Album Review – Pitney Meyer’s “Cherokee Pioneer”

Bluegrass (#520) on the Country DDS.

Under a different set of fates and circumstances, it could have been Mo Pitney revolutionizing popular country music with a neotraditional sound like we’re seeing from Zach Top and others in this moment. A strong argument could be made that it probably should have been Mo. When he started releasing singles for Curb Records in 2014, it was hard for true country fans to contain their excitement. Was this the artist we’d been waiting for who could help save country music?

Perhaps Mo Pitney was just too ahead of his time, just like William Michael Morgan and others who debuted during the height of Bro-Country, and had an impossible uphill battle to wage. It probably didn’t help that Mo’s label Curb Records can be one of the worst for enacting the “Artist Protection Program” for performers—meaning signing them to restrictive deals, and then mismanaging their careers by putting them on five year album release cycles.

However we got to this moment, Mo Pitney has now partnered with banjo player and songwriter John Meyer, who’s known in certain bluegrass circles for playing in a family band a fronting bands of his own. Together they offer up a straightforward bluegrass album under the duo name Pitney Meyer that warms your cockles, and does for bluegrass what Mo did for traditional country previously: make you hopeful for the future.

In eleven original songs and a cover of John Anderson’s “Seminole Wind,” Mo Pitney and John Meyer remind you why you love bluegrass so much. There’s no dearth of bluegrass acts or bluegrass albums, and it seems everyone is trying to figure out how to put their unique spin on this very old genre. But nothing replaces bringing a true love and youthful enthusiasm to the music, and letting the joy of bluegrass express itself. This is what Pitney Meyer accomplish on Cherokee Pioneer.

The chemistry of this album is significantly to blame for the positive outcome. Mo Pitney and John Meyer approached this album like a brotherhood, hatched it in jam sessions together with no ultimate goal to begin with other than enjoying the music, and then went into the recording wanting to capture the live, human element as much as possible. This included setting up a completely analog studio in the 1837 hand-hewn log cabin previously owned by Johnny Cash in Bon Aqua, Tennessee.

Recorded live over three days, Mo and John also solicited the services of Nate Burie on mandolin, Blake Pitney on bass, along with Ivy Phillips and the award-winning Jennee Fleenor on fiddle. The pickin’ on the album is great, but this isn’t exactly a pickin’ bluegrass album. It’s the harmonies that draw you in, and the songwriting that separates it from other standard bluegrass projects.

Whether it’s original songs that sound like classic bluegrass standards such as “Banjo Picker” or “Blue Creek Clay,” or tracks where the writing really stuns you like “White Corn Graves” and “Blue Water,” this is bluegrass that is meant to move you deeper than the twitch the mandolin chuck or banjo roll puts in your bones. Mo and John separate themselves from the bluegrass herd with the writing on this one.

And this is bluegrass with a message. Country music has always shared a close kinship and concern for America’s Native American population, and this is expressed not just in the bluegrass interpretation of “Seminole Wind,” but in the original song “Trail of Tears.” Those who’ve followed along with Mo Pitney over the years know how important his faith is to him. John Meyer happens to share these feelings, and it’s expressed in this album, especially in the final three songs.

Though Mo Pitney became known through country, just like so many country greats of the past, he was raised on bluegrass. Is that where he will eventually end up and make his mark in this great partnership with John Meyer? Time will tell. But with his country career stalled and Curb Records clueless what to do with him, why not try something different? Cherokee Pioneer doesn’t have a lot that’s different or unique to the bluegrass discipline. But sometimes it’s the bluegrass that’s original in scope but feels immediately familiar that’s the best.

8.1/10

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