I can be hot or cold when it comes to bluegrass. A lot of it sounds the same to me, and the bands tend to cover a lot of the same core tunes. But The SteelDrivers are different: They place a lot of emphasis on their songwriting, and, as fiddle player and frontwoman Tammy Rogers said, they don’t play “Rocky Top.” I always enjoy their shows, and their recent appearance at The Birchmere — their last in a run of shows for this year — was a special delight, as the band was loose and having a good time.
The SteelDrivers have received no small amount of recognition for the quality of their songs. In 2008, American Songwriter named “Sticks That Made Thunder” one of the top 25 songs of the last 25 years. As Rogers noted, “There were a lot of great songs between 1983 and 2008.” That’s not to say the instrumental work of the SteelDrivers isn’t notable, too; these folks can and do play their butts off, and they do emphasize that side of the equation. They won the Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album for 2015’s The Muscle Shoals Recordings, Rogers said, because they finally put a fiddle song on an album.
The SteelDrivers previously were nominated for that award for 2011’s Reckless, and for Best Country Performance by a Duo or a Group with Vocal for the songs “Blue Side of the Mountain,” which closed their main set at The Birchmere on Nov. 1, and “Where Rainbows Never Die,” which they played as their encore.
Watch The SteelDrivers perform “Where Rainbows Never Die” live with Chris Stapleton on YouTube:
It was clear that the band was having a good time on stage. They opened the floor to requests after “Long Way Down,” and some smart-alec called out “Freebird!” Tammy replied, “If you come back tomorrow night, we’ll play Freebird.”
Rogers, who has been in The SteelDrivers from the start, has written a number of their songs. “I Choose You,” she said, was written for her husband of 27 years, which leads me to conclude she was either a child bride or is an ageless vampire. “That was our only happy song,” she said.
In the best country and bluegrass tradition, The SteelDrivers have their fair share of songs about alcohol. They kicked off their set with “Guitars, Whiskey, Guns, and Knives,” a list of things that maybe shouldn’t go together. “Here’s one about drinking,” Tammy said before “Drinkin’ Dark Whiskey,” which turned into a sing-along, the first of several times that happened Friday night. For their second-to-last song of the evening, they played “Good Corn Liquor.”
Watch The SteelDrivers perform “Good Corn Liquor” in a studio performance on YouTube:
Early in The SteelDrivers’ career, before he went out on his own, the band included Chris Stapleton, who wrote a number of songs for them. One of those tunes is “Midnight Train To Memphis,” which Rogers prefaced by saying, “There’s a difference between jail and prison.” (Jail is where you’re held you’re arrested, prison is where you go to serve out your sentence after you’ve been convicted of a crime.) “Peacemaker,” she explained, is “about the gun that won the West.”
After “Drinkin’ Dark Whiskey,” the set continued with “You Put The Hurt On Me” and “At The River.” They also played “Wearin’ A Hole,” “Hear The Willow Cry,” “If It Hadn’t Been For Love,” “Angel of the Night,” and “Heaven Sent.”
The evening got kicked off with an opening set by The Wood Box Heroes. Notably, the band included bassist Barry Bales, who also plays in Alison Krauss’s band, Union Station. Their lead singer and guitarist, a native of Kentucky, introduced one of their songs as “a coal mining tune. “444,” he said, is about “a number that keeps showing up” in their fiddler’s life. They concluded their set with a cover of Lead Belly’s “In The Pines.”
The Wood Box Heroes were a nice complement to The SteelDrivers, who were in as fine a form as I’ve ever seen them. They kept it loose, and it was a fun night at The Birchmere.