Voices: Dale Ann Bradley: birthright in bluegrass

“Dale Ann Bradley is one of the most gifted vocalists bluegrass and country music has ever heard. She is a dream.” When Alison Krauss, who has won just about every award there is for her own singing, says that, people tend to listen. Quite a few people have been taking note of Dale Ann Bradley lately. Among other things, she’s up for female vocalist of the year in the International Bluegrass Music Association Awards, which will be given out on October 2nd at the historic Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville.

Bradley is no stranger to awards and acclaim, but it’s been a long and maybe somewhat unexpected road from her days growing up in eastern Kentucky, in the small community of Williams Branch, near Pineville. For one thing, her dad was a preacher in the Primitive Baptist church, in a part of that church which generally frowns on music outside the church house and within in it allows only the human voice to be raised in song, with no musical instruments permitted. Still there was singing in Bradley’s home and she was drawn to it. “My mother sang, my grandmother, my uncles," she says “My dad is a good singer. I’ve been singing almost since I can remember.” As a young girl, Bradley sang her way through some hard scrabble days and nights. There was the strictness of her church, and she was a preacher’s daughter, too. “Everybody had an opinion on everything we did,” she recalls, laughing. Then too, she grew up in a situation which had more in common with coal miner’s daughter Loretta Lynn a few decades earlier than with Bradley’s contemporaries such as Krauss and Rhonda Vincent. “We lived way back in the mountains, off a dirt road. There was no running water, no electricity until I was in high school. It was very different. It was not easy,” she says. “When you go up on one of the mountains there, it’s breathtakingly gorgeous -- but I was so sure I was never going to be able leave,” she says.

It was the music which drew her on. One of her uncles had migrated to Detroit, and when he came home to visit, he brought tapes of Loretta Lynn, Charlie Pride, Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton. ”Porter and Dolly’s stuff, that’s when I realized there was music outside of church. That cracked the door to me hearing some other music,” she says. Another uncle played guitar, and let her borrow it to practice. During high school, she began getting small gigs playing at restaurants and at a state park, and to work on making music her career. She also began to hear other sorts of music, including one which put together her love of the country music she’d heard on her uncle’s tapes and the a cappella singing of her church and family days. The first time she heard bluegrass, “it hit me so strong, “ Bradley says. “I thought, this is the genre that can do it all. Now, if I hear a song I like, nine times out of ten, I’ll figure out a way to make it work for me in bluegrass.”

Along the way to doing that, she has lent her mountain soprano to the famed Renfro Valley Barn Dance and The New Coon Creek Girls, and collected nominations and awards from the IBMA, SPBGMA, AFIM, and seen her solo debut East Kentucky Morning, chosen as an editor's pick at Billboard magazine.

It’s also a gift that’s highlighted on her current release, Catch Tomorrow. Bradley duets with country star Marty Raybon on a song she first heard on one of those early Parton and Wagoner records, Holding on to Nothing, and makes Texas songwriter Billy Joe Shaver’s anthemic Live Forever into another sort of anthem, one that adds a new dimension to the song. She makes Kris Kristofferson’s Me and Bobbie McGee right at home in the bluegrass world, too.

Bradley wrote several songs on the record. Her family roots reach beyond the Kentucky mountains to Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, a side of her heritage she recognizes in When the Mists Come Again, a tale of motherhood, loss and courage, which she recorded with with top Irish band Lunasa sitting in. She tells a tale ofmountains and moonshine in Run Rufus Run, remembers a happy childhood time with Grandma’s Gift, and looks at the love of parent for child in a story set in Civil War Days, Mercy Railroad. “When you’ve got the desire to write and sing, it’s who you are,” Bradley says.

With her work on Catch Tomorrow, with Grammy winning banjo player and composer Alison Brown as producer, Bradley feels she’s found her best way yet to share her music, and she has an idea of what she hopes people hear in it too. “I want this record to be thought provoking.,” Bradley says. “Maybe it will make people take a second look at how we view the world, maybe walk in somebody else’s shoes a little bit.”

an interview with Alison Brown

You'll find music content from many genres and plenty of other music fans at Gather Essentials: Music. For more of Kerry Dexter's Voices columns, look here. It's published on Thursdays.

Kerry Dexter, Music Correspondent Kerry's credits include VH1, CMT, the folk music magazine Dirty Linen, Strings, The Encyclopedia of Ireland and the Americas, and The MusicHound Guides. She also writes about the arts and creative practice at Music Road and contributes to Fred Bals' Series of Tubes.