CMT Blog: Archive

If you like bluegrass music, I have a couple of recommendations for you. The first is Marty Raybon & Full Circle's This That and the Other. You may recognize Raybon as the engaging lead singer of Shenandoah, who had a batch of popular country singles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These days he's pursuing bluegrass music full time yet the new material doesn't stray far from Shenandoah hits like "Next to You, Next to Me" or "If Bubba Can Dance (I Can Too)." If you like those tunes, try "Everybody's Reaching (Out for Someone)" and "Luzianna Man." You'll be pleased to discover that his voice still sparkles.

Brandon Rickman is currently the lead singer for Lonesome River Band, although his first solo album, Young Man, Old Soul, veers more toward the singer-songwriter side of things. Indeed, you can tell he wrote the gritty "Always Have, Always Will" with the SteelDrivers' Chris Stapleton. Like Ronnie Bowman before him, you get the feeling that Rickman could evolve into an in-demand songwriter in Nashville.

Finally, if you're looking for one of the sweetest singers in bluegrass history, try Mac Wiseman's Bluegrass Hits and Heartsongs, an introductory collection of 1970s recordings that he made quickly to supplement his catalog after his previous label was snapped up in a merger. (Yeah, that happened in the 1970s, too.) Selections like "Don't Let Your Sweet Love Die" and "When the Roses Bloom Again" are classics in the genre, and now that we're in festival season, you're likely to hear them all summer long.