While I’m away, I want to take this Saturday Soundtrack opportunity to encourage you to visit the online site of a writer I follow and admire: The Musical Box: Musings on music by Walter Tunis. Once or twice a week Tunis will feature an interview with a musician or review a live show in the Lexington, Kentucky region and he never fails to bring both joy and deep knowledge of the field to his work.

A recent post entitled A few minutes with Sam Bush and Jerry Douglas is a great example. I’ve followed their careers for decades and have seen both of them live numerous times, but his interview was as fresh as the first time I was exposed to their amazing talents.

Here’s how Tunis begins this post:

“It was a dark and stormy night…

Seriously, it was. Outside the Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts in Raleigh, Hurricane Helene was beginning to make her devastating presence felt. While her full wrath went West of the city, the North Carolina capitol region was still hammered by rain, wind and unavoidable unease.

Inside, the Center, though, the mood was considerably lighter. There, two members of the Bluegrass Hall of Fame stood onstage. One, Sam Bush, had just inducted the other, Jerry Douglas. It was fitting as Bush himself entered the Hall of Fame last year. But what made this ceremony seem so, well, obvious was the fact the two artists have spent the last five decades redefining the string music vocabulary that has long been the DNA of bluegrass and applying it to all kinds of multi-genre settings. Some were rooted in tradition, others explored wildly progressive terrain. The cool aspect to all this, though, is how many of these half-century adventures the two have explored together – with Douglas on dobro and Bush on mandolin and fiddle – as bandmates onstage or as studio players on the same recording sessions.”

These two string-music giants then swap stories and memories that reminds me of why I subscribe to The Musical Box.

And just recently, Walter has also had pieces on Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson, and Ricky Skaggs.

Do yourself a favor. Listen to Sam and Jerry play Bob Dylan’s Girl from the North Country and then mosey over and read the piece by Walter Tunis. There’s nary a false note to be found.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photos of Jerry Douglas (left) and Sam Bush (right) taken at Merlefest by DJB