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Special Guests
Saturday, November 3, 2001
RHONDA VINCENT brings her high-energy bluegrass band, The Rage, to us from her home in Kirksville, Missouri, on the new red white and blue Martha White Bluegrass Express tour bus they gave her after winning the big IBMA Female Vocalist of the Year Award: there are notes painted on the side and the lettering says "Now YOU BAKE RIGHT with MARTHA WHITE." She has been playing bluegrass since she was five years old; for her sixth birthday her father gave her a snare drum, a stand and a pair of brushes, and she became the drummer on the family's Sally Mountain Show. At eight she learned the mandolin and at ten, the fiddle. Nineteen albums and five videos later and still in her thirties, a veteran of the Grand Ol Opry, TNN, CMT, and a lot of touring, she continues to play Sally Mountain reunions every time she gets the chance, and so does her father.
GILLIAN WELCH grew up in West Los Angeles, where her musical parents wrote for the Carol Burnett show. "My parents loved the standards, like Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin, and we had these huge books of sheet music called 'Greatest Hits of 60s and 70s,' and we'd sit around and play songs like Bad Bad Leroy Brown.... my dad was a big Randy Newman fan.... toward the end of high school in 1984 I discovered R.E.M. and I thought they were it." At the University of California at Santa Cruz she discovered alternative music and bluegrass. "Every Tuesday night at Sluggo's Pizza there was a band called the Harmony Grits.... a light went on.... I started devouring as much bluegrass as I could. The Stanley Brothers were at the top of the list, along with Norman and Nancy Blake and the Delmore Brothers." She met David Rawlings at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. She says, "We're a good song-writing team.... we were playing country music together when we moved to Nashville in July of '92.... Dave used to play electric guitar in a Pixies-like punk trio and he still plays the same kind of role with me, but on an acoustic guitar.... In some ways we are trying to be real traditional, like the Stanley Brothers, but we necessarily miss the mark because we grew up listening to Neil Diamond.... Someone applied the November of 2000."
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