Bluegrass Group Plans Two Concerts

Fiddler-guitarist Laurie Lewis knew the significance of the year 2011 in the history of bluegrass.

It was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Bill Monroe, generally considered the father of bluegrass.

Lewis wasn’t going to let the year pass without acknowledging the anniversary. So she recorded a musical tribute to Monroe with her CD “Skippin’ and Flyin’.”

	If you go WHAT: Laurie Lewis & The Right Hands WHEN AND WHERE: 7:30 p.m. Friday, at Sol at Santa Fe Brewing, 37 Fire Place, Santa Fe and 7:30 p.m. Feb. 18, at the Historic Old San Ysidro Church, Old Church Road, Corrales HOW MUCH: Tickets for the Santa Fe concert are $25 in advance at www.brownpaperticketes.com or $29 at the door. Tickets for the Corrales concert are $22 in advance at www.musicincorrales.org and at Frame ‘n’ Art in the Las Tiendas Shopping Center or $25 at the door

“There are a couple of songs from Monroe’s repertoire but mostly from the same well that Bill Monroe drew from – Jimmy Rogers, the Carter Family and other country songwriters of his time,” Lewis said in a phone interview.

She herself wrote two songs for the album “American Chestnut” and “The Pharaoh’s Daughter.”

“‘The Pharaoh’s Daughter’ I guess is a gospel song. It deals with the fact that in (the book of) Exodus, pharaoh’s daughter rescues and raises Moses, but she’s left out of everything else in the Bible. What she did, I thought, was an amazing thing. So I wrote a song,” Lewis said.

“American Chestnut,” is a song from the viewpoint of American chestnut trees that were wiped out in a blight in the early 20th century, she said.

It also addresses the federal government’s policy, which was to cut down the trees because forestry officials said none was going to live, Lewis said.

“I was just imagining in the song how the forest must have looked when the chestnuts were not endangered,” she said.

The Jimmy Rogers song on the CD is “Tuck Away My Lonesome Blues,” which she said was so fun to sing. Lewis wrote a second verse “so we could sing for a longer period of time.”

For “Carter’s Blues,” which Lewis said is mostly known as an instrumental, she and singing partner Kathy Kallick sang the lyrics.

Lewis invited well-known singer Linda Ronstadt to join her on the obscure Flatt and Scruggs song “What’s Good for You.”

“As far as I know it’s always been sung by men but it makes a good song from a woman’s point of view as well. It’s a classic song of cheating and lying,” Lewis said.

Ronstadt and longtime Lewis mandolinist-singing partner Tom Rozum are also heard on the cut “Dreams.”

For two New Mexico concerts next weekend – in Santa Fe on Friday and in Corrales on Saturday – Lewis will be joined by her sidekicks The Right Hands – Rozum, fiddler Chad Manning, fiddler-banjo player Patrick Sauber and guitarist-bassist Andrew Conklin.