The Del McCoury Band 'The Company We Keep' album

“I used to travel forty miles and make seven dollars to play a night of bluegrass,” Del McCoury says. “I just always loved playing, always loved the road.” He earns a little more and travels a little further nowadays, but the essential truth remains: Del McCoury plays and sings because he loves music.

It seems that lots of people love Del McCoury’s music, too. At the age of 66, McCoury is at the height of his game, and has become a major bridge in bringing bluegrass to a wider audience. At McCoury’s shows, college students cheer alongside the fans that have been following McCoury’s music since his very first album. McCoury—along with his band—has now won more International Bluegrass Music Association awards than any other artist, been nominated for three Grammys, and has even seen his first video firmly planted on CMT’s top ten list. He joined the Grand Ole Opry in 2003 and now divides his time between traditional bluegrass festivals and jam gatherings, recently playing with such bands as Phish, Leftover Salmon, and Yonder Mountain String Band. Lately his albums have had a habit of topping the bluegrass charts.

All that is about to explode even bigger with the release of McCoury’s new album, The Company We Keep. “This is the most personal album I’ve ever done,” McCoury says. “It’s an album of really hardcore bluegrass songs.”

The album is packed with tightly-written songs from some of Nashville’s most trusted songwriters, and offers McCoury’s first attempt at cowriting. He shares the credit on three tracks. “I just never had thought of writing with anyone else before,” he says. One of these is his most autobiographical track to date: “Never Grow Up Boy,” written with Harley Allen, on which he sings, “Don’t ever let it be said darlin’/That what I do don’t bring me joy/Climb in the seat beside my Martin/Cause I’m a guitar-picking, bluegrass-singing/Never grow-up boy.” Gary Nicholson’s “Father and Sons” fits in perfectly with its insight into the sometimes rocky and often joyous relationship between fathers and sons, since McCoury shares the stage with his two sons.

One of the songs closest to McCoury’s heart is the stirring gospel number “I Never Knew Life,” which McCoury says “is one of my favorite gospel songs.” McCoury is especially fond of the lyrics on the kiss-off tune “She Can’t Burn Me Now,” and the picking on “Seventh Heaven,” a rousing instrumental number. There is also the expert picking on “Mountain Song,” an ode to Appalachia, and the hard-driving poetry of “Untamed” in which McCoury calls out “Can you hear the beating of my dark wild heart?” against a wild flurry of banjo, fiddle, bass and mandolin. With fourteen songs in all, The Company We Keep manages to cover the whole gamut of bluegrass music while also achieving a masterful sense of unity.

McCoury’s favorite, however, is “Nothin’ Special,” which he loves for a very simple reason. “Well, I like it because we can all sing it together.” McCoury has never minded sharing the spotlight with his bandmates, which may be one of the reasons they’ve managed to stay together for so long. The lineup has been going strong for more than 12 years. McCoury won’t take sole credit for the group’s longevity. “In a band you have to have people who think along the same lines. These are good boys, and we think along the same page.” Among these boys are Ronnie McCoury playing mandolin, Rob McCoury on banjo, Mike Bub plucking bass, and Jason Carter on the fiddle. All of them are recognized as being among the best pickers in the business. One reason McCoury gets along so well with his bandmates is because they respect musical history. “These guys love the people who first played bluegrass music. A lot of the younger pickers don’t respect the old ones as much as these boys do, and I think that makes them better.”

McCoury started out by respecting his elders, too. In 1950 he was an 11 year old boy living on a Pennsylvania dairy farm when he had his first taste of Earl Scruggs. He hasn’t been the same since. “He put me on fire for music,” McCoury says. “Later on, everybody else was crazy about Elvis, but I loved Earl.” McCoury worked in a string of Baltimore honkytonks before signing up as a Bluegrass Boy with Bill Monroe in 1963. But eventually Pennsylvania called him home again and there he turned his attention to raising his family, earning his living in construction and logging while continuing to travel the bluegrass circuit, never straying far from his first love. Through the years he recorded the occasional brilliant album (like 1972’s High On a Mountain), but it wasn’t until 1992 that everything meshed perfectly for McCoury, when he formed the Del McCoury Band. By the mid-90s the group had released three albums that are now gaining momentum as modern classics: Blue Side of Town (1992), Deeper Shade of Blue (1993), and Cold Hard Facts (1996). Suddenly the Del McCoury Band was the toast of the Nashville bluegrass scene and McCoury found himself being an ambassador for the music he has loved all his life.

“I’ve played music forever but it all just seemed to come together in the last ten years or so,” McCoury says. “The thing is, I’ve never changed my style at all. I’ve always done my own thing, always had confidence in myself. I always knew that someone would like my sound.”

McCoury says that new fans of bluegrass are spreading the word about the music. “Young people are just wild about bluegrass. This music has grit and young people like that. The general public hears something real in bluegrass. That’s why it’s more popular than ever, I believe.”

McCoury is also blessed to be one of the few bluegrass artists who has some semblance of control over his musical legacy, a rare feat in any musical genre. Over the last few years McCoury has been patiently reclaiming his rights to old masters and copyrights. He also started his own label in 2003. “That’s a big job,” McCoury says, “but this way I’ll have something to pass onto my kids and grandkids. That’s important.”

In the end, McCoury is protecting the two things he cherishes the most: his family and the gift of music. “I just love to sing,” he says. “Man, this music just really tells it like it is, and I like that.”

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The Del McCoury Band - The Company We Keep