VASSAR CLEMENTS
Vassar Clements (April 25, 1928 – August 16, 2005) was a Grammy Award-winning American jazz, swing, and bluegrass fiddler. Clements has been dubbed the Father of Hillbilly Jazz, an improvisational style that blends and borrows from swing, hot jazz, and bluegrass along with roots also in country and other musical traditions. (More from Wikipedia)
This would be a good time to relate my recent purchase of a one-of-a-kind, three-disc album called Will the Circle be Unbroken (1972). Unlike nearly all of the other rock and country collaborations that I know about, in this case the rockers hand the keys off to country music legends and let them drive. Ostensibly (or even technically) a Nitty Gritty Dirt Band album, Wikipedia calls the album a “collaboration from many famous bluegrass and country-western players, including Roy Acuff, ‘Mother’ Maybelle Carter, Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs, Merle Travis, Pete ‘Oswald’ Kirby, Norman Blake, Jimmy Martin, and others. It also introduced fiddler Vassar Clements to a wider audience.”
(February 2015)
