Yale President Peter Salovey has finally weighed in on the naming debate for two residential colleges that are sprouting up out of the ground over on Prospect Street: Carter and Ralph Stanley, so named for the bluegrass duo that turned him onto the genre several decades ago.
His tongue-in-cheek suggestion, he noted to an audience of around 700 Thursday night at College Street Music Hall, will not likely gain traction with students, faculty, or community members.
But for Salovey, who performed with the Professors of Bluegrass as the opening act before legends Del McCoury and David Grisman took the stage, the Stanley Brothers represent a musical gift grand enough to belong on two buildings, and then some.
That was the takeaway from Thursday’s three-hour bluegrass concert, geared more toward celebrating the genre’s vibrant legacy than talking about where it has gone since progenitor Bill Monroe started playing in 1939. Both the hometown favorite and bluegrass greats spent time painting a context for their songs, going for audience banter that was part music history lesson, part concert, and entirely enjoyable.
For the Professors of Bluegrass, that took two forms: contextualizing each song — and side note: if you’ve been pining to get your Bernie Sanders fix, just close your eyes and listen to Peter Salvoey sing Joe Maphis’s “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke,” and the voice might sound familiar — and showcasing members like virtuoso Stacy Phillips and Oscar Hills, a MIT-educated psychoanalyst who can play a mean banjo.
Meanwhile, McCoury and Grisman have still very much got it after 50 years of playing. They wove together an intricate and candid history of bluegrass through personal anecdotes. Between songs like “Shackles and Chains” (in video), the two delighted the audience with stories of their friendship, and their own experience playing among gurus of the genre like Monroe, Earl Scruggs, and longtime friend Bill Keith, who died last fall at the age of 75.
Audience members Tim Kane, Adam Christoferson and Adina Bianchi — all drawn by the promise of heartfelt, traditional bluegrass — were all kept at the edge of their seats for most of the show. Within the histories of bluegrass guitar — Lester Flatt, Red Smiley, Jimmy Martin, and others — McCoury talked about his own entry into playing, a transition from banjo that happened when he joined Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys in New York City in the early 1960s. Displaying a series of “runs” by bluegrass greats, he ended with his own, a now-recognized “McCoury run” that Grisman said takes the cake.
“You know it’s really hard to find a really great rhythm bluegrass guitar player,” Grisman said, finishing McCoury’s story up as a few audience members pleaded for another song. “You got banjo, mandolin, fiddle … but behind it all is this guy.”
And then they played, histories flying from their fingertips and sweet, just-so-flinty voices and into the seated crowd. Attendees smiled, their faces shining in the blue and pink light of the hall, opened their mouths, and swallowed those stories whole.
