John Hartford
Steam Powered Aereo Plane
“Steam Powered Aereo Plane” was written by John Hartford and is the title-adjacent track of his 1971 Warner Bros. album Aereo-Plain. The album is widely regarded as the foundational document of newgrass — the genre that emerged from Hartford’s blending of traditional bluegrass musicianship with a hippie-era acoustic-experimental sensibility.
The Aereo-Plain Band lineup is one of the most consequential in modern bluegrass: Hartford on fiddle, banjo, and lead vocal; Norman Blake on guitar; Vassar Clements on fiddle; Tut Taylor on dobro; and Randy Scruggs on bass. The recording’s loose, conversational feel — with band chatter and asides preserved on the album — deliberately broke from the polished Nashville traditionalism of the period and pointed toward the looser ensemble aesthetic the New Grass Revival and others would build out through the rest of the 1970s.
The recording associated with this entry is the New Grass Revival’s 1981 reading, which carried the song forward into the next decade of newgrass and helped consolidate Hartford’s piece in the modern acoustic-progressive repertoire. The lyric is a wry comic piece — the narrator daydreams about a steam-powered aeroplane to escape his problems, with verses cycling through the imaginary aircraft’s absurd mechanical details. It works as a moderate-tempo vocal piece in G or A with a strong instrumental break and remains a regular call in newgrass and bluegrass-revival sets.
