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.”

New York To Front Porch

That innovation called bluegrass was less than twnety years old when Claire Lutke started playing it in the early 1970s. She’d started on guitar as a kid in her native upstate New York. The Lutke family lived in Kingston, not far south of the town of Woodstock. Claire’s dad Evan worked for IBM and her mom Betty instilled a love of music in her three daughters, although, instead of bluegrass, the family stereo played Broadway show tunes and classic pop standards.

The first music that really caught young Claire’s ear was the 1960s folk revival. “I had two older sisters and the older one was into folk music and she had a guitar. It was a Harmony Fhole, and when she left it on the bed, I’d go and pick it up. We all had a whack at it.” She harmonized informally with sisters Karlyne and Susan and when Claire was 12, her dad took a job in the aerospace industry, relocating the family to Huntsville, Ala. There, she would meet her future husband and change her life, her name and how she played guitar. “I played with my fingers like a folkie, until I started hanging out with Larry Lynch after high school and he handed me a flatpick one day and said, ‘You have to learn how to use this’.” She did, and before long the couple was starting a marriage and a band, Hickory Wind, named for a song Gram Parsons had written when he was in the Byrds.

It was the era of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s “Will The Circle Be Unbroken” album, the “Dueling Banjos” craze, the mainstream success of country rock and backtoroots “wooden music.” Bluegrass was in the midst of a national youth movement the scope of which it would not see again for almost thirty years, when Alison Krauss, Nickel Creek, Yonder Mountain, and O Brother Where Art Thou created another Children’s Crusade.

“It was a really fun time,” Lynch recalls. “It was the time of the ecology movement, as they used to call it. So the fact that we were acoustic and, as John Hartford used to say, ‘Don’t need an amp and don’t plug in,’ we just thought that we were cool doing that, and we were portable and could go anywhere. And it was the music of people our age.” As the band got more serious, they planned their debut LP. That’s when they heard of a more established Hickory Wind band from West Virginia on Chicagobased Flying Fish, a leading roots label of the time. “And we thought, now’s the time to change our name before we do our first record,” Lynch recalls. The Front Porch String Band was born. They made a couple of regionally successful independent LPs, some of which were rereleased on their stillavailable, selftitled Rebel debut, mixing fine originals by Claire (“Hills of Alabam’,” later recorded by Kathy Mattea) with reworked classics (a jamgrass “Wabash Cannonball”) and thoughtful covers (Neal Allen’s “The Singer”). Their name reinforced a group identity, but the sound that leaped out at you was that unmistakable voice. Pure yet powerful, crystalline yet gutsy, Claire’s voice set Front Porch apart from the eclectic newgrass pack. As hot as the picking was, it was her singing that drew the crowds. “That’s just the facts,” Lynch admits. “It’s hard to get around that.”

It soon caused problems within the group, which had started as Larry Lynch’s band. What began as a sort of extended musical honeymoon for the couple soon turned into a business, and then into a source of conflict.  “It was not an easy thing,” Lynch says of trying to balance the roles of bandmembers and life partners. “It was fun and cool at first. And then it turned into more of….oh, how shall I say? All of sudden, there was this competitive feeling. And I just never looked at it that way.”

Raising Kids And GRAMMY® Nominations

In 1982, shortly after that promising Rebel debut, Lynch gave birth to their son Kegan and the Front Porch String Band and their amazing lead singer pretty much disappeared for the rest of the decade. Seven years later, the Lynches had a girl, Christy. “I’ve taken two or three hiatuses from my career, and the first two were really forced, because of children. It was just way too much to do to try to do both. With both parents playing in the band and little ones at home, it was really difficult for us. If we hadn’t had family around us, we would never have been able to do what we did.”

North Alabama is less than two hours’ drive to Nashville and, with some help from John Starling, the former lead singer/guitarist for the Seldom Scene, Claire was able to start making a name for herself as a Nashville songwriter and a backup singer. Claire’s soaring voice can be heard on Linda Ronstadt’s overlooked classic, “Feels Like Home,” as well as Dolly Parton’s GRAMMYwinning “My Grass Is Blue” and “Little Sparrow.” She’s also recorded with her early hero Emmylou Harris, as well as Ralph Stanley. Most recently, she appears on singersongwriter Jesse Winchester’s new CD, “Love Filling Station,” part of a quid pro quo that includes their “Whatcha Gonna Do” duet of Winchester’s soulful “That’s What Makes You Strong.”

As Lynch was raising her family, the mid1980s saw mainstream Nashville undergo a hip roots revival with Ricky Skaggs, Dwight Yoakam, Foster & Lloyd, Rodney Crowell, Vince Gill, Steve Earle, Sweethearts Of The Rodeo and the Desert Rose Band. Lynch had been on the fast track to join them, until she left the race.  “I missed some good opportunities, as far as moving out of bluegrass and into the country music realm. I had children right around the time that I was getting attention from  Nashville.” Lynch sees a positive side effect of those occasional breaks. “As far as the longevity of my bluegrass career, in a way it’s been helpful. I think it’s helped me to continue to generate some interest out there because I haven’t overexposed myself.”

In 1990, the Front Porch String Band returned, and in 1991 released “Lines & Traces” on Rebel. In 1993, Claire released her first inspirational album, “Friends For A Lifetime.” “ But a major turning point came in 1995, when her third solo album, “Moonlighter,” was nominated for a bluegrass GRAMMY. Still backed by the Larry Lynchled Front Porch, there was no denying who was the star. From then on, all albums were released under Claire’s name, which put more pressure on an alreadystrained relationship. Whatever went on behind the scenes, Lynch’s music was moving to another level,  including her 1997 classic, “Silver And Gold,” her second GRAMMYnominated CD. In 1996, “The Front Porch String Band featuring Claire Lynch” was the only contemporary band and sole female voice on Sony’s “Bluegrass” compilation, alongside founding fathers Bill Monroe, Carl Story, Flatt & Scruggs, Reno & Smiley, the Stanley Brothers, the Osborne Brothers, and the Country Gentlemen. It was no surprise when she received the IBMA’s 1997 Female Vocalist Of The Year award.

Starting Over

In 2000, Lynch released “Lovelight,” moving closer to mainstream country. That same year, the Lynches broke up Front Porch for good. Larry would focus on Celtic music and today leads northern Alabama’s Kinvara. Claire began another hiatus, helping teenaged Christy get through high school and trying to save her marriage. In early 2007, after 28 years, the couple split and Claire made a new commitment to music with an album reflecting those changes, the aptly titled “New Day.” And she finally packed her stuff and moved north to Nashville. Of course, as any divorce survivor can tell you, after that first burst of freedom comes the hard question, “What next?”  Or as Lynch poses it on her new album’s title cut, “Whatcha Gonna Do?”

“With the exception of ‘My Florida Sunshine,’ each of the songs on there has something to do with making a choice and living with the consequences. It just fell that way, and then ‘Whatcha Gonna Do’ is just literally about that.” That was also the question she and the band asked before making the album. “We sat down one evening at dinner, the whole band, and we talked about it. Jason and Jim had already been with me for a couple years, since 2005. But Mark had just come off of four years with Nickel Creek, so he had more of an acoustic worldview than I did. And he started talking about that there’s a lot more of an audience out there besides bluegrass, although you’d never want to alienate those people. And Jim and Jason were already thinking that way, so we were all on the same page. “It was like, ‘Well I could do the same thing again, or I could move a little bit into just whatever song I think sounds cool, because look at the versatility here with the musicianship.’ So we decided that we wanted to maybe open our audience up to the singersongwriter world.”That world includes their new agent. “We work with the Roots Agency and they have historically represented folk people like Arlo Guthrie and Richie Havens and a lot of world music. Up until they signed NewFound Road, which they signed in July, we were their only bluegrass act. And what we’ve found is that there are a lot of folk festivals out there that bluegrassers hadn’t really tapped into, but they’re open to having a bluegrass band. Especially because of the variety that we do.”

That variety extends to leading workshops at bluegrass festivals and music camps, where Lynch has been teaching singing, performance and songwriting, helping shape the next generation. But she’s concerned that pop and country’s obsession with the young and pretty seems to be spilling over into bluegrass. “One of the wonderful things that the music industry has lost is allowing players to be good without having to be cover material for People Magazine. We didn’t have the visual media that we do now. I mean, even back in the ‘70s, a lot of those bands whose music we dug, we didn’t get to see ‘em. Maybe a picture here and there, on their album cover, or if they were lucky to make a TV appearance. I’m talking about mainstream rock ‘n’ roll, even. But we were crazy about the music. And all that’s changed. Now everybody is visually in your face.” Sometimes the visual and the musical come together in surprising ways, she adds. “I went out to

California, we played for the CBA (California Bluegrass Association) out there. We taught the camps and then played for the festival. They had a whole community nurturing the young there. It’s amazing the crop they’re raising of kids that can play their fannies off. There was one little gal that could really play the fiddle and do the hulahoop at the same time and she didn’t miss a lick, either. Oh my God! She brought the house down.”      While she’s not adding hulahoop to her show, Lynch remains unafraid to try new things, especially new beginnings. In a career—and a life—that has seen more than its share of starts and stops, she’s become an expert at starting over, of reinventing herself. For an audience going through many of those same sorts of career and personal changes, singersongwriter Lynch is a reassuring voice of experience.

“Starting over, like after a marriage has broken up, or starting a business over, you have to have your goal, your vision. You have to decidedly move on it. I know that sounds really clich1d, but it’s the awesome truth. It’s just deciding what you need to do and then putting your nose to the grindstone and then doing it. It’s just a lot of work. Whether it’s work on your emotions, or work in your office, or work on your instrument, or whatever. It’s just, ‘One day at a time. Push, push, push. Make some progress.’

“If you were to put it in some sort of biblical terms, you know, God didn’t part the waters until his people put their foot in the water. In other words, they had to get wet before he made dry land for them. That’s just sort of an analogy of making big changes in your life. I think you just got to go for it. You got to get wet, baby!”

Larry Nager is a musician, writer and filmmaker based in Nashville. His documentary Bill Monroe: Father of Bluegrass Music is now on DVD.

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