Short Biography
It's tempting to try to summarize dobro master Jerry Douglas's musical impact with numbers: 12 Grammy Awards, 11 Musician of the Year awards from the Academy of Country Music (and three more from the Country Music Association), eight instrumentalist awards from the International Bluegrass Music Association, and over 2,000 instrumental appearances on records by such artists as Paul Simon, Ray Charles, The Chieftains, Elvis Costello and Reba McEntire. The leader of Alison Krauss and Union Station featuring Jerry Douglas (the band often abbreviated as AKUS) offers a pithier description: "He's irreplaceable," Ms. Krauss tells us.
Performing with The Jerry Douglas Band is singer/guitarist John Oates, who is best known as one half of one of rock's most successful duos of all-time, Hall & Oates. Their breakout major hits, "Sara Smile" and "Rich Girl," catapulted them to stardom and were followed by many other hits including "Kiss on my List," "Private Eyes," "Maneater," and "Say it isn't So," to name but a few. They unquestionably became one of the U.S.' top pop-rock groups. As a result, Oates became a sought after producer by other artists, as he worked with Eddie Kendricks, David Ruffin, the Parachute Club, and Chris Sheppard, and performed on recordings by Taj Mahal, Tina B, and Icehouse, among others.
Maura O'Connell is a Grammy Award-nominated Irish singer and actress. O'Connell began her professional musical journey during a six-week tour of America in 1980, as vocalist for the traditionally-based Celtic group De Dannan. The following year, she was featured on the band's landmark album, The Star Spangled Molly, (where she has the lead vocals on four tracks) which became something of a national phenomenon in her homeland.
Her 2009 album, Naked With Friends, is O'Connell's first a cappella album. Guest vocalists include Mary Black, Paul Brady, Moya Brennan, Jerry Douglas, Alison Krauss, Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh, Tim O'Brien, Dolly Parton, Kate Rusby and Darrell Scott.
In-depth Biography
Jerry Douglas is widely renowned as perhaps the finest Dobro player in contemporary acoustic music. His main foundation is bluegrass, but Douglas is an eclectic whose tastes run toward jazz, blues, folk, and straight-ahead country as well, and he's equally capable of appealing to bluegrass aficionados or new agers with a taste for instrumental roots music. What's more, his progressive sensibility as a composer has earned him comparisons to likeminded virtuosos Béla Fleck and David Grisman. Douglas was born in Warren, Ohio in 1956, and began playing the Dobro at age eight with encouragement from his father, who was also a bluegrass musician. By his teen years, Douglas was already a member of his father's band, and his playing was especially influenced by Josh Graves of Flatt & Scruggs' Foggy Mountain Boys. Douglas was discovered at a festival by the Country Gentlemen, who took him on tour with them for the rest of the summer and later brought him into the recording studio. From there, Douglas established himself as a hugely in-demand session musician; during the latter half of the '70s, he worked with the likes of J.D. Crowe & the New South, David Grisman, Ricky Skaggs, Doyle Lawson, and Tony Rice. Additionally, Douglas released his debut album, Fluxology, on Rounder in 1979; he followed it three years later with Fluxedo, which like its predecessor stuck relatively close to traditional (albeit sometimes jazzy) bluegrass.
During the early '80s, Douglas continued his session career with even greater success, adding Emmylou Harris, Béla Fleck, the Whites, and Peter Rowan to his list of credits. He returned to his solo career with 1986's Under the Wire on Sugar Hill, which reflected his interest in the progressive new-acoustic (or "newgrass") movement. He subsequently signed with MCA, where he issued Changing Channels (1987) and the smoother, strongly jazz-influenced Plant Early (1989). More session work for increasingly prominent artists brought him into the '90s, with names like Alison Krauss, Del McCoury, Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood, Randy Travis, Clint Black, Patty Loveless, Suzy Bogguss, Reba McEntire, Kathy Mattea, and Dolly Parton on his résumé. In 1992, he returned to Sugar Hill for the more traditional bluegrass outing Slide Rule, which many critics ranked among his finest recordings. The following year brought the all-instrumental Skip, Hop & Wobble, a trio recording with Russ Barenberg and Edgar Meyer. In 1994, Douglas contributed to the Grammy-winning compilation Great Dobro Sessions, and cut a duo album with Peter Rowan, Yonder, in 1996. True to its title, 1998's Restless on the Farm was a return to Douglas' freewheeling eclecticism, which continued on 2002's Lookout for Hope. Best Kept Secret arrived in September of 2005. In 2008 he recorded the musically adventurous Glide, and followed it with a Christmas album entitled Jerry Christmas in 2009. In 2010 he contributed to Southern Filibuster: The Songs of Tut Taylor, a various-artists compilation acknowledging the far-reaching influence of Taylor on the modern Dobro sound. ~ Steve Huey, Rovi
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