Tag Archives: IBMA

AJ Lee: Back To The Roots As A Flower Blooms

Top photo by Snap Jackson. Band photo from Natia Cinco.

I originally wrote this spotlight on AJ Lee back on June 15, 2017 when I was publishing my weekly Broadside columns over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music website. Jumping forward seven years, and No Dep has made AJ Lee and Blue Summit their Spotlight band for July 2024. This band is on the verge of exploding and their new album City of Glass will be released  July 19th on Signature Sounds. And now…hop in the Wayback Machine with me. 

When I reached out to Betsy Riger-Lee and asked her to give me a rough idea of how many views her daughter AJ Lee has had on YouTube, she came back to me in three hours and wrote: “As of this moment, it’s 3,358,333.” That right there tells you she’s one proud mama. It’s a simple fact that there are many musicians who have been working on the road and putting out albums for decades who have yet to hit that particular milestone, so a few months ago when I came across this young woman from Northern California singing the Gram Parson classic “Hickory Wind” with The Tuttles, a family of stellar musicians, I took notice.

 

That clip, which accounts for about ten percent of that huge number mentioned above, was uploaded six years ago, when AJ was only 13. She gives credit to Jack Tuttle, who wisely invited her to join up with him and his kids in their band, for introducing her to that song and many others. And when they uploaded that song, AJ had already been performing in front of audiences for nine years. Not a misprint.

“The initial event to my introduction to bluegrass happened one night at an open mic at a pizzeria. I was 4 years old, my mom held me up to the mic, and I sang the song ‘Angel Band.’ There was a man named Frank Solivan in the audience who happened to be the director of a program called Kids On Bluegrass for the California Bluegrass Association (CBA). I stuck with the program every year for several years after that. That’s also how I got into other bluegrass events — through the CBA. Throughout this whole process, I was never forced to play music, but always encouraged and inspired. It helped immensely being around kids my own age, and to this day I am great friends with a lot of the kids who came out of the CBA kids programs. Having a sense of community and belonging through music is something greater than anything I could have asked for.”

Want to hear what this eight-year-old girl sounded like onstage in 2006?

 

I’m going to let mom tell this part of AJ’s story:

“AJ was invited to be part of the first Kids on Bluegrass Fanfest in Nashville, where International Bluegrass Music Association’s ‘World of Bluegrass’ was taking place annually at that time. It was a pilot program that originally began in California, that has now become the standard for talented bluegrass children to meet up each year. AJ shared that stage with Molly Cherryholmes, Sarah Jarosz, Sierra Hull, Molly Tuttle, Angelica Grim Doerfel, and a host of many other gifted young female artists. She did that for several more years, and during that run, she was asked to be part of the revision of the ‘Discover Bluegrass’ video that the IBMA created for educational purposes, their intent being to spread the word of this genre of music.”

Author’s prerogative and detour: When Angelica Grim married TJ Doerfel in June of 2008, AJ and Betsy sang a duet of this Richard Thompson song y’all probably know at the wedding. It’s just basically a home video, but one that’s been watched watched over 65,000 times. And while I’m not exactly sure why, I keep coming back to this one over and over. Here’s a secret … somewhere about two minutes into it I can’t keep from crying.

 

AJ grew up in Tracy, an agricultural town that is being suburbanized as the Bay Area population looks for affordable housing in an area with a “Mediterranean climate.” AJ describes herself as preferring the rural lifestyle: “I grew up with horses, chickens, dogs, cats, rats, opossums, lizards, birds, snakes, frogs, quails, sheep … and a turkey. I’ve taken many trips to cities, but the country is where my heart will always stay.”

The family enjoyed the camping lifestyle, especially around the regional bluegrass festivals. It seems that it was the Riger side of the family from whose tree the music fell: AJ’s siblings and other relatives are accomplished players of various degrees and styles. Betsy is an excellent singer, guitarist, and dancer, and taught AJ how to find pitch and use basic techniques for singing. Rodney Lee doesn’t share in this talent pool … or, as AJ puts it: ‘My dad is NOT musical… haha. I’ve been trying to teach him how to play one song on the mandolin for years. I’m sure when pigs fly, my dad will learn how to play ‘Angelina Baker.’”

In 2011, when she was 13, Mother Jones published an interview with AJ titled “Could This Kid Be The Next Alison Krauss?” In addition to the mandolin as her main instrument, AJ plays fiddle, guitar, ukulele, and banjo, and her incredible vocals have earned her the Female Vocalist award for six years from the Northern California Bluegrass Society (NCBS). As the years rolled by she attended a number of music camps through the CBA and NCBS — “great organizations that are very supportive regarding kids and music,’…” she says — and she was playing in a number of band configurations, including The Tuttles with AJ Lee.

In the world of California bluegrass, Jack Tuttle is a legend. For over 30 years he’s taught fiddle, mandolin, banjo, and guitar, developed a solid curriculum, written a dozen instruction books, and put a band together with his daughter Molly and sons Sully and Michael. AJ joined the group in 2008, when she was about 10, and they released their first album two years later. I should note that Molly is making a lot of noise down in Nashville now, where she settled after attending Berklee College of Music, having won the first Hazel Dickens Memorial Scholarship from the Foundation For Bluegrass Music.

By the time AJ was 16,  you can see how she had developed not only strong musical skillsets, but was poised and polished onstage. She also began writing her own music and released her first EP, titled A Song for Noah, and was invited into the studio for The Prava Sessions, a series where “there are no overdubs, there is no Auto-Tune, the sounds aren’t pitch or time corrected with a computer. It’s all real, it’s all live and it only happens once.” As you’ll see, she began to drift away from the traditional bluegrass format.

 

The past couple of years, AJ has been playing locally throughout the Bay Area, and since graduating high school she’s taken some college classes, and is “off and running, away from home, working in the real world of service and people, busking and gigging to help pay rent, as honest and real living goes,” according to Betsy. “If she can handle all that life throws at her, she will probably stay the course with music as a career.”

AJ speaks about following the route Molly Tuttle is taking down in Nashville, but with the logic and reasoning of someone much older than their years, she’s quick to add that “those thoughts are still developing and I’m still trying to figure out what the best path for me to take is. At least in this time in my life.”

Postscript: July 2024

As many already know and many more will soon discover with the release of their new 2024 album City of Glass, AJ Lee and Blue Summit have been slowly bubbling under the radar, honing their craft, writing more and more and touring far beyond the West.  Over the past seven or so years and have had several changes in their lineup. AJ and Sullivan Tuttle have been the two constant members and along with Scott Gates on guitar and vocals, and fiddler Jan Purat they are at their best and growing more popular day after day.

There’s a reason I’ve become fascinated with AJ’s musical journey back in 2017. She grew up with the opportunity to learn and play music in the world of bluegrass, one that has always worked hard to pass the baton down from generation to generation. In the political climate we live in, one party in particular doesn’t  give a damn not only about music, but specifically public funding for any of the arts. In April 2017,  in an open letter to Donald Trump and Congress, the IBMA spoke directly to that point:

“The United States of America cannot afford to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts (“NEA”) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (“NEH”). These two government agencies carry out three highly beneficial missions across our country: preserving and promoting the arts, educating and inspiring children, and expanding commerce through the grants provided by these public endowments.

An important principle of our nation has been to protect and promote our rich artistic and cultural heritage. Bluegrass music, as a core genre of American roots music, was created on American soil as an extension of our country’s working class communities. It is this cultural history, along with exceptional musicianship, that makes this music loved throughout our country today. This is not simply entertainment; it is a vital part of our nation’s identity.”

Amen.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music website.

The Bluegrass Revival: What Americana Music Can Learn

A while back I wrote a column titled “The Aging of the Americana Music Audience,” and expressed concern that as baby boomers get older there may not be a younger crowd to replace them. This topic has been on my mind for years, as I have witnessed it firsthand time and time again at concerts, festivals, and clubs. After seeing 26-year-old award-winning singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist Molly Tuttle play to a crowd largely comprised of folks who could be her grandparents, and also noting that the current Americana Music Association airplay chart lacked diversity in both age and various sub-genres of roots music, I received a lot of feedback. While No Depression has eliminated the ability to post comments, my own Americana and Roots Music Daily page on Facebook lit up with feedback:

Kathy Sands-Boehmer, who has contributed articles on this site and is a concert presenter from the Boston area, shared her insight: “We find the same thing to be true. It doesn’t matter what the age of the artist is … those who support the music are on the more ‘mature’ side. Haven’t been able to crack this nut.”

A folk music fan from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, commented, “I always wonder about the future of these shows in 10 years. Same is true for the local jazz shows I attend. Everyone at these shows appears older than me and I’m in my 60s. Finding the key to attracting a young audience for folk and jazz shows is something that needs to be solved or there won’t be anyone left to attend them.”

And an observation from someone who attended the same Molly Tuttle show I did with a completely different experience: “I am 65 years old. I was at the back of the space and there were younger people and those of all ages. I came to see a guitar slinger (IBMA Guitar Player of the Year for the past two years) and what I saw was a singer-songwriter. This might have a greater appeal to a younger audience but not for me. I was at MerleFest a few weeks previous, and she was one of the main acts I was interested in seeing and she played about the same show. Also, I’m too old for the Mercury Lounge, where you have to stand for the entire time packed like sardines.”

There was a strong consensus that it wasn’t a lack of interest keeping younger people away, but competition from other entertainment options. Gaming, sports, Netflix, cable television, and high ticket prices were cited. Devon Léger, owner of the music marketing company Hearth Music and another No Depression contributor, shared some statistics from Billboard magazine showing that concert attendance is generally growing, including among millennials, but it doesn’t drill down on genres or the type of venues.

Two weeks after my column, Emma John at The Guardian published a story that caught my attention. Titled “Plucked from Obscurity: Why Bluegrass is Making a Comeback,” she gives a deep dive on the genre’s history, politics, geography, cultural aspects, and a change in the audience. The latter gives me hope, and might be applied to the entire Americana genre. She writes:

“Perhaps it’s an issue of geographical constraints — bluegrass’s popularity remains concentrated in a small portion of the southern Appalachian mountains, where the state lines of Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee converge. More likely it has simply been considered unworthy of notice: low art, uncomfortably associated with white redneck culture.

Something is changing, though. Acoustic music, live and unfiltered, is in vogue. America’s hipster generation, in its continual search for authenticity, is chasing roots music back to the country’s earliest string bands, and their sound is being replicated in trendy bars in New York, Los Angeles, and London.”

She also acknowledges both Rhiannon Giddens’ efforts in reclaiming the music’s African-American roots and the work of Bluegrass Pride, a Bay Area group advocating for gays and women “in a musical community that is still overwhelmingly white and male.” John goes further, citing the current crop of performers’ ages and backgrounds that are reaching out and opening up to a new audience:

“A progressive, metropolitan scene is, arguably, securing the music’s future. From the highly trained brilliance of Ivy League graduates such as Brittany Haas to the rollicking rock of stadium-fillers Greensky Bluegrass and Trampled by Turtles, their genre-bending efforts are reaching audiences younger and many hundreds of times larger than anything the traditionalists can hope for.”

A suggestion I’d make to the Americana Music Association is to follow the path of the International Bluegrass Music Association when it comes to youth programs. Their outreach to schools, low-cost membership to those under 17, and the Kids on Bluegrass annual showcases not only have made a difference, but also are replicated by dozens of regional bluegrass organizations. In fact, the abovementioned Brittany Haas was only 8 years old when she became a student of Molly Tuttle’s father, Jack. He is highly active in teaching both kids and adults, and is known as the “Dean of Bay Area Bluegrass.” (More about Jack and the entire Tuttle family here.)

Meanwhile, back on my Facebook page, the responses to John’s article came fast and furious. Here were the first two comments:

“Plucked from obscurity? Bluegrass never went anywhere! Hillbilly music? Hell yes! All you gear heads and technophiles need to pay attention. This is a pure form of American music that does not rely on electronics!”

“Having been a long-time bluegrass fan for 60 years, I’m not a big fan of the new style of bluegrass by these younger bands. They seem to think more is better and try to throw in every note and chord known to man. The old timers knew better. I accepted when Seldom Scene came around and changed the style of bluegrass but I don’t know about this new high tech stuff.”

Yikes. So I guess that there is a group of bluegrass fans who aren’t appreciative of the “youngsters” coming up, nor what they bring to the genre. But there is a crack in the sky and I loved reading these counterpoints that came from three of my page’s followers:

“I was thinking about all of this since you posted that last piece about Molly Tuttle. I went to Winter Wondergrass in Lake Tahoe last March. The crowd was overwhelmingly young, people in their 20s/30s. I was kind of surprised by that, but it seemed like a good sign.”

“Just saw Steep Canyon Rangers, originally a modern version of a classic bluegrass band, formed in a college dorm in North Carolina. Now, nineteen years later, they are a big festival band that has held on to a younger crowd by evolving into prog-grass and now jamgrass rock (rock-based drummer with big sound). Most songs are 6-8 minutes with some vocals at beginning and end and a lot of wild jamming in between.”

“One reason for the changes by younger bands may have to do with trying to stay relevant (i.e., marketable) in a time when so many interesting styles of music are available to consumers for dirt cheap. In addition, they probably grew up playing or listening to rock and other types of music when they were teens and may have a hard time playing bluegrass night after night in the traditional way. They need to stay challenged and to experiment.”

Please forgive me if you think that I’m sounding the alarm on a problem that doesn’t exist, but with age comes a tiny bit of wisdom and a whole lot of experience. Musical genres wax and wane in popularity, and sometimes they just simply fade away into obscurity. While American roots music is growing in popularity, it needs new blood on the stage and in the seats in order to thrive and not just survive. At the heart will be a concerted outreach, and we really need people and organizations to drive it.

This was originally posted as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression:The Journal of Roots Music’s website.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

Molly Tuttle: From Her Tweens to Her Twenties

The Tuttles With AJ Lee

Considering that she is only a quarter-century old and just released her first solo album, one might suggest I could be jumping the gun on writing a retrospective of Molly Tuttle’s musical career and highlights. And had she not grown up in the era of the magical time machine also known as YouTube, we might have thought she just landed under a Nashville cabbage patch one day and — poof — a star was born. But this young woman began playing guitar at the age of eight, recorded her first album of duets with her dad at 13, and has won more awards than the number of ants on a Tennessee anthill.

Molly, Michael, and Sullivan Tuttle’s bluegrass version of “El Cumbanchero” was uploaded in 2006 and has been viewed more than 1,750,000 times. And just to see what four additional years of practice and growing up can do to one’s musical skill sets, here is their 2010 version, with Molly moving from guitar to banjo:

Jack Tuttle is a distinguished bluegrass musician, teacher, author, and historian, and he came from a musical family in rural Illinois where he first learned to play guitar at age 5. Migrating to California, he began developing a complete lesson program for fiddle, banjo, mandolin, and guitar and has taught thousands of kids and adults since 1979 from his home base at Gryphon Stringed Instruments in Palo Alto. Known as the “Dean of Bay Area Bluegrass,” he taught his own three children how to play and through the years they’ve been highly active on the festival circuit and at music camps, through the California Bluegrass Association (CBA), Northern California Bluegrass Society (NCBS), and the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA).

For those of us guitar players who’ve been around a while and think we might be pretty proficient, watching Molly Tuttle’s right hand technique is a jaw-dropping experience. It seems to be a hybrid of Merle Travis’ style combined with clawhammer banjo, and the result is stunning. When you add in her abilities as a cross-picking, lightning-fast flatpicker, it’s no surprise that in 2017, Tuttle was named the IBMA’s Guitar Player of the Year, an honor that was repeated the following year. She also won this year’s Americana Music Association’s Instrumentalist of the Year award. In addition to her fretwork virtuosity, she’s an exceptional banjo player, singer, and songwriter. Here’s one she wrote back in her teens.

The first album Tuttle recorded was in 2006, a duet project with her dad titled The Old Apple Tree. Around that time, the IBMA began a program for pickers between ages 4 and 17 called Kids on Bluegrass. Held during the annual World of Bluegrass festival, the kids get to meet up with others for the chance to play and perform together. Tuttle was one of many talented participants, as were Sierra Hull, Sarah Jarosz, Alex Hargreaves, Molly Cherryholmes, and another Californian, a bit younger than Tuttle, named AJ Lee. Here’s Lee, Tuttle, and Angelica Grim with Luke Abbott in 2009 at the Brown Barn Bluegrass Festival in San Martin, California:

Like Tuttle, Lee began studying and performing bluegrass at a very young age. She was about 10 or 11 and attending a CBA event when Jack Tuttle introduced himself to her father, Rodney, and shared that he was working with groups of kids and wondered if Lee might want to join in. That was the genesis of The Tuttles with AJ Lee, featuring Jack on bass and occasional vocals, with the three Tuttle kids and Lee taking the spotlight. Here they are in 2010 at the Strawberry Music Festival at Camp Mather, California. Molly Tuttle is 17 here.

The group released their first self-titled album in 2010, followed by a second release titled Endless Oceans. Lee, whom I’ve written about before, is now 21, plays in the band Blue Summit that also features Sullivan Tuttle on guitar, and has won the Best Female Vocalist award from the Northern California Bluegrass Society seven times. Her mom, Betsy, has told me that “what AJ learned mostly from her work with the Tuttle family was humility among greatness and the ability to play with intent.” While Lee was poised to make the move to Nashville, as Molly Tuttle has done, a year ago, she’s backed off for now, telling me not too long ago that her “heart is in California.”

In 2012, Molly Tuttle had a huge year when she was awarded merit scholarships to the Berklee College of Music in Boston for music and composition as well as the Foundation for Bluegrass Music’s first Hazel Dickens Memorial Scholarship. She won the Chris Austin Songwriting Contest at MerleFest and received both Female Vocalist and Guitar Player awards from the Northern California Bluegrass Society. (The Tuttles with AJ Lee took home the  NCBS’s Bluegrass Band award that year.)

In October of that year, she and her father participated in a duet contest on Prairie Home Companion and won second place. In an article for Bluegrass Today, she wrote:

“I have been listening to Prairie Home Companion since I was a kid, so it was a dream come true to play on the show. I loved seeing how it all comes together. Everyone who worked on the show was so professional, but also really friendly and nice. After the show Garrison invited us all to his house for a party, which was wonderful with lots of good food and people. He led a jam around the piano and asked if I would like to sing a Hazel Dickens song with him, so we sang ‘Won’t You Come and Sing for Me.’ All in all it was such an honor to be on the show and one of the best weekends of my life!”

Over on the Tuttles with AJ Lee website, on the front page it says “We don’t really play together as a band anymore but most of us still do still play music a lot. Thank you for being so supportive of our music over the years. Please keep in touch with us and we hope to see you some time at a show or festival.”

Molly Tuttle is on tour supporting When You’re Ready — you can check the dates on her site. This is the link to AJ and Sully’s Blue Summit site, and if you’d like to learn more about Jack Tuttle and perhaps want to take some lessons, just click on his name. I’ll close this one out with one of Molly’s signature concert tunes, the Townes Van Zandt cover she’s been doing for years. This video is from the family band’s Freight and Salvage gig in Berkeley in 2014 and it’s a barn burner. Great music from fine folks.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.