Various Artists - Can't You Hear Me Callin: Bluegrass 80 Years / Var (CD)

All Music Guide

The title pretty much says it on this deluxe four disc package from Sony's Legacy imprint. Here on four discs are 109 performances that cover the spectrum of American Bluegrass from its prebirth roots in Appalachian country string band music via the recordings of Gid Tanner, and Charlie Poole and Blue Ridge Ramblers and Carters in the mid 1030s. The story really takes off with the Monroe Brothers and their 1936 classic "What Would You Give (In Exchange For Your Soul)? In the same year Roy Acuff issued his first hit, "The Great Speckled Bird." Ralph and Carter Stanley, the Bailes Brothers, and Molly O' Day enter the root stream within a few years and the tree blossoms at the dawn of WWII. And flowers with Flatt and Scruggs in 194...9 on ""Foggy Mountain Breakdown" in 1949. These are all here of course, as are cuts by Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper, the Osborne Brothers, Roy Hall, Grandpa Jones, Jim Jesse, Bill and Mary Reid, the Webster Brothers and many others form these early decades. Where the set really takes its chances is in including the contributions made to rock and modern country and bluegraqss music in offerings from the Byrds, Ricky Skaggs, Eric Weissberg, the Dixie Chicks, the O'Kanes, Rhonda Vincent Herb Pedersen, and many others. What it makes for, is a provocative, look at the music as it evolved not only musically, but culturally and socially, as it crossed from the Deep South into the East and West Coasts and moved north. Not everyone will agree with the track choices, of course, and the tiresome purists will find the last CD difficult to handle no doubt given their attitudes of Preservation at any costincluding premature deathbut the rest of us can be delighted, beguiled, amused and confronted by this primitive, raw original American underground music as it entered the mainstream of our society. The set includes a fantastic historical essay by former Creem editor Billy Altman, and a fine introduction by Dr. Ralph Stanley. - Thom Jurek, All Music Guide Read more Less