As the International Bluegrass Music Association’s annual IBMA Week launches in Raleigh, North Carolina, Jerry Douglas is among the storied honorees: The 30-time IBMA Award recipient will be inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame on Thursday (Sept. 26) by fellow bluegrass luminary and 2023 honoree Sam Bush.
Over the course of nearly five decades, Douglas’s contributions and influence on genres including bluegrass, country and Americana have been indelible, thanks to his masterful, pioneering musicianship on the dobro, as well as his work as a producer (on more than 100 albums), bandleader, and songwriter.
“It’s not something you expect,” Douglas, 67, tells Billboard of the induction. “I was shocked, surprised, and humbled, all those things. It’s the acceptance that’s really cool about it, being accepted in a place along with Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs [both members of the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame’s inaugural class in 1991]. You don’t think about your name being mentioned in the same paragraph as those guys, but sometimes it happens.”
The Bluegrass Hall of Fame honor isn’t the only award he could take home Thursday evening: he’s nominated in other three IBMA categories, including album of the year (for co-producing Tuttle’s City of Gold), resophonic guitar player of the year and collaborative recording of the year (for Authentic Unlimited with Jerry Douglas’ Fall in Tennessee).
The induction comes a week after his Sept. 20-released new album The Set (out on Nolivian Records), marking the 16-time Grammy winner’s first album in seven years.
Together with his Jerry Douglas Band cohorts — Mike Seal (guitar), Christian Sedelmyer (fiddle) and Daniel Kimbro (bass) — Douglas offers up reimaginations of six beloved older songs alongside five new compositions. The album takes its name from Douglas’ intent to capture more of the essence of the group’s live shows.
The songs on The Set span decades and styles, such as “From Ankara to Izmir,” which Douglas had previously included on his 1987 album Changing Channels.
“When I cut the song, I envisioned it as a different thing,” he says. “When you write a song and record it soon after, you don’t really know that song. It takes on different features and becomes something different than it started as. I originally cut it with lap steel and made it tougher sounding. Later on, I started playing it on dobro instead. Now, it’s a combination of electric guitar, bass, dobro, upright bass, and fiddle. It covers all the bases, but we have space in there, too.”
The lead single from The Set is a rendition of The Beatles’ 1968 song “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” Songs written by each bandmember are also featured including Sedelmyer’s “Deacon Waltz,” Kimbro’s “Loyston,” and Seal’s “Renee.”
“This is a band record. Everybody had a hand in it,” Douglas says. “I may have picked the songs and produced it, but everybody’s personality and music are on the record.”
Ohio native Douglas moved to Music City in 1978, initially to play for the country vocal group The Whites. He released his first solo album, Fluxology, a year later. His first Grammy nomination came in 1982 for his work on The Whites’ album You Put the Blue in Me.
“I moved to Nashville at a good time,” he recalls. “It was right after what we called ‘The Urban Cowboy Scare,’ when everyone had a mechanical bull and bruises. But when I got to Nashville, Ricky [Skaggs] broke out and Emmylou [Harris] and Randy Travis and all these traditional artists and I was playing so many of those records and dobro was on radio.”
His musical dexterity made Douglas an in-demand session musician; he’s played on over 1,500 albums including projects for George Jones, Garth Brooks, Paul Simon, Emmylou Harris, Sierra Ferrell, Dierks Bentley and James Taylor. He’s earned the Country Music Association Awards’ musician of the year honor three times.
He’s also seen the ebbs and flows of music emanating from Nashville — for better and for worse. “The music is cyclical and here in Nashville I’ve seen it turn over three or four times. The last one was the bro-country movement, which is finally dead, thank God. It resides along with disco in hell somewhere. Now we’ve entered a totally new [time] where so many people are coming from different genres to country music.”
Over the decades, in addition to serving as band leader for his own group and the Grammy-winning The Earls of Leicester, he played as part of The Country Gentlemen while still a teen and has been part of bands including Boone Creek and J.D. Crowe and The New South (his work with the group earned Douglas his first Grammy win). He’s been a member of Alison Krauss and Union Station since 1998 and earned a wellspring of attention thanks to his work on the RIAA-certified eight-time multi-platinum soundtrack O Brother Where Art Thou?.
Along the way, Douglas says he’s gleaned wisdom in the finer points of pulling together a group that heightens the musicians’ individual strengths.
“It’s all in the cocktail. How does this person support this other person? And that’s what it’s all about in a band — support. You can’t be practicing your next solo while someone else is soloing. I’ve seen that happen onstage. The cardinal rule is to listen to who’s playing before you. Listen to everything that’s going on around you, because you can pull all those things together and go in different directions. Just things you pick up along the way, like J.D. Crowe, when he would sing, he did not play, and then he would play coming out of that [singing] and that was like he’d just signed his name.”
Elsewhere on The Set, with “Something You Got” Douglas revisits his collaboration with Eric Clapton from Douglas’ 2012 Traveler album, with Douglas offering up lead vocals this time around.
Douglas says of Clapton, “He’s very, very philanthropic. It’s great meeting these fellows late [in life] like this. With James Taylor and Eric Clapton, those guys at one point, you wouldn’t have been able to get close to ’em, just because of the way they were. But through all of that, they are very well-read, intelligent people, and it’s wonderful to be around them. There’s so much history whenever you talk with those guys because they’ve been there and done everything you can do in the music business. I just happened to be lucky enough to hang around them once in a while. And icons like [guitarist, Country Music Hall of Fame inductee and “Nashville Sound” architect] Chet Atkins, I loved being around Chet. You’d just hang on every word he said because everything he said had like three meanings and they were all good. But he had done everything, too. How many people produced the Everly Brothers, Elvis Presley and Dolly Parton?”
The new version of “Something You Got” is notable, as Douglas is known as a performer who often sings lead vocals.
“I sang when I was a kid, until I started playing dobro and it just took over. I can find parts pretty easy, baritone and low tenor and things like that, but I wasn’t as comfortable in the lead role until I had a band and somebody needed to sing, so I was going to try it first. It’s funny how it surprises people when they do hear me sing, but I’ve been listening to the best singers on earth for 50 years and I know what not to do. I’m not a singer like Alison [Krauss] or Vince Gill. I’ll have them sing and I’ll play, because what I’m most comfortable doing is backing a singer.”
As he has looked up to his musical forebears, Douglas has also been a mentor and champion for artists including Tuttle and Billy Strings, as the sound of bluegrass continues to broaden and evolve.
“Historically, [bluegrass and jazz] come from the same place, but with jazz it’s more complicated while bluegrass is more rooted in the rudimentary chords, not a lot of diminished minors. Bluegrass music is more about social context in a way, but the social context that it was based on was a long time ago, and things have changed. That’s why now women are so well represented in the music. Growing up, as a kid, I didn’t see that many women [playing bluegrass], and if they did play, they were delegated to play the bass, which is a very important part of the music, but usually, it doesn’t really present you as the star on stage. I mean, some people can pull that off.
“But Missy Raines [the first woman musician to win the IBMA bass player of the year honor in 1998] turned it into a completely different thing. She has such a vocabulary with her bass [playing] that is different. And she’s a strong person who stuck it out when she was just kind of looked over when she shouldn’t have been [looked over]. The same with Molly [Tuttle] and [banjo virtuoso] Alison Brown. I like that it’s becoming more inclusive for everybody because back in Bill Monroe’s early days, it wouldn’t have been.”
Part of that evolution is being led by a new generation of bluegrass artists, including Strings, Tray Wellington, Wyatt Ellis and more.
“If it didn’t evolve, it would fade,” Douglas says. “The kids coming up who are playing are just incredible, and I know the internet has a lot to do with it. I had to sit there and listen to a record player, and I couldn’t slow my record player down either. So I had to put an ear on what was happening and try to figure it out. I didn’t have anything to see to give me an idea of what to do next. I didn’t even know if I had the thing tuned right at first. Now, you can study your favorite player online and pick up little things from that.”
