George W. Vanderbilt, it is safe to say, could have built a mansion
anywhere he chose, but when he saw the tumbling rivers, primeval forests,
and gentle ridges of the Smoky Mountains, he declared it the most beautiful
place in the world. His sprawling Biltmore House and gardens ushered
in a golden era for the nearby city of Asheville, North Carolina, which
soon found its hilltops adorned with luxurious art deco hotels for vacationing
New Yorkers and Chicagoans. The novelist Thomas Wolfe wrote Look
Homeward Angel about growing up there.
Bryan Sutton also grew up in Asheville, though a bit more recently.
For him, this historic place was more significant for its status as
a magnet city in the bluegrass belt. From the beginning, he was surrounded
by mountain music, from the old-time echoes of Arthur Smith, Riley Puckett,
and Charlie Poole to the classic bluegrass of Flatt and Scruggs and
the Stanley Brothers to acoustic music’s more modern offshoots. Sutton’s
father and grandfather had a band that played local dances. There were
picking parties at least three nights a week, including dusk summertime
jam sessions in Asheville’s main square. Sutton’s grandfather made fiddles
and traded all kinds of stringed instruments. "I was always around
these great-sounding guitars," Sutton recalls. His first instrument
was a 1930s Gibson L-OO.
Today, Sutton is a young-looking 26-year-old with a cherubic face and
slightly pudgy fingers that seem to belie his quicksilver speed on the
fretboard. He is soft-spoken and graciously deferential to the pickers
he learned from in and around his Asheville home. But through the total
immersion of his musical upbringing, along with some far-reaching training
in other styles of music, he has left many of his old teachers behind
and reached the pinnacle of bluegrass guitar. When Tony Rice was sidelined
by a wrist injury last summer, banjoist Béla Fleck and his all-star
band unanimously tapped Sutton to join them on their Tales from the
Acoustic Planet tour. He has held down flatpicking duties on The
Grass Is Blue (Dolly Parton’s foray into bluegrass), Jesse Winchester’s
dynamic and soulful comeback record Gentleman of Leisure, and
the scintillating A Man Must Carry On CD by fiddler/mandolinist
Aubrey Haynie. Sutton can also be heard on country radio, most spectacularly
on the Dixie Chicks’ rapid-fire single "Sin Wagon."
This year, Sutton released his first solo project, Ready to Go,
on Sugar Hill Records. But the album doesn’t make as bold a statement
about Sutton’s newfound prominence in bluegrass music as his live performances
do. Sutton places the acoustic guitar in front of a bluegrass band as
assertively as any player ever has. With the help of a new breed of
dreadnought guitars engineered for volume and attack (see What
They Play), Sutton’s breaks almost never let a note get swallowed
by the banjo and chopping mandolin. He is capable of a fiery inventiveness
across a wide range of acoustic music, and, while it goes without saying
for anyone who saw him during his tenure with Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky
Thunder, he can play astonishingly fast.
Scratching the Surface
As a young guitar player in western North Carolina, Sutton couldn’t
help but be inspired by local legend Doc Watson. "He was the first
guitar player I ever saw live who was doing what I was trying to do,"
says Sutton, echoing countless other pickers who came of age in the
1970s. "I’d never heard anybody flatpick like that. I first saw
him at Maggie Valley when I was about ten years old."
There were important local influences as well. "Growing up, I
was fortunate to know a guy named Dan Lashbrook, who instilled a lot
of thoughts in me about how an acoustic guitar should be placed in a
bluegrass band," says Sutton. "He was always trying to get
more volume out of a guitar with different setups." At the same
time, Sutton studied a number of different guitar styles, including
jazz and classical. The upshot was an awareness of tone and musicality
that often escapes pickers who can spray 16th notes like machine gun
fire. And that is what is capturing the attention of today’s best acoustic
musicians and producers.
"If anybody wants a secret weapon on their record, he’s the guy,"
says Dobro master Jerry Douglas. "He’s a great student, and he’s
a sponge. He listens to a lot of different players and different kinds
of music, and he’s able to adapt to any of them really fast." Indeed
Douglas, who has been playing with Sutton in a new acoustic trio with
Byron House on bass, says he’s seen Sutton’s playing mature dramatically
in just the last year. "We’ve worked acoustically. We’ve worked
plugged in. He played all kinds of different parts on the Jesse Winchester
record we did together. He’s becoming the best all-around acoustic guitarist
in [Nashville]," Douglas says.
Steve Buckingham, producer of Parton’s triumphant bluegrass album released
last fall on Sugar Hill, agrees. He recalls an evening killing time
leading up to the Country Music Association awards with Sutton and mandolinist
Chris Thile, where Sutton began zipping through an early hot jazz standard.
Thile picked up the cue and the two embarked on a spontaneous duet that
left Buckingham astonished. "I started realizing there’s a lot
more to Bryan than people have seen if they’ve only seen him out playing
with the bluegrass band," says Buckingham. Sutton’s versatility
and on-the-fly creativity has even led Buckingham to recommend him for
Los Angeles studio work far outside the bluegrass vein.
Kentucky Thunder
Sutton never was a glutton for contests. He won a competition at Fiddler’s
Grove one year but scratched plans to go to the nationals at Winfield,
Kansas, after he got mononucleosis. Instead, he became increasingly
serious about studying jazz and classical guitar, discovering unexpected
lessons for his bluegrass playing in those diverse styles. "There’s
so much physical conditioning that you get from classical in the left
and right hand," he says. "It’s so important to anybody trying
to flatpick—that extra little bit of proficiency." Sutton
came to admire players "who look like they’re just comfortable"
when they’re performing, and you can see it in his on-stage poise today.
He may be smoking along at 135 beats per minute, but he betrays very
little wasted motion.
Feeding off the camaraderie of the Asheville music scene, he began
to nurture the idea of playing for a living. "My mother always
tried to encourage me to have a plan B, but I never did," he says
wistfully. Sutton’s idea was to round out his jazz training at the University
of North Carolina at Asheville and then enroll at the Berklee College
of Music in Boston. He was a senior in high school. "Then I got
a call for a session," he says, and the offers have not let up
since.
The next few years were spent buffing up all the instruments in his
arsenal—from banjo to electric guitar—and working as many
sessions as he could in the region. He took some larks too. He played
acoustic guitar, fiddle, and banjo for a Knoxville heavy metal band
called Every Mother’s Nightmare that reconfigured itself as a hard-core
hillbilly act. "It was the closest I’ve ever been to stage diving,"
he says. And on the other end of the spectrum was extensive work with
acoustic gospel groups, through which he met bass player Mark Fain.
In 1995, Fain was hired by Ricky Skaggs, then touring as a country act.
In August of that year, when multi-instrumentalist Billy Joe Foster
left the band, Fain paved the way for Sutton to take Foster’s place.
When Skaggs more or less retired from commercial country and reconfigured
his band as a bluegrass act, Sutton was called upon to step up front
as the band’s lead guitarist. "I’d been the utility guy for several
years, so my flatpicking was at best just satisfactory," he says.
"So I found myself woodshedding. I knew what I wanted it to sound
like. I didn’t feel like I was lost musically. But I had to build up
physically and build confidence in soloing—knowing I was going
to find myself on stage with Ricky’s band every night and in special
situations with a lot of heroes of mine. I didn’t want to feel the pressure."
Skaggs’ brand of bluegrass is a heavy, classic, and hard-charging sound
that requires a punchy, precise approach to guitar soloing. "We
pushed each other," Sutton says of Skaggs’ penchant for murderous
tempos. Tunes like "Get Up John" or "Little Maggie"
were highly melodic and easy to solo over. "But a lot of those
really get-after-it banjo numbers in G like ‘Bluegrass Breakdown’ don’t
have a lot of melody to them. I get lost in those things, because it’s
like, ‘What else can I do in the key of G that’s this fast?’" The
aggressiveness of the music, the Bill Monroe muscle approach, appealed
to him. "It’s a raw kind of thing. It doesn’t back down. All the
sweat, blood, and attitude is put out there for you."
The bold sound of Kentucky Thunder secured the band a Grammy Award
for the album Bluegrass Rules! in 1998, and while Sutton stayed
on to record the follow-up Ancient Tones, he left the band and
the road behind in 1999 to settle in Nashville and pursue studio work.
Ready to Go
The networking sense it takes to climb the rungs in the Nashville studio
world seemed to come naturally to the unassuming Sutton. "It’s
like any business," he says. "If you see an opportunity, you
jump at it." Shopping for work is a bit like filling a role in
the studio, he says. "It’s knowing when to lead and when to follow,
when to listen and when to speak." Interacting with other session
players is a political and diplomatic dance. "You can’t come to
Nashville with a hot demo CD and expect work to just pile up at your
front door. It’s a matter of how you interact with other players."
Sutton found himself working on a variety of projects, ranging from
the straight bluegrass of Bobby Hicks’ Fiddle Patch to the gospel
ease of Don Rigsby’s A Vision to the country folk of Hayseed’s
acclaimed Melic. Perhaps the most rewarding collaboration, however,
came when Jerry Douglas pulled him into Dolly Parton’s The Grass
Is Blue. It was a session full of challenges, such as rearranging
the old Blackfoot rock song "Train, Train." "It’s where
our modern influences played a part," Sutton says. "Because
we were able to turn it into something that worked on [a traditional
bluegrass] record." Parton especially liked how Sutton handled
the album’s slower, more lyrical material, and their personal rapport
led to her agreeing to add a cut to Sutton’s own solo album. The resulting
track, a fresh arrangement of Parton’s own "Smoky Mountain Memories,"
is the most spellbinding piece on Ready to Go. "He seems
to know where I’m going," Parton says. "And I love where he’s
headed. We just went out there and started singing. I felt the song
completely differently than I had before. We did it in no time."
The spare, folky tone of the Parton song hints at the variety Sutton
was looking for when he began putting songs together for his CD, though
launching the project with a bluegrass barn burner was an easy call.
He’d been fooling around with what became the A section of "Decision
at Glady Fork" (transcribed on page XX) for some time. The deadline
of the album prodded him to round it out, along with four other instrumentals,
including the pleasantly archaic "Highland Rim," the lyrical
"Walk among the Woods," and the bright, melodic "Grover
Glen." Sutton’s father Jerry joins him on second guitar for a medley
of fiddle tunes, and there are some unexpected borrowings, including
Jeff White’s rendition of U2’s gospel tune "When Love Comes to
Town."
The record profits from the many relationships Sutton has made in Nashville,
with fine performances from Dobro player Rob Ickes, banjoist Ron Block,
and vocalists White and Sonya Isaacs. But the only musician on every
one of the band-based tracks is Aubrey Haynie. Sutton and Haynie are
the same age. Both are nurturing young families and Nashville studio
careers. And both set the standard for their generation of bluegrass
musicians. They are collaborators and friends, and it’s clear that they
push each other in new directions.
"Shortly after I moved here, I was hanging out with Aubrey during
the week, doing a lot of playing and a lot of listening to the Rosenberg
Trio, John Jorgenson, Django Reinhardt," says Sutton. "So
I started searching for that sound. I took an old Kay archtop I had
and tried different strings, silk and steel and gut, just to see what
I could get. I played an original Selmer down at George Gruhn’s, and
there was the sound. I knew in order for me to get anywhere close to
playing that style and feeling like I was doing it justice, I needed
the right kind of ax."
Sutton acquired a Dupont MD-50, a copy of the Selmer favored by Reinhardt,
and recorded two standards from the Reinhardt/Stéphane Grappelli
repertoire with Haynie for Ready to Go. "Minor Swing"
is slowed down to its original tempo and key of A minor, whereas most
bluegrass audiences are familiar with David Grisman’s faster version
in D minor. "I tried to play an honest Django-style solo, but it
never came off sounding real comfortable," says Sutton. "So
I came back another day and played it the way I feel it, kind of the
hillbilly interpretation of Django." The other tune, "Lady
Be Good," snaps ahead at a brisker tempo and features lovely guitar/violin
interplay.
With a Grammy on the shelf and an album in the can, Sutton has accomplished
more before his 27th birthday than most musicians achieve in a lifetime,
but it’s pointless to speculate about how large a shadow Sutton will
cast in the competitive world of bluegrass flatpicking. What seems clear
is that his goals are more about musical development and cultivating
respect for the traditional music on which he was brought up than thrusting
himself into the limelight. He goes about his work with a quiet professionalism
that eludes a lot of virtuosic players, and that can’t help but contribute
to a long and satisfying career. Perhaps Buckingham said it best when
he urged people not to underestimate Sutton because of his low-key ways.
"Somebody not paying that much attention could overlook him, until
they understand they’ve got a monster musician on their hands."
Excerpted from Acoustic
Guitar magazine, October 2000, No. 94. That issue also contains
a transcription of Sutton's tune "Decision at Glady Fork."
Read about Bryan Sutton's guitars and gear in the What
They Play department.
