Claire Lynch

By Larry Nager

Bluegrass’ original singersongwriter was always proud of what he called his “true songs.”  Bill Monroe packed a lot of his life into his music, whether it was the Blue Grass Boys’ inside joke, “Heavy Traffic Ahead,” inspired by a road sign near Lester Flatt’s home in sleepy Sparta, Tenn.; his pain at returning to his parents’ house deserted “I’m On My Way Back To The Old Home”; or, more happily and most famously, childhood memories of his musical mentor, “Uncle Pen.”

Claire Lynch and her new album, “Whatcha Gonna Do,” are firmly in that bluegrass tradition, even if the 12 songs’ musical settings include folk, swing and mountain ballads alongside a highlonesome Monroe cover. The singerguitarist’s eclectic streak goes back to her first band, Hickory Wind, started in 1973 with her mandolinplaying boyfriend, Larry Lynch (they married in 1976). But “Whatcha Gonna Do” is in the introspective singersongwriter mode of her early idols Joni Mitchell and James Taylor. In fact, there’s no bluegrass banjo until guitarist/banjo picker Jim Hurst picks up his fivestring on the ninth track, Monroe’s “My Florida Sunshine,” which Lynch first heard on an eighttrack tape in the 1970s. She gives it the Full Mon, right down to Jason Thomas’ twin fiddles.

Hurst is back on banjo for the folky “Barbed Wire Boys,” but the album’s only other fivestring is bassist Mark Schatz’s haunting clawhammer accompaniment to “Widow’s Weeds,” one of four songs cowritten by Lynch, and “A Canary’s Song,” by some unknown songwriter named Garth Brooks.

She’s not sure how the purists will respond, but she’s past fretting about it. “I’ve been in bluegrass a long time, so I’ve had plenty of stages of worrying about bluegrass purity,” she says with a laugh that can only be described as silvery. “My initial stages were total ignorance to the fact that people cared whether or not I played pure bluegrass. And then when I found out, I tried to walk the line and have pretty much walked the line for a long time. I just think that at this point in my career, it’s OK to do whatever feels good and I feel that I’m a singersongwriter who comes from bluegrass music, who’s a bluegrass player originally. But I also look at myself as a singersongwriter surrounded by these wonderful musicians.”

Along with guitarist Hurst and bassist Schatz, both twotime IBMA winners on their respective instruments, the Claire Lynch Band is rounded out by fiddlermandolinist Jason Thomas, who has won contests on both instruments all the way from his native Canada down to Florida.

Having that heavy artillery behind her gave Lynch the confidence to make a different kind of CD. “I did this album intentionally, having decided to do just the kind of music I wanted to with the kind of approach I wanted to and no holds barred.” Her attitude is definitely in the bluegrass tradition. After all, if Bill Monroe wasn’t an outlier, he’d have kept Stringbean on banjo and never hired Earl Scruggs. “That’s right,” she says. “People forget that Bill and them guys were bigtime innovators. They were responsible for a huge evolution of music.”

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