1966 bluegrass arrangements of Beatles classics

The Charles River Valley Boys came together amongst the early ‘60s folk revival scene of Cambridge, MA, the product Harvard and MIT students and a transplanted New Yorker. For all those Northeast roots (and the jokey name), their shared love of old-timey music resulted in surprisingly fine acoustic bluegrass. This 1966 album for Elektra could have been nothing more than a crass effort to cash in on the Beatles’ popularity (see for example The Hollyridge Strings’ contemporaneous Beatles Song Book), but the group displays an obvious love of Lennon and McCartney’s songs, and finds plenty of room to add bluegrass harmonies. Several choices find obvious analogs in the acoustic string band vein (e.g., “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” “Baby’s in Black” and “What Goes On”), but others are taken much further from their source. Lennon’s blistering “And Your Bird Can Sing” is turned from angry to melancholy, “Ticket to Ride” leans surprisingly on the blues, and the beat-heavy “She’s a Woman” is turned into a hot-picked instrumental for banjo, guitar and mandolin. Originally marketed to the general country music audience, rather than bluegrass fans or folk revivalists, the album stiffed and quickly became a hard-to-find collector’s item. Reissued first by Rounder and subsequently by Collectors’ Choice, the dozen cuts hold up as both bluegrass-harmony string band music and an affectionate tribute to the Beatles. [©2008 hyperbolium dot com]

Listen to “She’s a Woman”