A few hours before a recent concert, the Dry Branch Fire Squad was on stage for their sound check. Several minutes had already bean spent adjusting the tone of Bill Evans's banjo, when Dry Branch front man Ron Thomason -- the thinking man's redneck -- stepped up to the mike to drawl an accusing question at the sound man: "Are you treating the banjo as if it was a musical instrument?"
But that's exactly what Bill Evans has been doing for the past two decades. In the mid 1980's, as the leading figure in the Charlottesville, Virginia based band Cloud Valley, Bill seemed poised to enter the upper ranks of eclectic banjodom. Although they called themselves "a bluegrass ensemble," Cloud Valley's repertoire ranged far and wide. Bill's banjo, the group's dominant instrumental voice, was handling bluegrass, folk, jazz, and pop, as well as moody tone-poems and five-string showpieces like Cumberland Flats (a multi-modulational version of Cumberland Gap) and a spectacular full-fingerboard rendition of the Clarinet Polka. Who would ever have guessed back then that Bill would wind up with the "aggressively traditional" Dry Branch Fire Squad? Or that his first solo album ("Native and Fine," released last year on Rounder and nominated for Acoustic Instrumental Recording of the Year by the National Association of Independent Record Retailers and Distributors) would consist chiefly of material that fits any purist's definition of bluegrass?
From Bill's own viewpoint, however, his current situation is a logical result of his winding path through life, shaped by his roles as musician, family man, and scholar. Bill's passion for music started in Norfolk, Virginia, when at age eight he became obsessed by the Beatles. Two years later his air guitar gave way to a real instrument, and Roy Clark on "Hee Haw" inspired him to take up the banjo when he was fifteen. Soon he was hanging out at a local music store and picking with a crew of teenagers that included future Country Gazette bass player Bill Smith and future AcuTab entrepreneur John Lawless.
At first Bill's playing reflected the straight-ahead influences of Earl Scruggs and Ralph Stanley, with a touch of Don Stover, but after he entered the University of Virginia in Charlottesville he discovered melodics and set about methodically "cloning" the styles of players like Ben Eldridge, Alan Munde, Courtney Johnson, and Tony Trischka. He put this knowledge to work playing during summer vacations at the Busch Gardens and King's Dominion theme parks, and during his senior year with an Indiana-based group, the Falls City Ramblers. Upon graduation in 1978 (Bill had majored in anthropology, with a concentration in folklore) he decided to make a go of it as a full-time musician. Formed in 1979, Cloud Valley hit its stride in 1981 when Bill and guitarist Charlie Ranck joined up with bassist Missy Raines and mandolinist Steve Smith. In addition to playing the banjo and hammered dulcimer, Bill did most of the arranging, and booked the band. Cloud Valley released a debut album on Outlet in 1982 and a live album on Strictly Country in 1985 (both out of print). When the group dissolved after four years, Bill reassessed his plans and enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley to pursue a doctorate in ethnomusicology. Graduate school -- and starting a family -- left little time for the banjo, although Bill did learn to play the shahkuhachi and koto (Japanese flute and zither) and tabla (Indian drum) as part of his course work. His return to bluegrass came gradually, but when it did, Bill's music was enriched by a deeper understanding of the nature of musical traditions, and of the specific traditions that lurk beneath the surface of bluegrass.
A university teaching position brought Bill back to Charlottesville in 1992, where he played in an informal group with Geoff Huss and Darin Lawrence, two employees of the nearby Stelling Banjo Works. The next summer, Bill's Stelling connection put him in touch with the Dry Branch Fire Squad. In 1994 he moved to Owensboro, Kentucky, to become the associate director of the International Bluegrass Music Museum. That job placed Bill solidly in the music's inner circle, and led indirectly to the Sonny Osborne instructional video that Bill and Museum director Tom Adler facilitated for Homespun Tapes. As a bonus, Owensboro is just thirty-five miles from Rosine, Bill Monroe's birthplace.
Rosine dominates the imagery of "Native and Fine." On the cover Bill sits in the doorway of the old Monroe homeplace, while the CD booklet opens to a panorama of the crowd that gathers regularly in Rosine for open jams and free concerts. The album closes with Midnight in Rosine, a contemplative, neo-Monrovian tune that Bill wrote while still in Berkeley. It's one of five originals, and a fitting conclusion to a project on which Bill -- helped by Jason Carter, Stuart Duncan, David Grier, Missy Raines, and producer Mike Compton -- pays tribute to the roots that nourish his music. The banjo playing tips its hat to Ralph Stanley and Don Reno, as well as newer banjo heroes like Tom Adams and Joe Mullins. An old-time echo can be heard in two voice-banjo duets with fellow Dry Branchers Ron Thomason and Suzanne Thomas.
Bill sees Rosine, with its thriving grassroots music-making, as a "palpable connection to the long tradition of music." Western Kentucky, he points out, was home not only to Monroe but also to country guitar great Merle Travis and, for a time, blues composer W.C. Handy: "It's a microcosm of American music." So moving there is a symbolic homecoming, a return to a musical place that Bill has long inhabited in his imagination and his heart.
Bill and his family are putting down roots in Owensboro. Although he resigned from his museum post last fall to pursue other interests (completing his Ph.D. dissertation, and developing a solo history-of-the-banjo presentation), Bill leaves the door open to possible future involvement with the museum once it irons out its current organizational difficulties. Playing the banjo -- with the Dry Branch Fire Squad, with his friends in Owensboro, and with the "kindred spirits" down in Rosine -- is a regular part of his life once again.
BNL: You just talked about "reconstructing your style" to fit in with the the Dry Branch Fire Squad. What does that involve, besides just playing faster?
BE: Well, in some ways Cloud Valley and Dry Branch are totally different ends of the spectrum. I had always wanted to play in a traditional bluegrass band, but never had gotten the chance. I wanted to explore how I could make my approach to the banjo fit within a traditional band. What I've done is to strip things down to more essential musical elements and, working within roll-based styles, try to come up with an approach to playing the melody that somehow is my own.
I've ended up working with the timing between the rolls, how you hit certain notes within the rolls, and using bends and chokes. A lot of times -- and sometimes these things are not so much aesthetic decisions as physical decisions -- I find it helpful to break the roll at some point in a really fast tune. Usually, that's a good point to do a choke -- say, choking the third string up to the pitch that I'm fretting on the second string. You can go back and forth with that, and you're not really playing a roll pattern. I try to play as simply as possible; the simple approach for this band is the best. I have to rein myself in sometimes.
BNL: Besides being more traditional than Cloud Valley was, the Dry Branch Fire Squad is, well, looser. I mean, in arrangements,