The singer and fiddle player is a down-home girl whose feet are firmly Planted
You could call Alison Krauss many things — the queen of bluegrass; the most successful woman in the history of the Grammys (she has 26); you could call her, if you like, the artist whose hit double act with Robert Plant on Raising Sand stymied any chance of a Led Zeppelin reunion.
She has also, somewhat to her bemusement, become a headline star of this year’s London Jazz Festival, with four sold-out nights at the Festival Hall, when she and her band, Union Station, tour this month.
But, leaving aside the question of jazz’s links to the fiddle and mandolin tunes of the Appalachian mountains, it’s a huge achievement for a singer in a down-home genre that has scarcely troubled the charts over here since that banjo duel in Deliverance.
Paper Airplane, Krauss’s album with the reconvened Union Station, full of tunes of heartbreak and loss and delivered in her silken tones, has been a substantial hit here. There’s dobro, there’s string bass but no fat pop-radio backbeats. Suddenly the music of country bucks and old hayseeds is competing with the R&B divas.
Krauss isn’t surprised at the bluegrass boom. “I love the message that the music has, it speaks to everybody . . . the idea that there’s nobody more beautiful than the girl next door, there’s nobody kinder than your own mother and father,” she says. “And there’s just no place like home. It’s a very idyllic message and people dream of that, I certainly do.”
This, some have suggested, is music for troubled times — whose core patriotic sentiments have chimed with a post-9/11 America. Nobody, including Krauss, saw coming the success of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. The Coen brothers’ sepia re-creation of a Depression-era South in 2000 spawned an album of Americana that has sold some nine million copies. Just rereleased, it’s the top-selling soundtrack of the 21st century. Krauss’s rendition of Down to the River to Pray sent her already successful American career into overdrive. She would have appeared in the film herself but was pregnant with her son, Sam. Dan Tyminski, of Union Station, voiced George Clooney singing I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow, prompting Tyminski’s wife famously to observe: “Dan’s voice coming from George Clooney’s body — my fantasy.”
Krauss, who cuts an unworldly figure quite devoid of showbiz gloss, says that she has never seen the film all the way through. “I had a very small baby at the time and I was falling asleep during the day. I didn’t watch the TV for years — we just had a 20-year-old one that was in the basement. Even now I’ve seen parts of the film, not all the way through . . . but it presented the music in a very beautiful way.”
Krauss was brought up in small-town Illinois, where she heard pop but loved the old-time music, too. In her teens she was nominated by the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass in America as the most promising fiddler in the Midwest. When her band sent a demo tape to the roots label Rounder, they turned down the band but signed the fiddle player with the siren voice. Dolly Parton, with whom Krauss has subsequently sung, was an early idol. Even today, a star herself, Krauss is in almost breathless awe: “Oh my gosh, you have expectations of people you think are wonderful. You could never be prepared for how far beyond your expectations of how kind and beautiful and talented she is.”
In Britain it was the Raising Sand album that brought Krauss to a wide audience. In 2007 she joined a singer with whom she appeared to have little in common apart from lots of lustrous hair. But the tension between Plant’s impassioned wail and her honey-sweet tones created music that kept them busy on the road for years. Krauss won’t be drawn on whether Plant was tempted by the proposed Zeppelin reunion — which would have been the rock cash bonanza of the decade. “Oh, you’d have to ask him that. It came up at interviews but it was nothing we ever talked about . . . he’s a very focused person at the same time as being very free and a very joyful person.”
From what Plant has told the press, there was no contest between singing Raising Sand’s soulful Americana and trying to exhume the rock god of his youth. In 2009 the pair went back into the studio aiming to rekindle the magic. “We were there for about a week and if what we had been cutting had been the first record, it would have been great. But it wasn’t. We felt it wasn’t different enough. There really needed to be a different spirit about it and it didn’t have that. We said, ‘Let’s put it away now.’ ”
It’s typical of Krauss that she walked away. Throughout her career she has resisted music that she hasn’t felt completely true to. As a young woman who was successful from the mid-Nineties there was sometimes pressure to make Top 40 pop. “I couldn’t do it. Anytime I’ve gone down that road in the past it’s just a mistake. It’s either telling the truth or not telling the truth. I don’t want anything coming out of my mouth that is not true.”
Was returning to Union Station, a band with whom she has made music for more than 20 years, like slipping on some comfy old shoes? “Not at all. It was a little bit of a struggle. I was having these headaches that I’d had 15 years before. That mood made it really hard to make your musical decisions. It was just a bad dynamic. It was tough, but we got there. You rehearse the pieces and they become what they’re supposed to be. Now everything feels like it’s steady.”
Krauss lives out of the limelight in a Nashville mansion. Divorced from the musician Pat Bergeson, she has an 11-year-old son and is a devoted mum. Our interview is delayed because she has to see him in a school play. But, at 40, Krauss still enjoys life on the road. “It’s very peaceful, more routine than I have at home and I get very good sleep out there. You don’t need much and I don’t have to drive the car. I call it ‘the invisible mom’. There’s always food to eat and the laundry’s done.”
Alison Krauss and Union Station’s tour starts at Symphony Hall, Birmingham, on Friday (alisonkrauss.com); Paper Airplane, with six extra tracks, is out on Decca
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