Jim Lauderdale to play Tractor Tavern on December 4th
Jim Lauderdale to play Tractor Tavern on December 4th
Jim Lauderdale’s story is a complicated triumph, with a glorious soundtrack.
Here are the first and last chapters of the newly revised edition: His initial recording, with bluegrass innovator Roland White, and his newest effort, the expansive, hyper-melodic Time Flies.
Lauderdale is the son of a preacher, and of a mother who taught public school and played the organ at church.
He was raised in the Carolinas, schooled in bluegrass and the Beatles and worshipful of brothers Everly and Stanley.
He hit Nashville in the hot summer of 1979, at age 22, possessed of prodigious talent, indistinct musical ambitions, and nothing in the way of gold or silver. While country radio stations played pop-leaning hits, Lauderdale sought something other than what was in then-contemporary fashion.
He found a mentor and collaborator in Roland White, whose mandolin work with Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt and the Kentucky Colonels helped revitalize and reimagine acoustic roots music. The elder and junior musicians paired to make an album of close harmony and vivacious beauty, recorded in the basement of banjo master Earl Scruggs.
“Earl would come down and serve us coffee from a silver tray, and he’d be wearing an apron,” Lauderdale says. “He wasn’t doing that to be funny, it’s just what he did. I made cassettes and sent them to bluegrass labels with a handwritten note, and got turned down by everybody.”
That album should have, in some hypothetical, just and righteous world, taken its place in bluegrass history with tradition-drenched, progressive-minded classics by J.D. Crowe and the New South, The Seldom Scene, and, come to think of it, the Kentucky Colonels.
Instead, the thing went unreleased, and then the master tapes got lost for 39 years. It was the first bummer in an epic series for Lauderdale. Looking back, it all seems like sweet serendipity. At the time, it just felt like heartache.
Recently, Lauderdale was at the Station Inn, the world’s most storied bluegrass tavern. Roland White came to see him, and casually mentioned, “I think my wife found the tapes to our album, in a box in the basement.”
Indeed, she had. Quarter-inch, reel-to-reel. A journey’s beginning. “February Snow” and “Nashville Blues.”
Meanwhile, Lauderdale was working on new songs, with new-century music heroes like Chris Scruggs, Kenny Vaughan, Jay Weaver, and John McTigue. Those songs became an album called Time Flies.
Ticket and event information is available here.