Card-Carrying GrassPop The Greencards stretch the boundaries of bluegrass
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heap Trick’s “I Want You To Want Me” may not be a song you expect to hear from a string band, unless it’s The Greencards and then it may well be exactly what you’ve come to expect. The Greencards have been stretching the boundaries of bluegrass and taking Bill Monroe’s music to new heights for more than a decade. Monroe’s rabble-rousing spirit is alive and well in their all-encompassing embrace of American music. “We’ve always been concerned with not being genre-specific,” Kym Warner, the group’s mandolin player, told me recently. “If we like a song we’ll play it whether it’s a pop song or a folk song or whatever. Carol’s the singer, so it mostly depends on whether or not she can feel it.” Carol Young is the bass player and lead singer. She met Warner in Sydney, Australia, in a house the two were sharing with a number of other like-minded musicians. Young grew up in Sydney. Warner moved there from his native Adelaide because in the 1990s Sydney was the center of Australia’s music scene. These days, according to Warner, the center has shifted to Melbourne and the audience for the acoustic music they wanted to play has dler from the U.K. In order to largely disappeared. stay and play in the country they Winner of the each had to apply for Australian National a green card, hence Bluegrass Mandolin their name. Championship four After growing up times in a row, Warnear the ocean, you ner wanted nothing might think they felt more than to be in a a bit land-locked in band playing blue- RICHARD WINHAM Austin, but accordgrass. Young felt the ing to Warner they same way, so in 2001 they shipped felt right at home. “We landed in out for the U.S. landing in Austin, this west Texas town, there were Texas, where they hooked up with cowboys and people were playing Eamon McLoughlin, a young fidcountry music and, you know, I
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18 • The Pulse • APRIL 18-24, 2013 • chattanoogapulse.com
grew up with all of that.” The three players formed a tight unit but they were never able to find a permanent guitar player. They had what Warner calls a “rotating roster” of players joining them for gigs and recordings, but only on a casual contract. That all changed when McLoughlin left the group in 2008 and they joined forces with guitarist Carl Miner. A gifted flat picker, he was just 16 when he placed second in the annual
National Flatpick Championship in Winfield, Kan. A year later he took first place. With Miner the group was again a tight-knit trio, but this time without a regular fiddler. But that hasn’t proven to be a problem according to Warner. “Things are much easier now with the core of the band being the rhythm section,” he said. They work with a rotating roster of fiddlers including Tyler Andal, Luke Bulla and Christian Sedelmeyer, who will be with them on Saturday night. According to
his bio, the five-string fiddler has been influenced equally both by Neil Young and the legendary Nashville fiddler, Stuart Duncan. Like Duncan, he’s a sought after session player and sideman capable of playing in a wide range of styles. Miner is an equally versatile player adding bluesy string bending and a jazzy Tony Rice-style counterpoint to Tyler Andal’s fiery fiddle and Warner’s nimble mandolin runs on rapidfire instrumentals like “Adelaide” on The Brick Album.