Reflections: Del McCoury

photo: Gary Jared

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In 1963, Del McCoury performed at Nashville’s storied Ryman Auditorium as part of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, beginning a fruitful relationship with the Grand Ole Opry that continues to this day. There was just one caveat—he wasn’t allowed to pick up an instrument.

“I wasn’t in a Nashville local— I was in the musicians union, but they didn’t recognize it in Nashville, and you had to join that local in order to play the Grand Ole Opry. So the first time we played, I couldn’t play the guitar. I could only sing. I didn’t know what to do with my hands,” he says with a laugh, clearly still amused more than 60 years later. “Bill said, ‘When we come off the road, I’ll join you up in this local here.’ And the next time we came back, I could play guitar.”

It’s a late September afternoon and McCoury is at home in Music City. Last November, he marked his 20th anniversary as a member of the Grand Ole Opry with an all-star tribute, where he was fêted by friends and admirers like Sam Bush, Tyler Childers and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, with whom he once recorded Bonnaroo’s official theme song. In a few days, he’ll headline Port Chester, N.Y.’s Capitol Theatre with his long running Del McCoury Band as part of his extended 85th birthday celebration and, right after that, he’ll make a surprise appearance with Lukas Nelson and his sons’ group, The Travelin’ McCourys, at Farm Aid. He is also supporting a new Del McCoury Band release, Songs of Love & Life—a 13-track studio set that boasts a cross genre mix of covers.

“I guess I did have a few things happen recently,” he says humbly, before digging into his new LP. “It’s a scattered process. I don’t have any rhyme or reason—they took the title from a line in a song I did before. I just try to find some songs that I haven’t done and record them. I like a variety of things, and I’ll tell you the hardest thing to find is an up-tempo song.”

Like much of McCoury’s work, Songs of Love & Life is simultaneously traditional and forward-thinking. The singer/guitarist notes that his eldest son, mandolinist Ronnie McCoury, will often send him demos by downtown Nashville songwriters for possible inclusion on their projects.

“Ronnie’s good at arranging the instrumental parts and sings harmony with me,” he says. “He’ll sing lead too, and I’ll jump over to the tenor part. And the fiddle player, Jason Carter, will do the baritone part.”

The new record, which Del and Ronnie produced and released on McCoury Music this past winter, also features left-field takes on songs associated with Kenny Rogers, Roy Orbison and Elvis Presley. Del says that he picked up the Elvis tune while listening to SiriusXM in the car with his wife. “We got tired of the bluegrass channel, so we flipped it over and there was the Elvis channel. That line, ‘If you talk in your sleep, don’t mention my name,’ hit me,” he says. “When I was in high school, he was it for all the kids. But I was already a banjo player by this time, so I really didn’t pay that much attention to Elvis. Now, we sang in church, but I wasn’t really interested in singing. When I heard Earl Scruggs for the first time when I was 11, that did it for me.”

Del considered himself to be a banjo player until he met Monroe, who convinced him to switch over to guitar and vocals. “He needed a guitar player, and I didn’t know if I could do that—I didn’t even own a guitar. I was so immersed in the banjo,” Del says. “But Bill said, ‘You’ll like that a lot better.’ He brought this guitar that he had bought in 1939. All the guys had played it—Clyde Moody, Lester Flatt, Jimmy Martin.”

After he left the Blue Grass Boys following an impactful year-long stretch, McCoury spent much of his career working in the logging industry in Pennsylvania. He continued to play bluegrass on the side—often at weekend festivals—with The Dixie Pals, which included his brother Jerry on bass, but mostly focused on supporting his family. In the 1980s, Ronnie and his younger brother Rob, who plays banjo, both joined their father’s combo and the McCourys relocated to Nashville in the ‘90s. Since then, Del McCoury Band’s lineup has remained remarkably consistent.

During the past 25 years, McCoury has also gradually grown into both bluegrass’ elder statesman and one of the genre’s greatest ambassadors. Del McCoury Band’s 1999 collaboration with Steve Earle, The Mountain, was a pioneering Americana release and their appearance at Phish’s Camp Oswego festival was a pivotal moment for the then-burgeoning jamgrass genre.

“I had no idea how big they were until I got there,” he says, still slightly in awe. “Trey Anastasio thanked us for playing their festival and said, ‘We’d like to do some songs with you—put both bands together. He said, ‘Do you know ‘Blue & Lonesome?’ And I thought, ‘He’s not thinking of the same one I’m thinking of,’ but he was. It turned out we had a lot in common, really. Of course, all music is related somehow. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found that out.”

Del and his sons continue to act as a bridge between generations as well. Molly Tuttle not only appears on Songs of Love & Life but also recently invited Del and Ronnie to sit in with her at the Ryman. And Del helped nurture Old Crow Medicine Show when they were first starting out, after his agent told him that they needed a little boost.

“My wife took pity on them,” he says. “They were eating sandwiches—they couldn’t make enough money to get a room at a hotel, so she’d feed them because we always had food on the bus. She’d cook. I’d give Willie Watson strings because I felt sorry for them, and I was promoting this string deal. And now look at them.”

He also has fond memories of meeting Billy Strings early on, when the guitar phenom and his former mandolin partner, Don Julin, opened for Del and David Grisman at Chicago’s City Winery.

“They said, ‘They’re kind of like you and Dawg,’” Del says. “I was in the green room and could hear people applauding in the middle of the song, so I went out and he was not only singing and playing that guitar, but he was also entertaining. He didn’t have a good guitar back then and he loved Doc Watson, so I gave him an 8×10 picture I had at home.”

And though Del admits that he is too stiff to play the banjo now, he does have fond memories of jamming on his original instrument with Bush not too long ago.

“I surprised myself; I could still play,” he says, before adding with a laugh, “We did an old banjo-fiddle tune, ‘Sally Goodin’, but then, after we did those dates, I never picked it up again. It’s sitting there in the cage.”