The Bluegrass Album Vol. 6: Bluegrass Instrumentals closes out the long-running Bluegrass Album Band series that brought J.D. Crowe, Tony Rice, Bobby Hicks, Doyle Lawson, and Todd Phillips together across roughly fifteen years for the most uniformly admired studio recordings of late-twentieth-century traditional bluegrass. The instrumental volume strips away the vocal material that anchored the earlier records and turns the band into a pure instrumental ensemble, working through fiddle tunes and breakdowns at the rhythmic and harmonic level that only this particular combination of players could produce. Rice's guitar, Crowe's banjo, Lawson's mandolin, Hicks's fiddle, and Phillips's bass had spent enough hours together in this configuration to make the ensemble work feel inevitable, every note placed where the music wanted it. The album represents the working endpoint of a project that did as much as any other to define what mainstream bluegrass excellence sounded like in the period.
Tracklist
- 1 Wheel Hoss Source Recording 2:41
- 2 Misty Morning 3:47
- 3 Ground Speed Source Recording 2:15
- 4 Stoney Lonesome Source Recording 2:37
- 5 Lonesome Moonlight Waltz Source Recording 3:56
- 6 Brown County Breakdown alt version 4:10
- 7 Tall Timber 2:20
- 8 North Country Waltz 3:52
- 9 Foggy Mountain Chimes Source Recording 2:52
- 10 Monroe’s Hornpipe Source Recording 3:00
- 11 Home Sweet Home Source Recording 3:30
- 12 Roanoke Source Recording 2:13
