Word: bluegrass
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...least four generations are represented (along with voices from much further in the past): bluegrass patriarch Ralph Stanley, veterans such as Norman Blake and John Hartford, neo-trad practitioners like Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch, and the Munchkin-voiced Peasall Sisters (average age eight and a half). But the years fade away as the artists converge on an old-timey repertoire of sparsely arranged, vocally oriented songs that hark back to a pre-commercial time when singing was as integral an element of people's lives as work, love and religion, all of which it encompassed. This isn't folk...
...Ricky Skaggs. A virtuoso mandolinist and multi-instrumentalist who was playing with Ralph Stanley by the age of 16, Skaggs shared the stage with Monroe when still a child, and has been delivering on that promise ever since. For "Big Mon," Skaggs has reached well beyond the predictable bluegrass circles, and the success of the enterprise is a testament to the unassailable quality of Monroe's craft as much as the contributions of the individual performers...
...Dolly Parton's second fling with bluegrass follows on the clog heels of last year's excellent "The Grass Is Blue," and if it falls a bit short of its predecessor's headlong exhilaration, it still delivers a good helping of the right stuff. Chief among its virtues is the killer band that Parton has mostly retained from the first album, especially the remarkable Jerry Douglas on dobro and Stuart Duncan on fiddle. The ease with which these young veterans propel winners such as "Seven Bridges Road" carries over to and elevates less inspiring selections like Collective Soul's "Shine...
...Bill Monroe was not, by all accounts, a man prone to touchy-feely sentimentality, but were he still with us, it's hard to imagine that the father of bluegrass wouldn't be tickled by these young...
...Still, Dolly's bluegrass incarnation is one of the more exciting makeovers of recent years in country or any other kind of music, and "Little Sparrow" is a valuable addition to one of America's most enduringly vital genres...