Tony Rice, Peter Rowan coming to LCHS Saturday

Lincoln County may be one of the most rural counties in all of West Virginia, but that hasn't stopped some of the legends of the music world from visiting. In the last few months the Lincoln County Friends of the Arts Concert Series has brought in great performers such as Dr. Ralph Stanley, Blue Highway, Kathy Mattea, and Loretta Lynn.

This Saturday night, two more music legends will appear in concert in Hamlin when the Peter Rowan - Tony Rice Quartet takes the stage. The concert will be at the Lincoln County High School auditorium, and the show will start at 8 p.m. For more information on tickets, call 304-756-2585.

The Peter Rowan - Tony Rice Quartet have a new CD out on Rounder Records simply called Quartet. Rounding out the band is mandolin player Sharon Gilchrist, and in the last few weeks the band has been auditioning new bass players to take the place of Bryn Davies, who is now touring with Patty Griffin.

Tony Rice is widely known as one of the finest acoustic guitarists in the country, if not the best in the world. His pedigree goes all the way back to watching his father's bluegrass band in California in the 1960s called the Golden State Boys. As Rice grew older he would make music history with his own well-renown albums like Manzanita and Cold On The Shoulder, as well as in bands such as the David Grisman Quintet, the Bluegrass Album Band, and his own Tony Rice Unit.

Peter Rowan has been in the music business since the 1960s as well, and is to be considered a renaissance man of roots music. His career started in the early 1960's when he was invited to join Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Boys. As the late-60's rolled around he was in an early band with David Grisman called Earth Opera, and played with the progressive folk/rock group called Seatrain. In 1976, Rowan was in the groundbreaking outfit called Old and In The Way, which featured the late Jerry Garcia and the late Vassar Clements. Since then his solo career has found him playing everything from reggae to newgrass to cowboy music.

All along the way, Peter Rowan has never strayed too far away from his bluegrass music roots, and he is very happy with this new album.

"We were in one place, for a specific period of time, with one engineer. That's a big difference from the last one," Rowan said about Quartet. "The last one was three different studios at different times, with three different engineers. On this one, Billy Wolf, who mixed and mastered the last one, was the engineer from start to finish. So, I think the presence and the sound quality is very incandescent."

The band has put a new take on a few older standards on Quartet, including a seven-minute reworking of the Old and In The Way classic, "Midnight Moonlight."

"Well, that was Tony's idea. Tony was a lot more involved in this one, " Rowan said. "Tony was boss of that song. He set the tempo. He also played the opening riff the way it's supposed to be played. Most people play it based on (Jerry) Garcia's banjo part, which was a counterpart to the melodic riff. Garcia was playing a counterpart and most people think that is the riff, but the actual riff is what Tony is playing on the new cut. Tony musically defines some of these songs. Basically he steals a lot of what I try and do and plays it right, as far as what I consider right. He just puts something on it that's got a lot of drive. Historically it is important to hear that because in bluegrass, if people ever want to refer to what 'Midnight Moonlight' is supposed to be, they can go to this recording and that's about it. The Old and In The Way version was the song for sure, but we were learning as we did it. Tony and I have done it for eight years, and the way he plays that riff, to me, just defines the whole beginning of the tune. Then, of course, the solo section, he just bit into that and eats that up."

For Rowan, performing next to one of the great guitarists in history is not lost on him.

"I've been so lucky to have worked with everybody that I've worked with," Rowan said. "Finally, working with this guitarist, and Tony's singing I always loved to, but as far as a master guitarist, there is none other in the bluegrass world right now. Maybe in the world, you know? Tony is going to be featured on an Alison Krauss tour in April and May, and rightfully so. They are going to record him and film him, and they should because life is short. Tony is at the peak of his powers. He is always moving into the deeper aspects of music."

When one talks music with Peter Rowan, you soon realize that the conversation could go anywhere. His insights into the Father of Bluegrass, Bill Monroe, are one example.

"Well, he was a very quiet man. He wasn't very talkative," Rowan said of Monroe. "Ralph Rinzler, who was Doc Watson's manager and Bill Monroe's manager, grew up in New Jersey and had a vast view of things. He had an uncle that taught him the Greek myths, and he said that when he first heard old time music and he heard Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley, he thought he was hearing this ancient music that his uncle had taught him about. So, you get this sensibility from an educated point of view of a much vaster spectrum of associations.

"When Rinzler heard Bill Monroe, he thought he had discovered Homer. In a way it's true. A Bill Monroe show would be like a Homeric recitation. You would have the story songs. You would have the 'Girl In The Blue Velvet Band,' and the 'Footprints In The Snow.' I mean, part of it was epic poetry, but a lot of it was personal and pastoral poetry. Bill Monroe was a great nature poet. He could evoke nature to make you feel things. 'Footprints In The Snow,' think of that. That is snow, with footprints and no one there. It's kind of Zen like. And then, a song like 'The First Whippoorwill' that talks about birds and crops and trees and flowers blooming and the sound of a bird evoking a mood."

As the conversation continued, Rowan somehow found a way to relate the music of Bill Monroe to the Chinese poets of 14 centuries ago.

"As I got more interested in reading poetry and discovering where these traditions have existed all through the world, I found a real connection, and this sounds crazy, but I found a real connection between Bill Monroe, Carter Stanley, and the Chinese poets of the seventh century," Rowan said. "The T'ang poets were wanderers, but they left a huge body of work because the only education possibility for them was to rise up as a local clerk using the brush and writing things down, and rise up through the government as somebody who was literate. That was it. That was your education. If you could read and write the Chinese writing then you were employable. But, these guys were disaffected by the royal patronage thing. Guys like Li Po and Du Fu. They used their abilities not only to be musicians and sing songs, but they actually wrote records of their lives in poetic work. They had the brush and they had the ink. When I was working with Bill Monroe, his poetry was on pieces of napkins and restaurant menus, all in the little shelves up above the seats in this bus along with Stringbean's old baseball mitt, and baseballs and bats and things, and there was Bill's little shoebox of poetic things."