J.B. and Jamie Dailey

J.B. Dailey was Jamie’s first teacher. Jamie began singing with his father at the age of three, and at nine he was playing bass in J.B.’s regional bluegrass and gospel group. The album came out of the old bluegrass and gospel songs the two had sung together while Jamie was growing up, and it followed an appearance J.B. made with Dailey & Vincent at a sold-out show at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville a couple of years earlier.

Step Back in Time has thirteen songs. The first single was “Nobody’s Darlin’ But Mine,” written by Jimmie Davis, who first recorded it in 1935, and later made famous again by Merle Haggard; the second was “Will the Angels Play Their Harps for Me,” a song associated with Doyle Lawson, the bandleader who had hired Jamie in 1998. The album opens with “Ashes of Love” and also includes Flatt & Scruggs’s “Mother Prays Loud in Her Sleep,” “Vision of Jesus,” “White Oak on the Hill,” “Behind These Prison Walls of Love,” an instrumental “Great Speckled Bird” and “Lily Dale,” and it closes with an unaccompanied “Gloryland.” Lawson, Darrin Vincent and Jimmy Fortune of the Statler Brothers were among the guest singers and players. The album entered the Billboard Bluegrass Albums chart at No. 3 in its first week.