Ghost Of Bill Monroe Welcomes The Sabbath Queen

Hunkered at home with his Martin D28 guitar one Blursday evening during the lockdown depths of the Covid-19 pandemic, David Sasso heard familiar melodies come out a new way.

Fast forward to May 2023: Sasso returned home to debut a bluegrass take on a traditional Jewish prayer service, with an album of said music about to drop.

Sasso, a classically trained composer who records and performs bluegrass music in New Haven, doesn’t remember the exact date when that melodic inspiration hit. He certainly doesn’t remember which day of the week it was; all days were Blursdays then.

He does remember that he suddenly started playing a bluegrass version of ​“Lekha Dodi,” the climactic psalm in a series of prayers sung at Kabbalat Shabbat. That’s the spiritually uplifting Friday night service at which Jews ascend to the timeless otherworldly Sabbath realm in a tradition that began with 16th century mystics reciting the liturgy in Safed (Tzfat) at sundown to welcome the Shabbat ​“Queen.”

Within 90 minutes, he had eight such reworkings of the the liturgy and other prayers associated with Friday evening recorded on his phone.

“I realized something was happening,” Sasso recalled in an interview this week on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program. ​“But who knew where it would go?”

Sasso has lived with ​“Lekha Dodi” and the rest of the service since as long as he could remember. He attended Kabbalat Shabbat beginning as a child growing up in Indianapolis. He accompanied his parents Dennis and Sandy Sasso to services at Congregation Beth-El Zedeck — where they served as co-rabbis.

“The Jewish music I heard as a child inspired me to become a musician,” he said.

After that initial Blursday burst, Sasso kept working on the songs. When pandemic restrictions began easing, he shared them with fellow congregants at Kabbalat Shabbat services at Temple Emmanuel in Orange.

When he had the pieces in shape, he enlisted Boston-based bluegrass quartet Jacob’s Ladder to record the music with him. They recorded seven of the pieces in February at Dimension Sound Studios in Boston. The resulting album, Joy and Delight/ Sasson v’Simcha, will be released in streaming and CD formats on June 9. (Click here to pre-order.)

To debut the music, Sasso decided to bring it home. Jacob’s Ladder accompanied him back to Indianapolis, to Beth-El Zedeck, to perform the music at Kabbalat Shabbat services this past Friday night.

It wasn’t just any Friday night. It was the beginning of a weekend-long celebration in honor of his father’s retirement as the congregation’s rabbi. (Sasso’s mother had already retired from the pulpit.)

It felt like a double homecoming for Sasso: Not only was he returning to the shul of his roots; he was bringing bluegrass Kabbalat Shabbat back to the geographical roots of bluegrass, the state where Bill Monroe honed his licks a century earlier. (Monroe, considered one of the founding fathers of bluegrass, was born and raised in Kentucky, but worked at an oil refinery with his brother Charlie in Indiana before the Monroe Brothers hit it big as country music stars.) And by blending bluegrass with centuries-old prayers, Sasso was continuing a Jewish tradition of evolving liturgy by incorporating itinerant texts with local music.

Sasso also follows in the musical footsteps of a generation of Jewish musicians like David Grisman and Andy Statman who have mined traditional Askenazic melodies to add to the bluegrass mix, mirroring the revival and reinvention of klezmer.

Five hundred congregants filled the sanctuary. Sasso had jitters before the service began. ​“This was my home synagogue. When you know everybody out there since when you were 3, it’s different” from other performances, he said.

But it was also home. So the jitters dissipated as the music began and the Sabbath Queen descended.

Click on the video to watch the full conversation on WNHH FM’s​“Dateline New Haven” with David Sasso. Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of​“Dateline.”