84 Years Young

Jesse McReynolds

Jesse McReynolds turned 84 last week, but he's still a-pickin' and a-grinnin', as evidenced by the mandolin workshop he gave at Bean Blossom last month -- attended by yours truly.

His older brother, Jim, with whom he performed for half a century, died in 2002 at age 75. After their brief foray into country music, they recorded such bluegrass standards as "Sweet Little Miss Blue Eyes," "I Wish You Knew," "Hard Hearted," and "Pardon Me."

In the mid-1990s, the duo was a regular at Terry Lease's midwestern festivals, where I saw them perform many times (the first being at Quincy, Illinois, in 1996).

These days, Jesse doesn't travel near as much and tends to stay pretty close to his home base in Nashville. He is pictured above at the Ernest Tubb Record Shop on Music Valley Drive in the Music City.

July

Who is this inventive mandolinist who turns 84 this month?

Along with his older brother, this mandolin picker came to Nashville and the Grand Ole Opry in 1964 to play bluegrass music.

But, he recalls nearly 50 years later, there "wasn't that many bluegrass groups then really around Nashville ... and there really wasn't that much work for bluegrass musicians getting on the package shows that was going out of Nashville."

So, to put food on the table, they went country -- for a time. They recorded several country songs, including"Diesel on My Tail" (1967), which peaked at no. 18 on the Billboard charts.

"That got us ... a lot more work so we could stay in the business," he says.

They eventually came back to bluegrass, their first love, and became regular performers at Bill Monroe's Bean Blossom festivals. This younger of the two brothers also developed a unique and influential style of playing the mandolin, called crosspicking, in which he applies certain bluegrass banjo techniques to the mandolin.

Significant July dates in bluegrass history

• 1st: Keith Whitley (Clinch Mountain Boys) and Dempsey Young (Lost & Found) were born (1954)
• 4th: Charlie Monroe (1903) and Peter Rowan (1942) were born; the Country Gentlemen formed (1957)
• 8th: Kenny Baker, longtime fiddler for the Blue Grass Boys, died (2011)
• 9th: Jesse McReynolds (1929) and Ronnie Bowman (1961) were born
• 10th: Bela Fleck was born (1958)
• 13th: Rhonda Vincent was born (1962)
• 18th: Ricky Skaggs was born (1954)
• 23rd: Alison Krauss was born (1971)