MUSIC

Old Settler's spotlight: Lee Boys/Travelin' McCourys and the Greencards

The Travelin' McCourys, the Lee Boys

The Travelin' McCourys abide by the purest motto: Honor thy father.

The Nashville bluegrass quartet directly salutes its celebrated patriarch Del McCoury's rich textures. "It's a lonesome feeling when you're traveling down a lonesome road," son Ronnie McCoury sings on the band's reworking of the Osborne Brothers gem "Lonesome Feeling." "Down a lonesome road, nobody cares a thing about you." Listen closely: That's Alan Bartam rolling rhythm on locomotive electric bass.

The nimble McCourys – Ronnie (mandolin) and Rob McCoury (guitar), as well as Bartam and fiddler Jason Carter – rarely mind paradigms. One step forward, two steps back: Tinderbox instrumentals "Lonesome Road Blues" and "Goldbrickin'" shade blueprints with cerulean circles, but their inspired reading of Bob Dylan's "Walk in the Rain" sets wildfire to decades of bluegrass design.

It's progressivism that jam-band enthusiasts gleefully champion. On the other hand, even slight divergence infuriates prickly traditionalists.

"I don't think about that much," Ronnie McCoury says with a laugh. "My dad is a diehard traditional singer — there's no way around that. That's what he is and who he is. He can take any kind of song and move it and twist it until it works for him. I'm sure there are a lot of traditional people who don't even like what we do with my dad, who don't agree with us stepping outside sometimes. (Travelin' McCourys) are pluggin' in, and that's really a different thing. But we're not the first whatsoever."

True enough. Check out the Osbornes' own "Rocky Top," the megawatt mega hit they first recorded in 1967. Four decades later, another electric bass barely registers.

Now, let's factor in the Lee Boys. Talk about a conversation starter. When paired with the McCourys, Miami's sacred steel sextet — three brothers, three cousins — amplifies the equation with Robert Randolph's spiritual grace and Sly Stone's freewheeling fervor. Perhaps an unlikely couple, the 10-member collective, booked separately and together at Old Settler's, first matched licks last year at Maryland's Delfest and again at Warren Haynes' Christmas Jam in Asheville, N.C.

Banjos and electric guitars roll and tumble. Harmonies parasail. Ronnie's fiery mandolin solos spit devil's gasoline against Roosevelt Collier's howling steel. Their rebirth of the Lee Boys' joyous hymnal "Let's Celebrate" nearly melted Smokin' Music during SXSW. "Roosevelt's a hotshot player," Ronnie says. "He's young and burning it up. The improv between the two of us — all of us, anyhow — is the funnest part."

The music's spirituality, though, ultimately best unites their crowds. After all, founders rooted bluegrass as deep in gospel as the Lee Boys' connection to the House of God church. "Our father was a minister, and (Del) maybe wasn't a minister, but he's just as big in what he does," lead guitarist Alvin Lee says. "The chemistry just feels so good when bluegrass meets sacred steel. It's a really special thing that we have with this music. We're not barking religion down at the people, but they can feel the spiritual aspect through the music."

— Brian T. Atkinson

The Lee Boys are scheduled to play at 5:15 p.m. Saturday on the Hill Country Stage. The Travelin' McCoury's at 6 p.m. Saturday on the Bluebonnet Stage. The two groups are then scheduled to play together at 8:30 p.m. Saturday on the Hill Country Stage.

The Greencards

Everything feels new about the Greencards, which — for a band that made its bones playing traditional acoustic music — is an interesting place to be.

Sure, this bluegrass band has always been unique — two Australians (Kym Warner and Carol Young) and an English guy (Eamon McLoughlin) that started in Austin playing music considered as purely American as jazz. And that music has never felt stodgy or rote. Not for nothing did they take home the Americana Music Associations' New/Emerging Artist of the Year in 2006. They've soaked up as much Patty Griffin and Robert Earl Keen as Doc Watson and Ralph Stanley.

But the new one, "Fascination" is different. They've moved from Dualtone Records, the home of their first three albums, to the legendary roots label Sugar Hill. They hired an outside producer, Jay Joyce, to help retool their sound and open up new vistas. And they took a good, long time writing songs.

"We've been writing this record for about 10 months or a year," Warner said. "We had to have 40 songs written before we started to choose what would work." (Fifteen or 16 was the usual number.)

But that doesn't mean the songs are sprawling or hurried. "It's a much more focused record than we've ever done before," Warner said. "The lyrics are pretty positive for a time when things weren't that positive. I mean, we never decided let's be weird for the sake of being weird."

No, nothing too weird. But there are more different kinds of sounds on this album — with wide-open spaces contrasting with acoustic instruments stacked up or recorded to make them sound electronic — than on previous Greencards collections or most bluegrass records in general. Warner credits Joyce for that — "the songs were like a canvas and he help us put the pieces together," he says, mixing metaphors like cake batter — but he also says the band has been listening to ... Pink Floyd?

"We've been on a huge David Gilmour fix," Warner says of the Pink Floyd guitarist. "His first solo recordings (Gilmour's self-title solo album arrived in 1978) mostly and this live DVD that Carol got. I also love the musicality of Beck records."

Don't expect Beckish bricolage, however. Songs like "Three Four Time" are almost empty, Young's voice accompanied by the bass, distant strings and a lone cymbal. Then again, "Little Siam" is a dense, instrumental barn-burner while "Into the Blue" is noirish drama.

"Fascination" is also an example of work at the front end equaling smooth sailing at the back end. "We did a song a day," Warner says. "Jay spent the leftover time on rough mixes, which were light years ahead of anything we'd heard before. It gave us such a sense of an achievement."

Like Led Zeppelin, they wrote on the road, playing a song the night after it was written. "We did that with 'Fascination,' one of the very first things we wrote for this album and it went over really well," Warner said. "It was like, 'OK, we could pull it off.' "

Warner pauses, then laughs: "I mean, we're never overly concerned about being genre-specific, but we're not going to make a death metal record just to do it."

— Joe Gross

The Greencards play at 6:45 p.m. Friday on the Hill Country Stage.