Branching Out

American Heretics: Bluegrass purists get out the torches when Tony Rice (right) and Peter Rowan start genre-bending.

Roots rocker Peter Rowan is mixed up, but he's not schizophrenic.

by Mary Armstrong

"Roots is roots," says the impish, curly-haired Peter Rowan. "Once you know the root you can know the tree." Rowan has done a lot of digging, but no matter what type of musical branch he explores—rock and reggae feature prominently in his music—bluegrass is always seed.

He's cult figure to those who have figured him out, and a haunting vocal cry to those who've heard him, but never quite separated him from the din of commercial radio.

Like his music, the Boston-born Rowan has been all over the map. In the mid-1960s, Rowan played guitar and sang with Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys. He took off for the left coast where he and another former Blue Grass Boy, fiddler Richard Greene, made rootsy-rock with Seatrain in the early 1970s. ("Song of Job" and its soaring, glottal-flipping, crying/yipping/yelping vocals were distinctly Rowan.) He later played with another bluegrass rocker, Jerry Garcia, on the legendary Old and In the Way. Rowan went on to several other groups and projects, including a major label outing with his brothers.

Over the years, he's met plenty of resistance from the purists. He recalls particular outcry over his self-titled album on Flying Fish, which featured conjunto accordion legend Flaco Jimenez. "People scorned it. It was half bluegrass and half Tex-Mex, and the bluegrassers thought I was schizophrenic." Less dogmatic listeners heard the beauties of conjunto-style laid over English lyrics and fell in love with the sound.

These days, Rowan often tours with an eight-piece "reggae-billy" band, which includes Peter Tosh and Burning Spear band members.

Knitting all genre-hopping experiments together are Rowan's original story-songs and his distinctive vocals. While he can sell the sweetest ballad, his true trademark is the unique singing style that first grabbed national attention in the Seatrain days. Rowan explains that he was impressed by Hopalong Cassidy records at a tender age. "I heard [yodelling] in the Hawaiian music, bluegrass, Jimmie Rodgers," he says. Rowan began stretching his vocal limits early. "I lived in the country as a kid. I'd sing outside in the woods. I'd throw my voice out to Echo Rock and listen to it come back." Back home he'd listen to radio and imitate each of the instruments, "I'd have to be told to stop!" Lucky for us, he didn't listen.

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No matter what your level of bluegrass Puritanism, you're likely to find something to please you at the Keswick on Saturday.

Ralph Stanley, contemporary to the man who created bluegrass, Monroe, made a whole generation of young urban converts with his chilling performance in O Brother, Where Art Thou?. No surprise there; Stanley has always been the link between the older styles and what was once the cutting edge of country music.

The Seldom Scene is officially a second generation bluegrass band in more ways than one; that only banjo player Ben Eldridge remains from the original lineup. The Scene sound reflects its D.C.-area influences and its position at a crossroads of north and south. They blend the traditional playing and singing styles of the South with the Northern suit-yourself attitudes, adapting rock and swing to their own uses.

Rowan and Tony Rice take that paradigm a bit further. Rice was part of the seminal New South band that launched not only his career as a flatpicker and singer, but that of singer/multi-instrumentalist Ricky Skaggs and dobro-player Jerry Douglas as well. Rice went on to join David Grisman on the West Coast and be a integral part of the new acoustic music movement that used bluegrass instruments to build a whole new field of expression.

Peter Rowan with Tony Rice, Ralph Stanley, Seldom Scene, Sat., Nov. 20, 8 p.m., $36, 215-572-7650, www.keswicktheatre.com.