On a Bowling Green, Kentucky cattle
farm in the post-war 1950s, Bush grew up an only son, and with four
sisters. His love of music came immediately, encouraged by his
parents’ record collection and, particularly, by his father
Charlie, a fiddler, who organized local jams. Charlie envisioned
his son someday a staff fiddler at the Grand Ole Opry, but a clear
day’s signal from Nashville brought to Bush’s television screen a
boy named Ricky Skaggs playing mandolin with Flatt and Scruggs, and
an epiphany for Bush. At 11, he purchased his first mandolin.
As a teen fiddler, Bush was a
three-time national champion in the junior division of the National
Oldtime Fiddler’s Contest. He recorded an instrumental album, Poor
Richard’s Almanac as a high school senior and in the spring of 1970
attended the Fiddlers Convention in Union Grove, NC. There he heard
the New Deal String Band, taking notice of their rock-inspired
brand of progressive bluegrass.
Acuff offered him a spot in his
band. Bush politely turned down the country titan. It was not the
music he wanted to play. He admired the grace of Flatt &
Scruggs, loved Bill Monroe- even saw him perform at the Ryman- but
he’d discovered electrified alternatives to tradition in the
Osborne Brothers and manifest destiny in The Dillards.
“I started working at the Holiday
Inn as a busboy,” Bush recalls. “Ebo Walker and Lonnie Peerce came
in one night asking if I wanted to come to Louisville and play five
nights a week with the Bluegrass Alliance. Bush played guitar
in the group, then began playing mandolin after recruiting
guitarist Tony Rice to the fold. Following a fallout with Peerce in
1971, Bush and his Alliance mates- Walker, Courtney Johnson, and
Curtis Burch- formed the New Grass Revival, issuing the band’s
debut.
Shunned by some traditionalists, New
Grass Revival played bluegrass fests slotted in late-night sets.
Quickly becoming a favorite of rock audiences, they garnered the
attention of Leon Russell, one of the era’s most popular artists.
Russell hired New Grass as his supporting act on a massive tour in
1973 that put the band nightly in front of tens of thousands.
Bush was the newgrass commando,
incorporating a variety of genres into the repertoire. The group
issued five albums in their first seven years, and in 1979 became
Russell’s backing band. A three-record contract with Capitol
Records and a conscious turn to the country market took the Revival
to new commercial heights. Bush survived a life-threatening bout
with cancer, and returned to the group that’d become more popular
than ever. They released chart-climbing singles, made videos,
earned Grammy nominations, and, at their zenith, called it quits.
Bush worked the next five years with
Emmylou Harris’ Nash Ramblers, then a stint with Lyle Lovett. He
took home three-straight IBMA Mandolin Player of the Year awards,
1990-92, (and a fourth in 2007). In 1995 he reunited with Fleck,
now a burgeoning superstar, and toured with the Flecktones,
reigniting his penchant for improvisation. Then, finally, after a
quarter-century of making music with New Grass Revival and
collaborating with other bands, Sam Bush went solo.
In 2009, the Americana
Music Association awarded Bush the Lifetime Achievement Award for
Instrumentalist. In 2023, he was inducted into the Bluegrass Music
Hall of Fame.
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