. And he could tell me all about learning it, singing with the Lily Brothers, hearing them sing it. He didn’t know who wrote it; he thought it was probably ‘P.D.’ And then we could joke about how that’s either Passed Down or Public Domain.
It’s just a plain wonderful old time bluegrass song, and it gave me the chance to think about singing with Mac every time I sing the song -- very thrilling for me.
And it gave the Kathy Kallick Band the chance to sink their teeth into just a classic, good bluegrass number. It really drew some wonderful fiddling out of Annie to get a kind of a Curly Ray Cline-sounding fiddle solo. And from Tom Bekeny to just play great fast bluegrass waltz mandolin. But the surprise was Greg Booth, who didn’t know how to get to this song at first. It wasn’t the kind of song that he’s played a lot of. He kinda went Josh Graves on it. And that was the ticket. e He plays a beautiful dobro kickoff and solo that’s very reminiscent of Josh Graves, so it gives the whole track an early bluegrass sound, and I think Mac’ll be pleased with it.
5. DON’T LET YOUR DEAL GO DOWN (1:34)
Kathy Kallick has been playing in a band with multi-instrumentalist Greg Booth for nearly a decade, and he still finds ways to surprise her.
Greg Booth came to playing the dobro a little bit later. He started out playing the banjo. He was a student of Bill Emerson when he was growing up in the DC area when he was a young teenager. He played the banjo through college, and started playing pedal steel. When he moved up to Anchorage, he played in country bands, played pedal steel every night.
And somewhere, about ten years ago, he saw the dobro, he heard the dobro. And he went, “Banjo. Pedal steel. Banjo. Pedal steel. I think I could do that thing.” And he started in playing the dobro, using all of his information from banjo and pedal steel. And had so much musical information already for a person starting an instrument that he hit the ground running in a big way.
He’s written some wonderful instrumentals to play on the dobro. But what he really loves to do is pick songs from different styles, different genres, and interpret them on the dobro. And the tune he chose for this new album is a Flatt and Scruggs song that is usually sung. And he decided to interpret it as an instrumental and change the key and use one of his drop tunings. He just went all Greg Booth on “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down.”
6. SNOWFLAKES (2:36)
The Kathy Kallick Band released seven of Kathy’s new songs on Foxhounds, which means she now has something like 150 of her originals on albums. For someone this prolific, she finds her muse in many different situations.
I’ve been writing songs pretty much since I started playing music. When I learned to play the piano, which I played from the time I was maybe 9 to 14, quite early on I learned to play a minuet. And I thought it would be fun to write a minuet. So I made up my own minuet, and brought it to my piano teacher, who was not amused. This was not encouraged at all.
But I can’t help it. If I’m playing music, I start thinking about writing songs. And I’ve always written songs by just kind of waiting for the song to come to me – which happens with pretty great regularity. I get woken up in the middle of the night or I’m trying to accomplish a task, but I have to stop and write a song.
But as I’ve begun teaching songwriting with more frequency, I’ve tried to come up with assignments and triggers to help other people write songs. If I have a week-long songwriting class, we can’t just all sit around and wait for the muse. It might come and it might not.
Then I started taking the prompts, and I found I could write a song from a songwriting prompt – which was new for me as well.
So it opened up a lot of possibilities, and one of the things that I learned is that no matter what the prompt, no matter how random it is and how outside and artificial, the song that I will write is gonna be about me. It’s gonna be personal and it’s gonna be about something that resonates from my experience or in my life.
I was teaching a songwriting class, and I brought a collection of small objects that you could hold in your hand, and I spread them all out and invited everybody in the class to pick one of these small objects, and just walk around and hold it in their hand and see if they would get a song. It worked for some people, it didn’t work for others.
For me, I looked in that box and I had put in two Mylar snowflakes that had come to me in a Christmas card. And I put one in my hand and I looked at it, and I took the other one and I put it in my hand next to the first one and I looked at ‘em and I went, “Those are exactly the same. That’s just wrong; that’s not what everybody says. What everybody always says is, ‘No two snowflakes are the same.’”
7. SALLY ANN (1:19)
“Sally Ann” is a frequent title in the world of bluegrass and old time music, but the Kathy Kallick Band’s song of that name is not what you’d expect.
There are fiddle tunes called “Sally Ann” and songs called “Sally Ann” in the old time canon, but this is a brand-new song that was written by a woman named Allison Fisher, who lived in the Bay Area. She was very involved in the music scene. She did many years of adventuresome and brilliant booking at the Freight and Salvage, really helped to launch the Freight and Salvage as an international stage for roots music. And she played bass and she sang; she was in a band called True Blue. And she was a wonderful songwriter.
She’s written these old time songs that kind of sneak up on you. They sound authentic, they sound ancient, and they’re brand-new songs.
I had the opportunity to hear Allison Fisher sing some of these songs. Annie Staninec learned this song through jam sessions and from playing with other people, in the tried-n-true bluegrass tradition of swapping songs. And when she heard this song “Sally Ann,” it just resonated for her. She loved it, and she loved the feel and the groove of it, and she loves to play the fiddle on it.
8. LONGEST DAY OF THE YEAR (1:41)
Sometimes, a seemingly simple story, tied to a specific occasion, can provide a range of emotions and feelings – and still be about the specific.
I went to Alaska with the Good Ol’ Persons in the mid-‘80s for a tour that included Summer Solstice. It was a big time for the Good Ol’ Persons. In my memory, everything that happened in that week sort of piles in to one day, and it feels like one long, complicated, rich, dense day. And when Greg Booth talks about summer in Alaska, that’s exactly the way he talks about it. The number of events that would happen in one day -- because it’s light 24 hours – is exhausting and exhilarating all at the same time. And that was the feeling I wanted to get in this song about the longest day of the year.
How everybody makes the decision, especially up there, where they know the light’s gonna go away and then it’s gonna be dark all the time; when it’s light, they wanna pack as many of their favorite things into every single day as they can. They’re gonna get up early and they’re gonna just go full-bore until they can’t go any more – with tiny bit of sleep.
So I just constructed a day with all the things Greg Booth talks about everybody in Alaska doing and all the things I could remember from my week I’d spent there thirty years ago, and built one very, very long day.
9. ROSCOE (1:04)
Annie Staninec learns tunes from many places, like this one from Kyle Creed and Fred Cockerham, which grew out of jam sessions in the Pacific Northwest.
Annie’s a jamming fool. She loves to jam more than anything else. When I say, when we’ve been on tour, “I have to make her stop jamming and eat a sandwich,” I am not making it up. She will play the fiddle 24 hours a day – forget to drink water, forget to sleep. The only thing that will really make her stop is if everybody else quits jamming and there’s nobody to jam with.
And one of the things she’s doing when she’s jamming is learning new songs and bringing them to the next jam, bringing them to the next new situation, so she’s learning the music and she’s spreading the music.
And this tune is one that she taught me sitting in the dining room at my house, and we had so much fun playing it that we brought it to the band. And it’s just a rockin’ good old time fiddle tune that makes you wanna get up and dance -- you can’t hold still – and great fun for us to play: “Roscoe.”
10. TEAR STAINED LETTER (1:55)
When putting her own spin on someone else’s song, Kathy Kallick is far more likely to dig deep into traditional bluegrass than rock ‘n’ roll, but sometimes it just works.
We’re not the first bluegrass band to cover a Richard Thompson song. But, I thought if we were gonna do it, let’s go to a different Richard Thompson song.
And I had the chance to see Richard Thompson playing with his band and watched them play this song. It looked they were playing a bluegrass number. There was something about the energy and the intensity that looked like bluegrass to me.
And I began to think: this would make a great bluegrass song. It’s got all the elements: it’s got sad, sad, scary lyrics, but it sounds happy and perky like so much bluegrass. And it’s really got a deep groove.
And when I presented it to the band, everybody was into it, but everybody came at it from a different angle. Definitely Greg Booth in his country rock days – he had a way to get at it that was very rock ‘n’ roll. And Cary Black has played a lot of rock ‘n’ roll, along with all the other styles of music.
Annie missed that teenage rock & roll era; it didn’t ever happen to her. She’s never really listened to it, but she’s played a lot of Cajun music, and could get that gnarly Cajun rock ‘n’ roll kind of a groove. She plays with Andrew Carrier in a Cajun band and plays for dances, so she knows how to really rock out in that groove.
Tom heard the chord changes of “Beaumont Rag” in “Tear Stained Letter,” so that gave him a way in to kind of get the swing feel that he loves to play on the mandolin, but dig it in and make it kind of dirty swing.
It was really a fun tune for us to record, and we’re having such a great time performing the song, “Tear Stained Letter.”
11. MY MONTANA HOME (2:42)
The life of a bluegrass musician is one of travel, and visits to a new place can inspire a new song. Sometimes, the emotional aspects of this new song can translate to other special places.
I think one of the things that makes or breaks a band is how much they enjoy spending time together. You can have fabulous musicians who are all on the same page about the music they want to play. If they don’t enjoy spending time together, it’s gonna be hard for that band to stay together for very long. Because when you’re on tour, the time you spend playing music is a very small fraction of the day. The rest of the time, you’re just hanging out together, generally packed inside a tiny metal capsule.
One of the things I love about this band is the varied interests of everybody, and the way we’re interested in each other. Annie studied biology. She might tell us all about insects for an hour or two on a long ride in the car. Greg is famous for punning, and he’ll start a riff of puns and Cary’ll get right in there with him; this could go on, off and on, with the same pun for a couple of days.
It works for us. That’s all that matters. All that matters is that the five of us find each other interesting and entertaining, which we do.
And we’re all really interested in the world around us. So when we’re on tour, if there’s an opportunity to go to a museum, we’ll do that. If we could have a tour of the coastline, that’d be cool. There’s a bat exhibit, maybe we’d go to that. The dinosaur museum: we went to that. It’s a group of people that don’t just want to be stuck in the back seat with their headphones on in their own world.
We had the opportunity to spend several days in Montana a couple of years ago, and in that time, there was a fantastic day off, which hardly ever happens, when we could actually sit and work on new songs.
One of the songs that came out of that trip was my homage to the state of Montana, which I think has a very particular kind of beauty. I was thinking: If I had come from Montana, and I had had those wide-open vistas for my whole childhood, and I grew up and I left, I would pine for it. And I wanted to write a song that captured that feeling of pining for that beautiful place.
12. BANJO PICKIN’ GIRL (1:04)
A show-stopper in concert, this song provides the opportunity to make up lyrics on the spot to reflect a show’s location. (There’s a Midwestern reference in this version.)
When Lily Mae Ledford recorded “Banjo Pickin’ Girl” in the 1930s, that was a pretty exotic girl she was singing about. That was a woman who was traveling all around the world, playing the banjo. Well, goodness, that’s pretty fancy.
But now, that’s what we’re doing, that’s what the bluegrass world is filled with. The bluegrass world is filled with young women playing instruments, leading bands, writing songs, at the forefront of this style of music. So, yeah, there are a lot of banjo pickin’ girls.
And so it was really fun for Annie to bring this song to the band and for all of us to sink our teeth into this great old time song about this iconic person: the banjo pickin’ girl. But, when it came time for us to record it, well, it turns out Annie’s a pretty great fiddler and Greg Booth is a really good banjo player and he can’t play the fiddle at all, so it actually gets kicked off by the banjo pickin’ boy.
13. KENTUCKY MANDOLIN (1:55)
Mandolinist Tom Bekeny is Kathy Kallick’s lengthiest musical associate. He remains a fearless player with a huge musical vocabulary.
I’ve been playing music with Tom Bekeny since I started playing bluegrass. We both came in at the same time in the Bay Area. But we’ve been in a band together for nearly 20 years.
And I love Tom Bekeny’s mandolin playing because he references all the great mandolin players. And he puts all of the different styles together in a way that’s exclusively Tom.
In one solo, he’s gonna play some Jesse McReynolds, he’s gonna have a little swing nuance, he’s gonna have some beautiful Bill Monroe downstrokes, he’s gonna sound like Frank Wakefield, he’s gonna turn it around a little bit backwards. He’ll do all these things inside of one solo.
When we started to think about what tune we would feature Tom on the new album, we went to the Bill Monroe tributes that we’ve been part of for the last many years since the centennial of Bill Monroe’s birth. We’ve had the chance to just delve into the repertoire of all the Bill Monroe songs and tunes. We’ll never get to the end because there are so many great songs. And some of those songs stick with us and we keep playing them.
And Tom Bekeny chose the “Kentucky Mandolin” for one of these tributes and he just really sunk his teeth into this tune in a great way. And it was one that the whole band really enjoyed. It has a mood that’s so essentially bluegrass. And I love the way the band played this tune and referenced old versions of the song and still brought something new to it as well.
14. IN TEXAS (1:58)
The musical feel of the final song on Foxhounds is more appropriate to the region sung about than to bluegrass, but it’s a fitting conclusion to the “geographical” portion of the record -- as well as the album as a whole.
I had a little handful of slow, sweet new songs that I presented to the band because I like to close an album with a sweet feeling. I still imagine people listening to an album in its entirety. I still imagine the record on the record player playing until I fall asleep, and how much I loved it when the last track was a gentle, lilting, sweet-feeling kind of song.
So we chose this song to put at the end of the album because it had that feeling. But it was step outside for this band because it has a feel and a groove that this band has never played. It was a stretch.
The person who had the greatest grasp on this groove was Cary Black because he’s played so many styles of music, so he could kick it off and set the tone immediately on the bass. And Greg Booth, in his years of playing in country bands, had played enough Roy Orbison or stuff like that that he could also get into this feel of this tune, this kind of southwestern, languid, Latin-y kind of feel.
For Tom and Annie, it was something new, and I loved the way they came to it. They listened to other songs that had this sound, and they came up with their own interpretation of how to play this groove. And the little rills of mandolin notes that Tom plays in the fade-out to me are the sweetest sound of all.
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THIS – AND THE NEXT -- ALBUM (1:28)
Foxhounds is the twentieth album that I’ve made, not including being part of compilations or tribute things, themed collections. It’s the twentieth album that I’ve made, either with my band or in a combination that’s under my name.
I guess it feels like some kind of a landmark, but mainly it just felt like the next album to make. It was time to make another band album, and, as each project starts to loom, I begin to collect songs, I begin to have ideas, and, as it becomes a body of work, I begin to see the next project. And the band was ready and the material was there.
What happens next after Foxhounds, I don’t see the project looming. But Foxhounds has only been out a very short time. I’m pretty confident that there’ll be something else coming along, and that the material will start to present itself, and the concept will be there – whether it’s a band or a solo album or a gospel album or a kids album or another collaboration with another musician I love playing with. I feel confident there’ll be the next project.
followed by KATHY KALLICK BAND: Time/Live at the Freight & Salvage - Berkeley, CA (Nov. 20, 2015)
Kathy Kallick: composer, guitar, lead vocals
Annie Staninec: fiddle, harmony vocals
Greg Booth: banjo
Tom Bekeny: mandolin
Cary Black: acoustic bass
Recorded by Lou Judson
INSPIRATIONS & HEROES (4:27)
I’m often asked about who’s influenced me in music and who are my mentors.
The first one, of course, is my mom, who talked to me so much about singing, who really encouraged me to enunciate. If you care about the words you’re singing, sing them so somebody else can understand them. She really discouraged me from striking poses or posturing or hair-tossing or any kind of histrionics. Just sing the song.
As I came to be interested in bluegrass, as anybody who plays bluegrass, Bill Monroe became my hero and a mentor and my inspiration. The fact that he wrote his own songs about his own experience and put them into this old time style of music that came from dance bands was really important information for me. And the way he put together bands that sounded different by the personnel of the band, but always had an overriding common sound that was obviously him. What I’ve tried to think about in forty years of having bands: the band is gonna be really affected by the sound of the people that are in the band. And that’s a good thing.
Of course, Mac Martin: my mentor, my hero. Had his 90th birthday last spring. I talked to him; I said, “So what did you do today?” He said, “Well, I walked over to church for mass ‘cause I like to do that and then I worked in the soup kitchen because I enjoy that and then Jean and I went out for a beautiful lunch and then I played a little show tonight.” And I went, “Dude. It’s your 90th birthday. I would be tired if I did all those things in a day.” But that’s my goal, that’s what I want to do.
Rose Maddox played in the Bay Area, and I had the chance to see her and play music with her. One of the things I loved about Rose Maddox was the way she stayed exactly who she was at all times. She was flamboyant, she was mouthy, she was a little rough around the edges, she was not growing old gracefully, and she was never going to. She was who she was – onstage, offstage, all the time. And I loved that.
Hazel Dickens spoke her mind, she never minced her words, she sang straight from the heart every time she sang. She wanted to channel the core of the song without any unnecessary ornamentations. She stayed true to herself throughout the whole time she was playing music. Fabulous role model for anybody, but really for women, who are really encouraged to, while they are doing all of those things, Could you please be a Barbie doll? And could you stay 14 if you don’t mind?
See, Rose Maddox, Hazel Dickens -- they’re never doing that. They’re who they are at all times
And Alice Gerrard: the thing I love about Alice is she’s still learning the song, she’s still working to find that core of the song every time she does it. She never stands up in front of everybody and says, “I’m a hero, look at me. Look at how I stomp around on stage with my great big attitude.”
None of these women are growing old and turning into polite little old ladies. I’m not gonna turn into a polite little old lady, that’s not my goal. I’m gonna stay who I am at all times. I will try to behave appropriately in appropriate situations, but, like all three of these women, if the situation calls for some rough talk, I’m your gal. If the situation calls for actual tears while I’m singing the song because I’m moved by that song, I’m gonna go there. It’s not about the slick veneer; it’s about finding the heart of that song.
followed by KATHY KALLICK BAND: Fare Thee Well/Live at the Strawberry Music Festival – Grass Valley, CA (Sept. 14, 2014)
Kathy Kallick: composer, guitar, lead vocals
Annie Staninec: fiddle, harmony vocals
Greg Booth: dobro, harmony vocals
Tom Bekeny: mandolin
Cary Black: acoustic bass
Recorded by Hog Ranch Radio
MAC MARTIN’S INFLUENCE AS BANDLEADER (1:43)
One of the things that’s most inspiring things to me about playing with Mac Martin is he’s just a fabulous band leader. He’s been playing with the fiddler, Mike Carson, since, I believe, 1954. That’s almost my entire lifetime. And when I had the chance to play with the two of them when we went back to visit in Pittsburgh, it was phenomenal to just see the way they still look at each other when they play. They’re still communicating, they know each other’s every move playing music.
It’s one of the things I love about having a band for a long time is the ways you get to know each of the people you’re playing with and still learn something new.
When I had the chance to be part of the California Travelers, I had the experience of being in Mac Martin’s band. And he’s very careful to feature each person in the band in every set. He has such a well-constructed way of composing a set so that he’s definitely at the reins but he’s featuring each member of the band. He’s wanting to present each part of the music in each set, and it’s all about connecting with the audience. He’s reading his audience and picking songs and making sure everybody is getting featured.
It’s a big job of work, and he’s doing it with such ease and such calm and just tossing it off with just the right little funny thing to say between each song. There’s no artifice, there’s no posturing. He’s a natural guy doing what he loves to do in front of a group of people and inviting them to be part of it. And it’s just the way I want to play music.
followed by MAC MARTIN & THE CALIFORNIA TRAVELERS: I’ll Just Pretend/Live at Redwood Bluegrass Associates (Oct. 14, 2006)
Mac Martin: guitar, lead vocals
Kathy Kallick: acoustic bass, harmony vocals
Keith Little: banjo
Butch Waller: mandolin
Paul Shelasky: fiddle
Lisa Berman: dobro
Recorded by Lou Judson
MAKING ALBUMS (2:23)
PT (on recording): Back in the ‘70s, when you were part of the Good Ol’ Persons getting going and playing Paul’s Saloon and the Red Vest and all that, did you see 20 albums under your belt?
Gracious, no! Back in the olden days, making an album was a very complicated thing. It was really elaborate and really expensive. If you didn’t have a label behind you, it was never gonna happen. We were all hoping we could get on Rounder or get on a label and get the support and make an album. Or you could make your own little cassette that you might sell at a festival.
But, it’s become accessible for people to make albums. There’s so many people who have digital studios and businesses like Discmakers or companies that make it available for people to make albums in a pretty easy way.
I felt in the first few albums I made just terrified that it wouldn’t be perfect. Everybody did. We were doing this really rarified thing by
putting this music that we played live in bars and whatever on vinyl where it would live forever. And it was a terrible pressure to have it be perfect, perfect in every way, at all times.
And Barry Poss from Sugar Hill said to me, at the end of the first record I made with him, “Y’know, you don’t have to be too concerned about this performance being the ultimate expression. This is just the way you sang the song that day.”
And that was radical for me, radical thinking. I might sing it differently tomorrow, I might sing it a lot better in two years, but oh well. That’s the record of how I sang that song that day. And it took a big bunch of pressure off me and a big load off my shoulders. Y’know, we’re making a record; it’s just like performing, it’s just like jamming, it’s just what we do. We just, once again, we go for the heart of the song in that moment.
The first 14 segments of this “interview” – Kathy’s voice only – are linked to tracks from the most recent Kathy Kallick Band album, Foxhounds. The scripts provided (in italics) approximate the introductions used when this was broadcast in October, 2016, on KALW. The “title” of these segments indicates the track from Foxhounds that followed Kathy’s remarks.
The remaining 4 interview segments are not tied to specific songs, but I used live recordings as indicated with the first three of these.
INTERVIEW CREDITS:
Produced by Peter Thompson
Recorded by Derek Bianchi at Muscletone Studios, Albany, CA
Edited by Peter Thompson and Lou Judson
Mastered by Lou Judson at Intuitive Audio, Novato, CA
More information on Kathy Kallick and the Kathy Kallick Band
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1. FOXHOUNDS (3:07)
The title track of the Kathy Kallick Band’s most recent album – which happens to be Kathy’s 20th release – is one of her songs (and she’s now released nearly 150 of her originals). It reflects the most important influence on anyone involved in bluegrass, Kathy’s own musical journey over the past few decades, and memories of a very special experience.
Everybody that plays bluegrass is influenced by Bill Monroe, the Father of Bluegrass -- even young people who come to bluegrass because they saw the String Cheese Incident, and that made them start listening to bluegrass. Even if they never listened to a Bill Monroe record, they’re still influenced by Bill Monroe. The influence permeates every aspect of bluegrass.
But for me, one of the biggest influences: he’s the original bluegrass singer-songwriter. I started trying to write my own bluegrass songs about my own experience quite early on, and I was given the seal of approval by Bill Monroe, who I had the opportunity to meet several times and go back and play at his festival in Bean Blossom.
After all these years of trying to write my song in bluegrass about my particular story, I took the opportunity to really think about Bill Monroe and his story and his songs about his early life when he sings, “On my way back to the old home” and he talks about sitting and listening to the foxhounds with his dad in the old Kentucky hills. And this is the model for bluegrass songwriting: talk about yourself, talk about your life.
I had the great good fortune in the early ‘80s to go back to Tennessee and stay with Bill Monroe on his farm. He was very gracious, very welcoming, and I spent a week there, just going about his daily day with him, although I didn’t get up at 6 in the morning to check on the fences.
One evening, he had all of us come out and sit on the front porch and he let the foxhounds out of the barn where he kept them and invited us to sit and listen. And we couldn’t hear them at first because they took off running to the outer edges of the farm. But then we could start to tune in and hear them way off in the distance, yipping and barking and baying.
Eventually, he got his mandolin and started playing along with them, and you could hear that he was trying to catch the sound of the foxhounds. And it was so beautiful and powerful for us. Bill was maybe in his 70s, and he was still trying to catch that sound that was one of the first sounds that led him to play bluegrass.
And somebody asked him, ‘Bill, do you ever hunt foxes with your foxhounds?’ And he said, ‘Well, no sir, I don’t care about the foxes, I just like to listen to the hounds.’ It was all about the soundscape, the aural delivery and taking the sounds around him and turning it into music – what he spent his life doing. So I was inspired to write a song about that.
2. SO DANG LONESOME (4:00)
Since the two well-received and highly-regarded albums with the current iteration of the Kathy Kallick Band – 2010’s Between the Hollow & the High-Rise and 2012’s Time – there has been a personnel change in the band. And that’s resulted in not only a new player but also a new co-writer and new singer in the band of Kathy Kallick.
I’ve been playing in a band for the last forty years. Every time the band personnel changes, I grieve. I’m devastated. I hate to have somebody leave the band.
And I can tell myself intellectually, when that band member leaves or the band dissolves and I have to reinvent the wheel, it’s gonna be great -- because every time it happens, it’s wonderful. Each band does something new. Each band inspires me to write a whole new raft of songs. Each collection of musicians affects my music in a powerful and positive way. But when I lose a band member, I’m really sad.
The most recent band change, when Dan Booth left the band, I wished him well. I knew he was doing the right thing, but I had loved singing with that guy and I had written a bunch of songs to sing with him, and I didn’t know who was gonna play the bass and what the next thing was gonna be.
And then I was at a music camp, teaching with Cary Black. And I remembered: Cary Black - he’s an awesome, awesome bass player. He lives in Seattle, but, y’know, Greg Booth lives in Anchorage, and that doesn’t seem to stop us from playing music together. Annie moved to Portland; it’s okay, she comes down all the time, we still get to play music together. I think Cary Black could be a great fit for this band.
And we had him come and play one long weekend in the Northwest. And after the first rehearsal, there was a general consensus we would be lucky to have this guy in the band. And Annie just blurted it out, over dinner before the first night, “So, Cary, whatdya think? Do you want to join our band?” And he looked at all of us and said, “Yes, please.”
And he brought a whole bunch of new information to this band. He’s a wonderful bluegrass bass player. He also plays a lot of other styles of music. And he thinks deeply about music. He’s produced a lot of records. He’s a fabulous singer. Pretty soon he started to have ideas and inject his own information, opinions, suggestions, and everything he had to say was really smart and really cool.
And I had been working to write a song for this band, and I was really struggling to get a chorus going. I had the lyric idea, I just wanted the melody to be awesome. And Cary was in town and he was staying at my house. And I said, “Would you like to collaborate with me on this song?” And he said, “I would love to get in on that, I’d love to start doing some co-writing.”
So we worked together on the chorus of this song. And in my typical fashion, all the suggestions he was making were really scary, because they were really different from what I would do, left to my own devices, which is why I always ask somebody to co-write with me so the song will be something other than what I would do on my own.
And so this song, “So Danged Lonesome,” came out sounding so danged lonesome; it’s the lonesomest, sorriest, saddest lonesome song because of these melody and chord ideas that Cary Black came up with on the chorus.
And then we had the chance to investigate the new vocal trio with Cary Black and Greg Booth, and those two guys both just come up with the gnarliest, out of the box ideas for harmony combinations. I’m thrilled with the incredibly lonesome, gnarly, scary sound of this track.
3. I’M NOT YOUR HONEY BABY NOW (1:50)
Fiddler Annie Staninec is the most recent winner of IBMA’s Momentum Award for Instrumentalist of the Year as well as the newest member of the Rod Stewart Band. But she remains active in the Kathy Kallick Band, and inspires not only great playing from everyone in the band but also new songs written by Kathy Kallick.
Annie Staninec is such an entertaining person to play music with, but she’s even more entertaining to watch play music. When she starts to play the fiddle, her hair’s just flying around, she’s stompin’ her feet, she is so happy. She loves to play the fiddle. She looks like a fairy princess, she fiddles like an old man on a front porch. It’s a fabulous combination.
When I wrote “I’m Not Your Honey-Baby Now,” it was with the idea of her playing screaming old time fiddle throughout the track and singing at the same time, which she’s pretty good at doing, I’ve got to say.
She loves this old time track, and when we play the song, it makes her so happy, and, for the first ten times we played the song, she would say, “Thank you for writing this old time song for me to play the fiddle and sing. I love this so much.”
The content of this old time song is based on the experiences of a friend of mine. I don’t have a lot of misery and sorrow and struggle and challenges in my daily life. I’m pretty happy, things go along nicely for me. And I’ve gotta look for the content for my songs that’s not gonna be Everything’s going great for me, how’s it going for you?’ because that would be a really boring song.
But, luckily, there are always people around me, there are always things I can see, there are always interesting conversations, and the struggles of somebody trying to date in the modern world are fresh, and I get to hear about it all the time. And to take those conversations and to set them in an old time context was really fun for me.
4. I’LL FORGIVE YOU (2:49)
Kathy Kallick has been playing and performing with Pittsburgh’s Mac Martin for the past 15 years, and has learned a great deal from this bluegrass pioneer who has been leading his own bands since 1954. Mac is the repository of literally thousands of songs, and has taught some of them to Kathy.
Mac Martin is a wonderful first generation bluegrass singer, guitar player, mandolin player, and he has become a mentor to me.
He came to California to perform three times. He came on his own without his band, and asked me to put together a band. And we put together a band that got called the California Travelers. And I had the opportunity to sing with him on these three wonderful tours. And then I was lucky enough to go back and visit with him in Pittsburgh a couple of times.
And I’ve learned so much from Mac Martin about performing, about playing in a band, about not making music be your whole life, but when you play music being really in the music, in the moment. I’ve learned so much about singing from him: his slippery, complex, elegant bluegrass phrasing. When I try and sing with him, I’m in a Masters Class Of Bluegrass Singing.
He’s just the warmest guy, and I wanted to pick a song that I loved singing with him to put on this album. And I talked with him about “I’ll Forgive You (But I’ll Never Forget),” and asked him: Where did he get that song? And he said: Well, he got it from the Lilly Brothers. And he could tell me all about learning it, singing with the Lily Brothers, hearing them sing it. He didn’t know who wrote it; he thought it was probably ‘P.D.’ And then we could joke about how that’s either Passed Down or Public Domain.
It’s just a plain wonderful old time bluegrass song, and it gave me the chance to think about singing with Mac every time I sing the song -- very thrilling for me.
And it gave the Kathy Kallick Band the chance to sink their teeth into just a classic, good bluegrass number. It really drew some wonderful fiddling out of Annie to get a kind of a Curly Ray Cline-sounding fiddle solo. And from Tom Bekeny to just play great fast bluegrass waltz mandolin. But the surprise was Greg Booth, who didn’t know how to get to this song at first. It wasn’t the kind of song that he’s played a lot of. He kinda went Josh Graves on it. And that was the ticket. e He plays a beautiful dobro kickoff and solo that’s very reminiscent of Josh Graves, so it gives the whole track an early bluegrass sound, and I think Mac’ll be pleased with it.
5. DON’T LET YOUR DEAL GO DOWN (1:34)
Kathy Kallick has been playing in a band with multi-instrumentalist Greg Booth for nearly a decade, and he still finds ways to surprise her.
Greg Booth came to playing the dobro a little bit later. He started out playing the banjo. He was a student of Bill Emerson when he was growing up in the DC area when he was a young teenager. He played the banjo through college, and started playing pedal steel. When he moved up to Anchorage, he played in country bands, played pedal steel every night.
And somewhere, about ten years ago, he saw the dobro, he heard the dobro. And he went, “Banjo. Pedal steel. Banjo. Pedal steel. I think I could do that thing.” And he started in playing the dobro, using all of his information from banjo and pedal steel. And had so much musical information already for a person starting an instrument that he hit the ground running in a big way.
He’s written some wonderful instrumentals to play on the dobro. But what he really loves to do is pick songs from different styles, different genres, and interpret them on the dobro. And the tune he chose for this new album is a Flatt and Scruggs song that is usually sung. And he decided to interpret it as an instrumental and change the key and use one of his drop tunings. He just went all Greg Booth on “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down.”
6. SNOWFLAKES (2:36)
The Kathy Kallick Band released seven of Kathy’s new songs on Foxhounds, which means she now has something like 150 of her originals on albums. For someone this prolific, she finds her muse in many different situations.
I’ve been writing songs pretty much since I started playing music. When I learned to play the piano, which I played from the time I was maybe 9 to 14, quite early on I learned to play a minuet. And I thought it would be fun to write a minuet. So I made up my own minuet, and brought it to my piano teacher, who was not amused. This was not encouraged at all.
But I can’t help it. If I’m playing music, I start thinking about writing songs. And I’ve always written songs by just kind of waiting for the song to come to me – which happens with pretty great regularity. I get woken up in the middle of the night or I’m trying to accomplish a task, but I have to stop and write a song.
But as I’ve begun teaching songwriting with more frequency, I’ve tried to come up with assignments and triggers to help other people write songs. If I have a week-long songwriting class, we can’t just all sit around and wait for the muse. It might come and it might not.
Then I started taking the prompts, and I found I could write a song from a songwriting prompt – which was new for me as well.
So it opened up a lot of possibilities, and one of the things that I learned is that no matter what the prompt, no matter how random it is and how outside and artificial, the song that I will write is gonna be about me. It’s gonna be personal and it’s gonna be about something that resonates from my experience or in my life.
I was teaching a songwriting class, and I brought a collection of small objects that you could hold in your hand, and I spread them all out and invited everybody in the class to pick one of these small objects, and just walk around and hold it in their hand and see if they would get a song. It worked for some people, it didn’t work for others.
For me, I looked in that box and I had put in two Mylar snowflakes that had come to me in a Christmas card. And I put one in my hand and I looked at it, and I took the other one and I put it in my hand next to the first one and I looked at ‘em and I went, “Those are exactly the same. That’s just wrong; that’s not what everybody says. What everybody always says is, ‘No two snowflakes are the same.’”
7. SALLY ANN (1:19)
“Sally Ann” is a frequent title in the world of bluegrass and old time music, but the Kathy Kallick Band’s song of that name is not what you’d expect.
There are fiddle tunes called “Sally Ann” and songs called “Sally Ann” in the old time canon, but this is a brand-new song that was written by a woman named Allison Fisher, who lived in the Bay Area. She was very involved in the music scene. She did many years of adventuresome and brilliant booking at the Freight and Salvage, really helped to launch the Freight and Salvage as an international stage for roots music. And she played bass and she sang; she was in a band called True Blue. And she was a wonderful songwriter.
She’s written these old time songs that kind of sneak up on you. They sound authentic, they sound ancient, and they’re brand-new songs.
I had the opportunity to hear Allison Fisher sing some of these songs. Annie Staninec learned this song through jam sessions and from playing with other people, in the tried-n-true bluegrass tradition of swapping songs. And when she heard this song “Sally Ann,” it just resonated for her. She loved it, and she loved the feel and the groove of it, and she loves to play the fiddle on it.
8. LONGEST DAY OF THE YEAR (1:41)
Sometimes, a seemingly simple story, tied to a specific occasion, can provide a range of emotions and feelings – and still be about the specific.
I went to Alaska with the Good Ol’ Persons in the mid-‘80s for a tour that included Summer Solstice. It was a big time for the Good Ol’ Persons. In my memory, everything that happened in that week sort of piles in to one day, and it feels like one long, complicated, rich, dense day. And when Greg Booth talks about summer in Alaska, that’s exactly the way he talks about it. The number of events that would happen in one day -- because it’s light 24 hours – is exhausting and exhilarating all at the same time. And that was the feeling I wanted to get in this song about the longest day of the year.
How everybody makes the decision, especially up there, where they know the light’s gonna go away and then it’s gonna be dark all the time; when it’s light, they wanna pack as many of their favorite things into every single day as they can. They’re gonna get up early and they’re gonna just go full-bore until they can’t go any more – with tiny bit of sleep.
So I just constructed a day with all the things Greg Booth talks about everybody in Alaska doing and all the things I could remember from my week I’d spent there thirty years ago, and built one very, very long day.
9. ROSCOE (1:04)
Annie Staninec learns tunes from many places, like this one from Kyle Creed and Fred Cockerham, which grew out of jam sessions in the Pacific Northwest.
Annie’s a jamming fool. She loves to jam more than anything else. When I say, when we’ve been on tour, “I have to make her stop jamming and eat a sandwich,” I am not making it up. She will play the fiddle 24 hours a day – forget to drink water, forget to sleep. The only thing that will really make her stop is if everybody else quits jamming and there’s nobody to jam with.
And one of the things she’s doing when she’s jamming is learning new songs and bringing them to the next jam, bringing them to the next new situation, so she’s learning the music and she’s spreading the music.
And this tune is one that she taught me sitting in the dining room at my house, and we had so much fun playing it that we brought it to the band. And it’s just a rockin’ good old time fiddle tune that makes you wanna get up and dance -- you can’t hold still – and great fun for us to play: “Roscoe.”
10. TEAR STAINED LETTER (1:55)
When putting her own spin on someone else’s song, Kathy Kallick is far more likely to dig deep into traditional bluegrass than rock ‘n’ roll, but sometimes it just works.
We’re not the first bluegrass band to cover a Richard Thompson song. But, I thought if we were gonna do it, let’s go to a different Richard Thompson song.
And I had the chance to see Richard Thompson playing with his band and watched them play this song. It looked they were playing a bluegrass number. There was something about the energy and the intensity that looked like bluegrass to me.
And I began to think: this would make a great bluegrass song. It’s got all the elements: it’s got sad, sad, scary lyrics, but it sounds happy and perky like so much bluegrass. And it’s really got a deep groove.
And when I presented it to the band, everybody was into it, but everybody came at it from a different angle. Definitely Greg Booth in his country rock days – he had a way to get at it that was very rock ‘n’ roll. And Cary Black has played a lot of rock ‘n’ roll, along with all the other styles of music.
Annie missed that teenage rock & roll era; it didn’t ever happen to her. She’s never really listened to it, but she’s played a lot of Cajun music, and could get that gnarly Cajun rock ‘n’ roll kind of a groove. She plays with Andrew Carrier in a Cajun band and plays for dances, so she knows how to really rock out in that groove.
Tom heard the chord changes of “Beaumont Rag” in “Tear Stained Letter,” so that gave him a way in to kind of get the swing feel that he loves to play on the mandolin, but dig it in and make it kind of dirty swing.
It was really a fun tune for us to record, and we’re having such a great time performing the song, “Tear Stained Letter.”
11. MY MONTANA HOME (2:42)
The life of a bluegrass musician is one of travel, and visits to a new place can inspire a new song. Sometimes, the emotional aspects of this new song can translate to other special places.
I think one of the things that makes or breaks a band is how much they enjoy spending time together. You can have fabulous musicians who are all on the same page about the music they want to play. If they don’t enjoy spending time together, it’s gonna be hard for that band to stay together for very long. Because when you’re on tour, the time you spend playing music is a very small fraction of the day. The rest of the time, you’re just hanging out together, generally packed inside a tiny metal capsule.
One of the things I love about this band is the varied interests of everybody, and the way we’re interested in each other. Annie studied biology. She might tell us all about insects for an hour or two on a long ride in the car. Greg is famous for punning, and he’ll start a riff of puns and Cary’ll get right in there with him; this could go on, off and on, with the same pun for a couple of days.
It works for us. That’s all that matters. All that matters is that the five of us find each other interesting and entertaining, which we do.
And we’re all really interested in the world around us. So when we’re on tour, if there’s an opportunity to go to a museum, we’ll do that. If we could have a tour of the coastline, that’d be cool. There’s a bat exhibit, maybe we’d go to that. The dinosaur museum: we went to that. It’s a group of people that don’t just want to be stuck in the back seat with their headphones on in their own world.
We had the opportunity to spend several days in Montana a couple of years ago, and in that time, there was a fantastic day off, which hardly ever happens, when we could actually sit and work on new songs.
One of the songs that came out of that trip was my homage to the state of Montana, which I think has a very particular kind of beauty. I was thinking: If I had come from Montana, and I had had those wide-open vistas for my whole childhood, and I grew up and I left, I would pine for it. And I wanted to write a song that captured that feeling of pining for that beautiful place.
12. BANJO PICKIN’ GIRL (1:04)
A show-stopper in concert, this song provides the opportunity to make up lyrics on the spot to reflect a show’s location. (There’s a Midwestern reference in this version.)
When Lily Mae Ledford recorded “Banjo Pickin’ Girl” in the 1930s, that was a pretty exotic girl she was singing about. That was a woman who was traveling all around the world, playing the banjo. Well, goodness, that’s pretty fancy.
But now, that’s what we’re doing, that’s what the bluegrass world is filled with. The bluegrass world is filled with young women playing instruments, leading bands, writing songs, at the forefront of this style of music. So, yeah, there are a lot of banjo pickin’ girls.
And so it was really fun for Annie to bring this song to the band and for all of us to sink our teeth into this great old time song about this iconic person: the banjo pickin’ girl. But, when it came time for us to record it, well, it turns out Annie’s a pretty great fiddler and Greg Booth is a really good banjo player and he can’t play the fiddle at all, so it actually gets kicked off by the banjo pickin’ boy.
13. KENTUCKY MANDOLIN (1:55)
Mandolinist Tom Bekeny is Kathy Kallick’s lengthiest musical associate. He remains a fearless player with a huge musical vocabulary.
I’ve been playing music with Tom Bekeny since I started playing bluegrass. We both came in at the same time in the Bay Area. But we’ve been in a band together for nearly 20 years.
And I love Tom Bekeny’s mandolin playing because he references all the great mandolin players. And he puts all of the different styles together in a way that’s exclusively Tom.
In one solo, he’s gonna play some Jesse McReynolds, he’s gonna have a little swing nuance, he’s gonna have some beautiful Bill Monroe downstrokes, he’s gonna sound like Frank Wakefield, he’s gonna turn it around a little bit backwards. He’ll do all these things inside of one solo.
When we started to think about what tune we would feature Tom on the new album, we went to the Bill Monroe tributes that we’ve been part of for the last many years since the centennial of Bill Monroe’s birth. We’ve had the chance to just delve into the repertoire of all the Bill Monroe songs and tunes. We’ll never get to the end because there are so many great songs. And some of those songs stick with us and we keep playing them.
And Tom Bekeny chose the “Kentucky Mandolin” for one of these tributes and he just really sunk his teeth into this tune in a great way. And it was one that the whole band really enjoyed. It has a mood that’s so essentially bluegrass. And I love the way the band played this tune and referenced old versions of the song and still brought something new to it as well.
14. IN TEXAS (1:58)
The musical feel of the final song on Foxhounds is more appropriate to the region sung about than to bluegrass, but it’s a fitting conclusion to the “geographical” portion of the record -- as well as the album as a whole.
I had a little handful of slow, sweet new songs that I presented to the band because I like to close an album with a sweet feeling. I still imagine people listening to an album in its entirety. I still imagine the record on the record player playing until I fall asleep, and how much I loved it when the last track was a gentle, lilting, sweet-feeling kind of song.
So we chose this song to put at the end of the album because it had that feeling. But it was step outside for this band because it has a feel and a groove that this band has never played. It was a stretch.
The person who had the greatest grasp on this groove was Cary Black because he’s played so many styles of music, so he could kick it off and set the tone immediately on the bass. And Greg Booth, in his years of playing in country bands, had played enough Roy Orbison or stuff like that that he could also get into this feel of this tune, this kind of southwestern, languid, Latin-y kind of feel.
For Tom and Annie, it was something new, and I loved the way they came to it. They listened to other songs that had this sound, and they came up with their own interpretation of how to play this groove. And the little rills of mandolin notes that Tom plays in the fade-out to me are the sweetest sound of all.
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THIS – AND THE NEXT -- ALBUM (1:28)
Foxhounds is the twentieth album that I’ve made, not including being part of compilations or tribute things, themed collections. It’s the twentieth album that I’ve made, either with my band or in a combination that’s under my name.
I guess it feels like some kind of a landmark, but mainly it just felt like the next album to make. It was time to make another band album, and, as each project starts to loom, I begin to collect songs, I begin to have ideas, and, as it becomes a body of work, I begin to see the next project. And the band was ready and the material was there.
What happens next after Foxhounds, I don’t see the project looming. But Foxhounds has only been out a very short time. I’m pretty confident that there’ll be something else coming along, and that the material will start to present itself, and the concept will be there – whether it’s a band or a solo album or a gospel album or a kids album or another collaboration with another musician I love playing with. I feel confident there’ll be the next project.
followed by KATHY KALLICK BAND: Time/Live at the Freight & Salvage - Berkeley, CA (Nov. 20, 2015)
Kathy Kallick: composer, guitar, lead vocals
Annie Staninec: fiddle, harmony vocals
Greg Booth: banjo
Tom Bekeny: mandolin
Cary Black: acoustic bass
Recorded by Lou Judson
INSPIRATIONS & HEROES (4:27)
I’m often asked about who’s influenced me in music and who are my mentors.
The first one, of course, is my mom, who talked to me so much about singing, who really encouraged me to enunciate. If you care about the words you’re singing, sing them so somebody else can understand them. She really discouraged me from striking poses or posturing or hair-tossing or any kind of histrionics. Just sing the song.
As I came to be interested in bluegrass, as anybody who plays bluegrass, Bill Monroe became my hero and a mentor and my inspiration. The fact that he wrote his own songs about his own experience and put them into this old time style of music that came from dance bands was really important information for me. And the way he put together bands that sounded different by the personnel of the band, but always had an overriding common sound that was obviously him. What I’ve tried to think about in forty years of having bands: the band is gonna be really affected by the sound of the people that are in the band. And that’s a good thing.
Of course, Mac Martin: my mentor, my hero. Had his 90th birthday last spring. I talked to him; I said, “So what did you do today?” He said, “Well, I walked over to church for mass ‘cause I like to do that and then I worked in the soup kitchen because I enjoy that and then Jean and I went out for a beautiful lunch and then I played a little show tonight.” And I went, “Dude. It’s your 90th birthday. I would be tired if I did all those things in a day.” But that’s my goal, that’s what I want to do.
Rose Maddox played in the Bay Area, and I had the chance to see her and play music with her. One of the things I loved about Rose Maddox was the way she stayed exactly who she was at all times. She was flamboyant, she was mouthy, she was a little rough around the edges, she was not growing old gracefully, and she was never going to. She was who she was – onstage, offstage, all the time. And I loved that.
Hazel Dickens spoke her mind, she never minced her words, she sang straight from the heart every time she sang. She wanted to channel the core of the song without any unnecessary ornamentations. She stayed true to herself throughout the whole time she was playing music. Fabulous role model for anybody, but really for women, who are really encouraged to, while they are doing all of those things, Could you please be a Barbie doll? And could you stay 14 if you don’t mind?
See, Rose Maddox, Hazel Dickens -- they’re never doing that. They’re who they are at all times
And Alice Gerrard: the thing I love about Alice is she’s still learning the song, she’s still working to find that core of the song every time she does it. She never stands up in front of everybody and says, “I’m a hero, look at me. Look at how I stomp around on stage with my great big attitude.”
None of these women are growing old and turning into polite little old ladies. I’m not gonna turn into a polite little old lady, that’s not my goal. I’m gonna stay who I am at all times. I will try to behave appropriately in appropriate situations, but, like all three of these women, if the situation calls for some rough talk, I’m your gal. If the situation calls for actual tears while I’m singing the song because I’m moved by that song, I’m gonna go there. It’s not about the slick veneer; it’s about finding the heart of that song.
followed by KATHY KALLICK BAND: Fare Thee Well/Live at the Strawberry Music Festival – Grass Valley, CA (Sept. 14, 2014)
Kathy Kallick: composer, guitar, lead vocals
Annie Staninec: fiddle, harmony vocals
Greg Booth: dobro, harmony vocals
Tom Bekeny: mandolin
Cary Black: acoustic bass
Recorded by Hog Ranch Radio
MAC MARTIN’S INFLUENCE AS BANDLEADER (1:43)
One of the things that’s most inspiring things to me about playing with Mac Martin is he’s just a fabulous band leader. He’s been playing with the fiddler, Mike Carson, since, I believe, 1954. That’s almost my entire lifetime. And when I had the chance to play with the two of them when we went back to visit in Pittsburgh, it was phenomenal to just see the way they still look at each other when they play. They’re still communicating, they know each other’s every move playing music.
It’s one of the things I love about having a band for a long time is the ways you get to know each of the people you’re playing with and still learn something new.
When I had the chance to be part of the California Travelers, I had the experience of being in Mac Martin’s band. And he’s very careful to feature each person in the band in every set. He has such a well-constructed way of composing a set so that he’s definitely at the reins but he’s featuring each member of the band. He’s wanting to present each part of the music in each set, and it’s all about connecting with the audience. He’s reading his audience and picking songs and making sure everybody is getting featured.
It’s a big job of work, and he’s doing it with such ease and such calm and just tossing it off with just the right little funny thing to say between each song. There’s no artifice, there’s no posturing. He’s a natural guy doing what he loves to do in front of a group of people and inviting them to be part of it. And it’s just the way I want to play music.
followed by MAC MARTIN & THE CALIFORNIA TRAVELERS: I’ll Just Pretend/Live at Redwood Bluegrass Associates (Oct. 14, 2006)
Mac Martin: guitar, lead vocals
Kathy Kallick: acoustic bass, harmony vocals
Keith Little: banjo
Butch Waller: mandolin
Paul Shelasky: fiddle
Lisa Berman: dobro
Recorded by Lou Judson
MAKING ALBUMS (2:23)
PT (on recording): Back in the ‘70s, when you were part of the Good Ol’ Persons getting going and playing Paul’s Saloon and the Red Vest and all that, did you see 20 albums under your belt?
Gracious, no! Back in the olden days, making an album was a very complicated thing. It was really elaborate and really expensive. If you didn’t have a label behind you, it was never gonna happen. We were all hoping we could get on Rounder or get on a label and get the support and make an album. Or you could make your own little cassette that you might sell at a festival.
But, it’s become accessible for people to make albums. There’s so many people who have digital studios and businesses like Discmakers or companies that make it available for people to make albums in a pretty easy way.
I felt in the first few albums I made just terrified that it wouldn’t be perfect. Everybody did. We were doing this really rarified thing by
putting this music that we played live in bars and whatever on vinyl where it would live forever. And it was a terrible pressure to have it be perfect, perfect in every way, at all times.
And Barry Poss from Sugar Hill said to me, at the end of the first record I made with him, “Y’know, you don’t have to be too concerned about this performance being the ultimate expression. This is just the way you sang the song that day.”
And that was radical for me, radical thinking. I might sing it differently tomorrow, I might sing it a lot better in two years, but oh well. That’s the record of how I sang that song that day. And it took a big bunch of pressure off me and a big load off my shoulders. Y’know, we’re making a record; it’s just like performing, it’s just like jamming, it’s just what we do. We just, once again, we go for the heart of the song in that moment.