timeline

Sam Bush

The Kentucky mandolinist who helped invent newgrass, carried it through New Grass Revival and decades of sideman and festival work, and in 2022 turned to the songs of his mentor John Hartford.

Origin
Bowling Green, Kentucky, United States
Years active
1963-present
Genres
newgrass, progressive bluegrass
Labels
Flying Fish, Sugar Hill, Ridge Runner, Smithsonian Folkways

A Kentucky mandolin

Charles Samuel Bush was born in Bowling Green, Kentucky, in 1952. He first heard country and bluegrass through his father Charlie's record collection and the Flatt and Scruggs television show. He bought his first mandolin at about eleven and went to his first bluegrass festival, at Roanoke, Virginia, in 1965. He also played fiddle, and as a teenager he won the junior division of the National Oldtime Fiddler's Contest in Weiser, Idaho, three times.

His teacher in those years was the guitarist Wayne Stewart. In 1969 Bush, Stewart and the banjo player Alan Munde recorded the instrumental album Poor Richard's Almanac. In the spring of 1970 the progressive bluegrass of the New Deal String Band impressed him at the Fiddlers Convention in Union Grove, North Carolina. Later that year he moved to Louisville and joined the Bluegrass Alliance.

New Grass Revival

The Bluegrass Alliance became New Grass Revival in the fall of 1971, and Bush was the only original member who stayed. Their first record, The Arrival of the New Grass Revival, came out on Starday in 1972. The band wore long hair and played songs by Jerry Lee Lewis, the Beatles and Bob Marley, which not everyone in bluegrass welcomed. John Cowan joined in 1974, and in 1979 they began backing and opening for Leon Russell. Bela Fleck and Pat Flynn arrived in 1981, and by the mid-1980s the group had moved from Flying Fish to Sugar Hill and then to EMI.

Bush ended the band after Friday Night in America in 1989. His first solo record, Together Again for the First Time, appeared in 1977 and was made with Alan Munde. Late as Usual followed about 1984. In 1989 he also joined Fleck, Jerry Douglas, Mark O'Connor and Edgar Meyer in Strength in Numbers at Telluride, and then spent about five years in Emmylou Harris's Nash Ramblers. New Grass Revival came together again briefly in the winter of 1997 to back Garth Brooks on Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

The Sam Bush Band

In 1995 Bush worked as a sideman for Lyle Lovett and for the Flecktones. He then formed his own band with Cowan and the former Nash Ramblers Jon Randall and Larry Atamanuik. Their first record, Glamour & Grits, came in 1996, and Howlin' at the Moon followed in 1998 with guests including Harris, Fleck and J. D. Crowe.

Telluride has long been his festival, and he is known there as the King of Telluride. The live album Ice Caps: Peaks of Telluride was recorded at the festival and came out in 2000. In April 1992 he joined the Tony Rice All-Stars at the Merle Watson Memorial festival in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, now MerleFest. The set opened with Freeborn Man, with Bush on mandolin and vocals. His later records include King of My World (2004), Laps in Seven (2006), which brought the banjo back to his band in the hands of Scott Vestal, Circles Around Me (2009) and Storyman (2016).

Honors

Bush has received fourteen Grammy nominations and three wins: for At the Ryman with Emmylou Harris, for The Sinister Minister in 1997, and for the Album of the Year award for O Brother, Where Art Thou? in 2002. The International Bluegrass Music Association named him its Mandolin Player of the Year in 1990, 1991, 1992 and 2007.

He entered the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame in 2006 and received a lifetime achievement award for instrumentalists from the Americana Music Association in 2009. In March 2010 Kentucky legislation named Bowling Green the Birthplace of Newgrass and Bush its Father of Newgrass. The International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame inducted him twice, with New Grass Revival in 2020 and as a solo artist in 2023. The documentary Revival: The Sam Bush Story, by Kris Wheeler and Wayne Franklin, won the audience award for best music documentary at the 2015 Nashville Film Festival.

Radio John

In 2022 Bush made Radio John: Songs of John Hartford for Smithsonian Folkways, his first release since Storyman. He met Hartford at Bill Monroe's Bean Blossom festival in 1971, and the record began as demos made at his place in the Florida Panhandle with the local studio owner Donnie Sundal. Lockdown turned it into a solo project in which Bush played nearly every instrument himself. The album reached number two on the US bluegrass chart and brought him a Grammy nomination in 2024.

The title song, Radio John, was the one original on a record of Hartford's songs, and it is the place where Bush's own band joins the solo layering.

Records

Songs

John Hartford, Tony Rice, Bela Fleck, Emmylou Harris, New Grass Revival

Where to go next

Official

Reference

Discography and data

Writing and criticism

Interviews

Live performance archives

Film and video

Fan sites and communities

Sources

  1. Sam Bush, Wikipedia
  2. Sam Bush honors his mentor with Radio John, Folk Alley (2022-11-10)
  3. Radio John: Songs of John Hartford, Bluegrass Today (2022-12-27)
  4. Revival: The Sam Bush Story, Bluegrass Today
  5. Sam Bush, Sam Bush official site
  6. On a Loving Tribute Album, Sam Bush Salutes John Hartford's Songwriting, The Bluegrass Situation (2022-12-05)
  7. Sam Bush, Radio John: Songs of John Hartford, Americana UK (2022-11-21)
  8. Live Review: Sam Bush at Wolf Trap, 10/22/23, Parklife DC (2023-11-06)
  9. New Grass Revival, Wikipedia
  10. Sam Bush, Radio John: Songs of John Hartford, Discogs
  11. Sam Bush, Glamour & Grits, Discogs
  12. Sam Bush, Ice Caps: Peaks of Telluride, No Depression (2000-08-31)
  13. Sam Bush, Radio John, Sam Bush official site