Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key: The Return of Alison Krauss & Union Station With Jerry Douglas
Flux Gives Insight Into Arcadia and a Preview of the Earl Scruggs Music Festival
Greetings from rain soaked western NC! After a hot and dry July, August has turned down the temperature and deluged us with rain. I think we have gotten at least 8 inches of rain in the past two weeks at my home near Shelby, for example.
Soon we will be looking at long range weather forecasts for what will be in store for us at the 4th annual Earl Scruggs Music Festival in Tryon, NC. Here’s hoping for dry conditions and moderate temps!
Welcome to the newsletter edition of Southern Songs and Stories, with the script and transcript for my new episode on Dobro pioneer Jerry Douglas, who returns to the festival as host for the weekend. Jerry will perform in Alison Krauss & Union Station, The Earls of Leicester, and as guest in the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s set which will draw from their seminal album, Will The Circle Be Unbroken. Jerry Douglas will pop up as a guest on who knows how many other artists’ sets as well, which is the usual for him at Scruggs Fest. As he said in his interview here, “Yeah, I fall in with everybody.”
Coming up are episodes on Jeff Tweedy, Eddie 9V (who recently scored opening slots with ZZ Top), and Andrew Duhon. I will be busy at the Earl Scruggs Music Festival gathering more interviews for future episodes as well as emceeing various stages (now up to four). For those attending, please feel free to say hello! I will be there starting Thursday night, which features free admission, and throughout the next three days of the festival.
Onwards to our episode, which you can hear on podcast platforms everywhere as well:
[“When You Say Nothing At All” by Alison Krauss & Union Station, from Alison Krauss & Union Station Live, continuing as bed]
Consider these two avenues for making a fortune: start a business and build it up, or invest in highly successful businesses. You probably have heard of entrepreneurs like Estee Lauder or Sam Walton, known respectively for their cosmetics and retail empires. Have you heard the name Benjamin Graham? How about Warren Buffet? The former is known as the “father of value investing”; the latter as “the Oracle of Omaha”. Instead of building businesses, their business was picking winners in the stock market.
Now, consider two ways of making your name as a music artist: write your own songs and build your career on that foundation, or invest your talents by interpreting, and building up a portfolio of songs that others wrote. Every bluegrass fan will know the name Bill Monroe, the father of the genre, as well as Bela Fleck, who propelled bluegrass to new worlds in both New Grass Revival and, especially, The Flecktones; both are well known for their original songs as being foundational to their success. Bluegrass fans everywhere will also know of Ricky Skaggs, and Alison Krauss. Their success is also undeniable, but they are not known as songwriters. Like Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffet, they picked a lot of winners on their way to fame, as Alison Krauss did with the song you are hearing now, written by Paul Overstreet and Don Schlitz, “When You Say Nothing At All”. Keith Whitley made it a hit in 1988; Alison Krauss recorded what many consider to be its definitive version in 1995; it hit the charts twice again with Irish artists Frances Black, and then Ronan Keating. Krauss also took songs and made them a hit first herself, like the David Rawlings and Gillian Welch song “New Favorite”, the title track to her album with Union Station in 2001.
The version of “When You Say Nothing At All” playing here is taken from the 2002 double album Alison Krauss & Union Station Live, which features longtime band members Barry Bales on bass and Ron Block on guitar, as well as Jerry Douglas on Dobro. Douglas was not in the band when Alison Krauss first recorded this song, but he has been a part of the band for going on 27 years, which has returned with their first album since 2011, Arcadia. For Jerry Douglas, being a member of Union Station has yielded some remarkable returns: an IBMA award, a gold record, and eight of his fourteen total Grammy awards. Outside of Union Station, he has remained busy with his own albums and the Earls of Leicester, the all star Flatt & Scruggs tribute band that has taken home six IBMA awards and a Grammy since it formed in 2013.
Jerry Douglas will be the host once again at the Earl Scruggs Music Festival in late August 2025, where he will perform with the Earls of Leicester as well as Alison Krauss & Union Station, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and who knows how many artists as their on stage guest. You could call him “The Oracle of Earl”, and here, he speaks with me on a recent video call, where he gives us a preview of Scruggs Fest, plus he details a lot of what went into Alison Krauss & Union Station’s new album Arcadia. We also find out what he believes is the best key for playing bluegrass music.
All that and more, including more music from Jerry Douglas, and Alison Krauss & Union Station, is straight ahead. I am Joe Kendrick, welcoming you to our episode on Jerry Douglas on Southern Songs and Stories.
[SSaS theme song with VO by Joe K]
00:02:21 Joe Kendrick
Jerry Douglas, welcome to WNCW.
00:02:24 Jerry Douglas
Thank you, Sir. It's it's a nice. It's a nicer. To be here.
00:02:28 Joe Kendrick
Very nice to talk to you again in anticipation for your appearance at the Earl Scruggs Music Festival, both with Alison Krauss and Union Station, and also as your role as a host of the festival ambassador. What? Whatever you might call it.
00:02:43 Jerry Douglas
Yeah, playing with the cast of thousands. Yeah. Yeah, the Earls. Yeah. I fall in with everybody. I mean, I I know practically everybody that comes there, and I've either recorded with him or been on stage with them before. So.
00:02:46 Joe Kendrick
Yes. And the Earls.
00:02:58 Jerry Douglas
Yeah, I'm. I'm it's a pretty good chance I'll be on stage a few times.
00:03:04 Joe Kendrick
Well, we wouldn't. We wouldn't take anything less. I mean we, we want our Jerry Douglas we.
00:03:09 Jerry Douglas
Well. And you know that it's going to be trouble next year because I don't know. What the Allison, what? The acres thing is going to be next year. So and we are going back out next year, so. I don't know what's up with Scruggs weekend, but I'm hoping crossed fingers crossed. That I can be. So.
00:03:33 Joe Kendrick
Alison Krauss and Union stations making it beyond 2025. I mean, 73 dates this year. You've already got 2026 in sight.
00:03:41 Jerry Douglas
We do, yeah. And probably just as many dates we're going to try to hit everything we can.
This is. That's the been the plan all along was to make a couple of records and go out and Tour tour tour. We just and we're having a blast. Ohh man, it sounds good. Really good.
00:04:00 Joe Kendrick
Well, it's the first time you've been out with Alison Krauss & Union Station in a little while, and a lot longer since the last record, so you've got both in 2025. How's all that been going?
00:04:10 Jerry Douglas
It's really going great. We've been, we've been all over the place and this is the second or third leg of the tour that ends in October. But no, it's it's going great. Russell, Russell Moore is just killing it. And Stuart Duncan's out with us too. And it's good. It's really fun. We're having a blast. Sounds like AKUS. Totally! It, it all came right back. It's fine.
00:04:41 Joe Kendrick
Can you give us any preview of what might come our way musically at Earl Scruggs?
00:04:48 Jerry Douglas
Besides AKUS, besides AKUS. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. The Dirt Band's coming. Dirt Band’s coming on Sunday. We're gonna do. We're gonna recapture Circle 1. The big record, you know, it was. It was a huge landmark record for them, for bluegrass, for, for everybody that happened, you know, in the early 70s. But we're going to recreate that with, you know, Sam's there. And Trey Hensley's gonna be singing, Shawn. Shawn Camp. You know, it's gonna. It's the Dirt Band. Let's I I put, I put a thing together for them last year. For the 50th anniversary of that record, and we're going to sort of recreate the recreation that we did in Nashville, but it's a blast. It's fun and everybody, everybody gets a turn. It's a lot of people on stage.
[“Nashville Blues” by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, from Will the Circle Be Unbroken, excerpt]
Speaking of Earl Scruggs, and Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, I wonder if Jeff Hanna, Jimmie Fadden and the band will play this one, “Nashville Blues”, an Earl Scruggs original, taken here from Will the Circle Be Unbroken, the watershed album that Jerry Douglas referred to here by its shorthand, Circle 1. Norman Blake played dobro on that version, and he was joined by Earl Scruggs on lead banjo, former and founding Dirt Band member John McCuen joining in on banjo, with Jeff Hanna on washboard, Jimmie Fadden on harmonica, Vassar Clements on fiddle, Randy Scruggs on guitar, and Junior Huskey on bass.
As our conversation went on, I asked Jerry about Alison Krauss & Union Station’s first album in 14 years, Arcadia, specifically its thematic foundation. The word arcadia can be interpreted in a couple of ways: as a place of peace and serenity, which is rooted in Greek mythology, but also with a darker connotation. Alison Krauss is quoted as saying that the album's theme is "the good old days when times were bad" and she goes on to say that it was inspired by the aesthetic of Norman Rockwell's paintings, which provide an uplifting vibe for bluegrass tunes. I asked Jerry Douglas how these two extremes co-exist in the same record.
00:09:14 Jerry Douglas
Yes, Arcadia, when I think of the word Arcadia, it it reminds it conjures. Up a a. A place to me, exactly as you said. It's so almost utopian. In society, as in everything's nice, everybody gets along, but then there is the darker side and and. And as there is, you know, to almost anything, if you dig, you can find the darker side. But.
Yeah, we, there's a song on there that came from a poem called “The Hangman”. So that, that would, I'd say be our darker side. You know, that's about as dark as this record gets. There's a there's a surprise on the next record. There's an extension of “The Hangman. There's there's more to it than we didn't tell the whole story on the first record. There's more to it on the second record and it we approach it differently and things like that, but. But the songs. Yeah, the songs.
The songs are not happy, you know, and as Allison says, you know, if if you leave, if you leave this concert happy, we haven't done our job. You know, she she likes the darker side of things. You know, the sadder side of things because that that because I think because then that after that. You know there's nothing but up. There's no place to go but up, and that's what we're all looking forward to. That I think that kind of sums up the the record it it's it's it's it's not a dark record the the. There are a lot of. There are a lot of string parts on this record, more than usual, but they they serve as backgrounds and sort of. Bring out. Emotions, you know, and this record is very emotional and. Up and down, you know, and and and and Russell singing brought a whole new. Color to the to the palette.
It's it's, it's it's it's you know it's it's it's hard to describe exactly what it is that we do in AKUS that we make we make a lot of really really sad songs sound.
00:11:45 Joe Kendrick
Beautiful!
00:11:47 Jerry Douglas
Beautiful and sometimes, comedy, you know, enters the, enters the scene. She's been hilarious on stage lately, just talking about, she's just coming up with all kinds of stuff, like off top her head. And, you know, and I joined this band, she wanted me to be the emcee and I said Allison, I think they would like to know what you're thinking about. And uh, that's worked. I stand there every night and just go. What is she saying? What? How's this going to turn out? You know, it's like watching Garrison Keillor. You know, bring all of these subjects together. You know, at the end of his show, you know, and tie all these things together. But you see, there's an end to everything, but she, and she finds it. But it's. Her emcee stuff is getting better and better. It's really funny. It's really funny stuff and we have, we're having a great time though on the road. Everybody's, everybody's getting along great and and great crew, really good crew, the sound. I've never heard any many, anybody as many people, say “oh wow, I love the sound of the show,” you know, it's like. Please, they just tell the sound guy. Oh, good job. You know, or or they go away and they go. I couldn't hear, you know, the right side of the stage. Well, you're sitting on the left, but you know.
The whole experience, the whole experience of this Arcadia, you know of, we're kind of, we kind of lived in the lived in. In that place, while we were making the record, everything, everything was nice. Everything was, was comfortable, smooth and then Dan decided to leave. That was a little bit of a weird. That was a. That was a a hiccup. But we got past that and. Man, it's just I think it's a. It's a it's a mixture of things that bluegrass people. Like you know, it's it's, it's not all bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, you know and and just drive it up the wall. Well, there's some of that on there too. We can do that. We just want to show all of these different things that we can do in the ways that we can paint these instruments around that voice. You know, that's th,e that's the. That's the experiment. That's what we got going on.
[“The Hangman” by Alison Krauss & Union Station, from Arcadia, excerpt]
That is a bit of Alison Krauss & Union Station’s “The Hangman,” which is based on a little-known 1951 poem by Maurice Ogden that has been interpreted by some as a parable about the Holocaust. Ever the song collector, Alison Krauss came across “The Hangman” several years ago, and asked her brother, bassist Viktor Krauss, to set it to music.
With its theme of death and mystery, the song is right at home on Arcadia: in the album opener “Looks Like The End Of The Road”, Krauss sings about the end of life, or at least the life the unnamed subject of the song knows; there’s the bright sounding, upbeat but thematically morbid “Richmond On The James”, about a Civil War battle; there is “Forever”, about two lovers parting ways; in “One Ray Of Shine”, the song’s protagonist describes a scene of constant gray skies and a longing to remain near a hollow tree -- you get the idea.
I asked Jerry Douglas about the ever present tragic themes in bluegrass, and if that is the go-to theme for the genre, as well as songs in minor keys:
00:15:36 Jerry Douglas
Well, we, we. Gravitate there because there's so much more information in a minor in a minor key, I think that that that trips your trigger, you know the, it can send you in a in a completely different direction, a minor chord, and and it's it's it's strange but true.
And you know, there are. There are, there's the triad, which is a a straight, you know, no minor just, you, “Ba Da Dah!”, which was the more or less the, the sound, the notes of war, you know. But they would play right before the charge. You know, that kind of stuff. So we so we stay on the so we stay in the negative in the, in the in the minor key I think we can get more out of it and, and it seems like it a whole lot more people make it through the fray. You know, but we can, we can. We can lay down some slam grass too. You know. It it there's, we we know how we've we've all been in those bands and been there before and, and it's really fun and but I love how much, how much room there is and how much information there is in. And some of these songs that we're doing, you know, B minor is my favorite key.
00:16:59
Hmm.
00:17:00 Jerry Douglas
Well, and we we're doing a few in B minor. So I'm very happy and and it's just a beautiful place to start out of and go and, and to write a song. I think it's a great place and it seems like that. Female singers, male singers, everybody's comfortable in B minor, so everything is right with the world.
00:17:25 Joe Kendrick
With your playing, what is different with you in Alison Krauss and Union Station versus you in other contexts? How do you play differently here than there?
00:17:35 Jerry Douglas
I'm, I'm playing here. I'm, I'm a ,I'm a support guy. You know, I like. I like being in that position too, because it gives me a chance to, to, to mess with the vocals, you know, and support the vocals more and. I'd say that I play more around her. I go off of her and I also give her, give her markers, you know, the next note, the next major note. You know, I might land on that to just to guide her a little bit and I might. Like you know, something behind her that sounds like another voice or a harmony, but it's just that dobro sliding around back there and it, but it it it gives the it, gives you the impression of another voice. You know dobro, it's such a it's such a great instrument for that and it, mean it for for painting, you know and supporting the lyric you know and what the what the lyric is about what the song is about. You know, setting the mood, you can you can conjure up the sound with the with the dobro. That's that's it's different than any other instrument other than I'd say maybe the the violin, the fiddle.
You know, but no frets. We can move the note. We can make it sing, you know, without crossing a fret, you know. Hear any, any separation in notes and. It's it's a, it's it's really a moving. A kind of situation to be in, to be on stage and tend and to hear that voice and to sort of like, I always describe it as painting around it, you know, to kind of kind of create a pic. Picture. For people to hear a Sonic picture and and and that's that. That's everything to me is creating something to go around this song, you know, to give it an aura of some kind. And. It doesn't matter if it's a fast song or if it's a slow song. I'm gonna play something that's gonna move it along, you know? Not, not hold it in its place, but keep it moving. That's that's the. That's how I'm gonna. That's how I play a little bit different in this band than I normally would.
You know, I'm always I'm a band guy, so I like. I love supporting other musicians. I listen to their solos and I react to their solos, you know, and rhythmically or, you know, throw something at them, you know, an answer to what they've just thrown out and and to. Continue that idea of whatever that you know, if it's, if it's an instrumental, whatever the last thing I hear them play is probably the theme that I'll take off on in the front of my solo, and then I'll go off on my own on my own. But. I, I, I love just, you know, making the instruments all as close to being one thing as possible, you know, and, and creating a picture out of those things. And that translates to, you know, to what you hear and and and and it's. And it's always so amazing. To hear a record, but they're actually watched somebody plan it. You know that that extra sense of sight. That it just it pulls everything together, it it makes you, it makes it easier for you to understand. That, you know, the music goes along with the words. You know it doesn't. You know, some nobody starts taking a, a bebop solo in the middle of a really sad, poignant number.
Well, you know, you just have to, you have to. Just kind of get in there and you know, get behind the curtain and see what uh levers you can pull to make things sound a little different.
[“One Ray Of Shine” by Alison Krauss & Union Station, from Arcadia, continuing as bed]
Wrapping up this episode with the aforementioned song “One Ray Of Shine” by Alison Krauss & Union Station, a song which prominently features Jerry Douglas’ Dobro adding, as he described, the harmony voice and a sonic picture to the mix.
This is the second time we have featured Jerry Douglas in this series: the first was in 2021 in the episode titled “It’s Always Roots Music 12 O’Clock With Jerry Douglas”. And mention of Jerry Douglas is as widespread in other episodes of this podcast as his Dobro playing is throughout bluegrass music and beyond.
Thank you for listening, and we hope you enjoyed your time here. You can check out over 150 episodes of Southern Songs and Stories anytime for free anywhere you find podcasts, and at the website southernsongsandstories.com, where there are many more articles and photos to go along with those episodes.
Drop me a line at southersongsandstories@gmail.com where I welcome your thoughts and comments, and you can follow us on social media: @southstories on Instagram, at Southern Songs and Stories on Facebook, and now on Substack, where you can read the scripts and transcripts of these podcasts, and get updates on what we are doing and planning in our quest to explore and celebrate the unfolding history and culture of music rooted in the American South, and going beyond to the styles and artists that it inspired and informed.
This series is a part of the lineup of both public radio WNCW and Osiris Media, with all of the Osiris shows available at osirispod.com. You can also hear new episodes on Bluegrass Planet Radio at bluegrassplanetradio.com. Thanks to Jaclyn Anthony for producing the radio adaptations of this series on public radio WNCW, where we worked with Joshua Meng who wrote and performed our theme songs. I am your host and producer Joe Kendrick, and this is Southern Songs and Stories: the music of the South and the artists who make it.
Epilogue:
00:21:46 Jerry Douglas
Thanks, man. It's good to talk to you too. I don't get to see you guys enough. I'm, I hear you a lot. We anytime we're, we're in Carolina or anywhere close we try to dial you in because you guys are the lifeblood of the, of the civilization as we know it. You know I and I always think of North Carolina especially western North Carolina as the place where I think bluegrass music really started. You know, Bill Monroe. I give him everything you know. He, he, he tried everything. He tried accordions, he tried everything. But when Earl Scruggs stepped in, that's when the music started. That's when, that's when the, that's when the celebration began. You know, we got this new kind of music, we can do anything we want to with it. We got this guy that can fly 150 miles an hour with this banjo. You won't believe it. You won't. You never heard anything like this and. He delivered, you know, and that's all we're all trying to do. We're all. We're all out there trying to be your Earl Scruggs. We are not Earl Scruggs. Earl Scruggs came along at a time in, in history when we needed him. You know, I get, I get that guy a lot of credit. I mean, he. He, Bill Monroe had a dream, and Earl Scruggs made it all come true for him.
You know, it's the way I think it.