The Dillards
Album: Back Porch Bluegrass/!!!Live!!!Almost!!!/Pickin' And Fiddlin'
Label: BGO
Tracks: 28+16
Website: http://www.bgo-records.com

The Missouri-born Dillards - in their original incarnation comprising Doug and Rodney Dillard, Dean Webb and Mitch Jayne - were one of the first of the 1960s wave of folk groups to embrace bluegrass and make it popular. The allowable extravagance of hindsight permits the claim that along with contemporaries The Louvin Brothers they brought a fresh and youthful face to the music, later helping - along with the Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers - to invent and establish country-rock as a genre. And yet, strangely, it's the Dillards whose name tends to be forgotten even by roots enthusiasts, although their influence can't ever be overlooked.

This abundantly generous BGO reissue collects together the Dillards' first three albums, originally issued on Elektra in 1963, 1964 and 1965 respectively. These albums, accurately described in the booklet essay as "straight off-the-shelf recordings", possess a limitless, infectious energy and enthusiasm and radiate a stunning freshness of execution. Back Porch Bluegrass is exemplary, quintessential bluegrass, its 15 tracks a wonderful mix of vocal tracks complete with archetypal four-part close harmonies, drawing upon old-time, gospel and ballad traditions as well as self-penned material, and brilliantly virtuosic instrumental cuts including a frantic-from-the-start take on Duelin' Banjo. Never has the standard banjo/guitar/mandolin/double bass lineup sounded better!

Well, except perhaps on the Live album, where the quartet's unbridled enjoyment of their art just bounced out of the grooves of the LP's 13 tracks, which embraced a broadly similar mix of material to their first album as well as a cover of an early Dylan song (Walkin' Down The Line) and a smidgen of ragtime. The between-numbers banter was equally infectious too, at times genuinely hilarious, and demonstrated just why the Dillards were such a draw on the "upscale" folk circuit (it was recorded at the Mecca nightclub in LA).

A significant clue as to the nature of the Dillards' ensuing Pickin' And Fiddlin' album is to be found in its title, for it was an all-instrumental set that brought into the studio alongside the Dillards foursome the phenomenal young fiddle player Byron Berline, a veritable polymath capable of playing in almost any style within the vast American tradition who had turned down a job with Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Boys and was later to play with the Burritos and Country Gazette. The LP unashamedly intermingled American fiddle tunes of Appalachian origin with others of potential or actual Irish influence, and the material was played straight and acoustic - although the band themselves had already begun experimenting with electric instrumentation in live performance as they were gravitating more towards the rock circuit. Soon afterwards, things changed rapidly, and personnel changes and over-reaching ambition overtook the band. But the three LPs collected here mark a distinct and self-contained "early phase" in the Dillards' career, and are an essential library acquisition for anyone interested in the development of bluegrass music in the mid-60s.

David Kidman