Mark Bennett
The Tribune-Star
TERRE HAUTE — Terry Eldredge’s musical bucket list just gets more and more interesting.
He’s already shared a microphone and stage with legends George Jones, Dolly Parton and Vince Gill, as well as country hit-maker Dierks Bentley, among others.
Now, he’s checking off another icon — Hank Williams Jr.
Eldredge and his bandmates, The Grascals, are about to release their fourth album, “The Famous Lefty Flynn’s,” with old Bocephus joining them in three-part harmony on a song co-written by the late, great Hank Sr. A few days later, The Grascals will join Hank Jr. on his 2010 Rowdy Friends Tour.
But Eldredge isn’t stopping there. He’d like to sing alongside Merle Haggard, The Eagles and Beyoncé, “just so I could look at her,” he said, laughing.
This guy who grew up across from West Vigo High School thinks big. And with good reason. In six years together, he and The Grascals have become a hit with bluegrass aficionados, big-city critics and fans of other musical genres. They’ve earned a pair of Grammy nominations. It’s hip to like The Grascals.
Their popularity likely will increase this spring. Rounder Records will release their album March 30. Their tour with Williams should further expose The Grascals to crowds unfamiliar with their sound, or that of any other bluegrass band.
“We’re gonna gain a whole lot of fans,” Eldredge said Wednesday by telephone from Nashville, “but bluegrass will, too.”
The Grascals are a six-member group that formed in 2004. Their self-titled 2005 debut album and the 2006 followup “Long List of Heartaches” both received Grammy nominations for Best Bluegrass Album. They’re legit. They harmonize like songbirds, and play their instruments with jazz-caliber musicianship. Eldredge, now 46, started playing in Nashville as a teenager, driving from West Terre Haute to Tennessee with his brothers, Grady and Payton. Eventually, Terry decided to stay.
Today, he’s the lead singer and acoustic guitarist for America’s hottest bluegrass band.
The Boston Globe once gushed, “DJs rhapsodize about The Grascals as though they were the second coming of Bill Monroe. The hype machine is at full throttle, but The Grascals justify every scrap of it … astonishing instrumentalists.”
The aura of Monroe — the Bob Dylan of bluegrass — never leaves The Grascals. In fact, their studio pairing with Hank Williams Jr. comes on a song penned by Monroe and Hank Williams Sr. They wrote “I’m Blue, I’m Lonesome” while standing backstage together in Nashville.
The Grascals wound up recording it with Hank Jr. for their new album, thanks to a business connection. They share the same publicist, and, according to Eldredge, when Williams overheard one of their CDs, he exclaimed, “That’s it — that’s the sound I’ve been trying to get” for a song he’d written 20 years earlier. Soon, The Grascals were in the studio recording that song, “All the Roads Open to My Heart,” with Hank Jr. for his upcoming album. He returned the favor for “I’m Blue, I’m Lonesome,” the penultimate track on The Grascals’ new album.
Williams handled the lead on “I’m Blue,” while Eldredge sang tenor and Grascals singer-bassist Terry Smith took the baritone part.
“Hank came in and just sang the poop out of it,” Eldredge said.
The likely first single from the album, though, has far different, but equally name-dropping roots. The opening track is a cover of The Monkees’ “Last Train to Clarksville.” The band — Eldredge, Smith, singer-guitarist Jamie Johnson, banjo ace Kristin Scott Benson, mandolinist Danny Roberts and fiddler Jeremy Abshire — picked The Monkees’ classic while brainstorming in Eldredge’s living room.
“I think that’s one of the best cuts on the album,” Eldredge said.
In between The Monkees’ and Hank Williams are nine tunes from more traditional bluegrass origins, including some written by The Grascals, themselves. That includes “Satan and Grandma.” They’ve played the song at concerts for years, but stopped introducing it because “people got a weird look on their face, or would go, ‘Say, what?’” Eldredge explained with a chuckle. “Satan and Grandma” actually is a ballad, praising the power of a righteous grandmother. While the title cut — “The Famous Lefty Flynn’s” — is Johnson’s story of a barroom brawler in his Indiana hometown, many of the album’s 12 songs carry spiritual themes.
It closes with the spiritual “Give Me Jesus.”
Hank Jr.’s Rowdy Friends Tour could get interesting.
Eldredge is excited.
They’ve got a big, new bus, painted black and emblazoned with the name of their tour sponsor, Mobil Devac — a motor oil brand. They’ll be calling in nightly to the Midnight Trucking Radio Network to give its listeners updates on their shows. The Grascals even have an RV park named for them in Dothan, Ala., where they’ll play 20 shows a year.
They’re willing to go where no bluegrass band has gone before, just to share its shimmering sound. The Grascals have been doing that since their first gigs backing up Dolly Parton.
“That took us to an audience that never would’ve heard us,” Eldredge said. “That’s what we want to do.”
Mark Bennett can be reached at (812) 231-4377 or mark.bennett@tribstar.com.
