Rounder Records has published two new interviews with artists whose debut CDs are due in the next few weeks.

First is a discussion with Jamie Dailey and Darrin Vincent whose Dailey & Vincent project will be released on January 29. Darrin discussed how he and Jamie discovered the marvelous vocal blend they achieve.

“The first song we sang together was on my sister Rhonda Vincent’s IBMA song of the year, Kentucky Borderline. Our vocal blend just happened naturally, like a gift from heaven, and at that point we started to try duets in the car.

Then we had a great chance to sing Beautiful Star on a compilation called Christmas Grass Volume 2. It was sent out to radio on the Prime Cuts of Bluegrass sampler, and our song got the strongest response of all the tracks on that issue of Prime Cuts. It was then that Jamie and I said, “People like what we sound like – let’s start praying about doing a record together.” We still have fans tells us it’s their favorite version of that song, and we thank them for that!”

Read the whole interview here.

There is also an interview with Mike Henderson, one of the primary songwriters and vocalists with The SteelDrivers, whose eponymous debut will be released on January 15.

Songwriting plays such a huge role in the SteelDrivers sound. When you and Chris [Stapleton] write a song, do you say to yourself “Let’s write a bluegrass song”?

Not really — we would just write the songs with a couple of acoustic guitars. when it came time to make demos, we’d get a full band, drums, keyboards, and demo ‘em up in the Nashville way, to try to get them recorded, which is what you do when you’re a staff songwriter. But there seemed to be a kind of underlying thread — something about a lot of the songs that made them playable in a bluegrass fashion, just by changing the feel of it just a little bit. Chris’s singing ability has a lot to do with that, his ability to say “Well, when we do it with drums and B-3, it goes like this. When we do it with a banjo, it goes like this.” He’s really good at being able to get inside the song and steer it different ways.

Were you surprised with the way these songs were reborn as bluegrass?

I was surprised with a few of them, because I was so used to hearing them the other way. Once you make a batch of demos and they are in a finished form, you tend to think of them that way. A lot of them had heavy drums and such, and I would think, “That would be a good song for country artist x or country artist y.” But Chris would say “Let’s try it like this,” and we’d mess with it and it worked just fine — we surprised ourselves on a lot of it!

That complete interview is also available online.

Here’s a follow-up to a post from this past June, about movie and television actress Mare Winningham having released a spiritual CD of folk and bluegrass tinged music, but framed by her perspective as a recent convert to Judaism.

The CD is entitled Refuge Rock Sublime, and has attracted some attention from the Jewish press.

Winngham recently appeared at a bluegrass festival in Arkansas, singing her songs during the Sunday Gospel show at the Eureka Springs Bluegrass Festival. This generated two stories about the Torah/Gospel convergence, one in The Arkansas Democrat Gazette, and the other at JewishJournal.com.

Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to find anything about the performance itself, as both the stories referenced above were written in advance of the festival.

Read more about Refuge Rock Sublime in our earlier post. You can find a music video for one of the songs from the CD, Valley Of The Dry Bones, on JewishJournal.com (scroll down for the video).

Here’s something I had been expecting to see for some time - hoping, even. Bluegrass has long been intertwined with its Gospel music tradition, though that aspect is far less universal than it once was. As the appeal of the music has grown beyond its roots in the rural southeastern United States, the topical themes of newly-written material has grown as well.

It seemed certain that adherents of religious faiths other than the Christian Church would be drawn to mimic the sort of Gospel traditional that exists in bluegrass music, and apply it to the beliefs they hold as true. Given the numbert of Jewish people who have been drawn to perform in bluegrass and acoustic music, I had expected to see this coming from that camp.

And so it has.

Mare Winningham may be known to readers as an actress, having appeared in dozens of movies and television programs over the past 30 years, but not many may realize that she has also been pursuing a career as a singer and songwriter, with three albums to her credit. Though raised in the Catholic Church, Mare converted to Judaism in 2003, and that change is the focus of her newest CD, Refuge Rock Sublime.

Released this spring on the Craig & Co label, Winningham’s CD mixes folk, bluegrass and Gospel music influences with Jewish musical idioms and themes, It is not a bluegrass record in any understandable sense of the term, but Jewish fans of acoustic and folk styles might want to give it a listen - as might folks interested in such cross-cultural musical ventures.

Audio samples can be found online at Fonogenic.com and in the iTunes Music Store.

The Jewish press has noticed this project as well, with articles/reviews appearing in The Jewish Week, on the Hillel web site, and on YoYenta.com.

Perhaps we will eventually see a more thoroughly bluegrass recording that mixes Jewish faith principles with the sonic themes of bluegrass Gospel - or even Christian themes other than the predominant rural southern staples. My own private joke has been that someday my own Catholic faith might inform a bluegrass song about The Miracle at Fatima or The Feast of the Assumption.

Now that would clear a festival site in a hurry.