Bee-Liners creating a buzz

By MARK SAGE/Staff

Buddy Woodward and Brandi Hart had about week to throw together a band to headline an Arts Array show.
They made a few phone calls and wound up with what they call the definitive lineup of the Dixie Bee-Liners.
“This is the one where everything gelled,” Woodward said.
To Hart, it felt like the end of a journey.
A journey that began in 2004, with the Barter, in New York. A studio musician friend of Woodward’s saw an audition for the touring “Keep on the Sunny Side: The Story of the Carter Family.” She suggested he try it out. He hesitated at first. He hadn’t done any acting, other than voiceover work, since the early 1980s, he said. But he went, and he didn’t get the gig. And then a year later, the Abingdon theater tracked him down, in New York, and offered him a role in another Douglas Pote-penned show, “Man of Constant Sorrow: The Story of the Stanley Brothers.” He wound up playing the roles of George Shuffler, Pee-Wee Lambert, Bill Monroe and a Primitive Baptist preacher. He wound up falling in love with area. And he wound up moving his band, the Dixie Bee-Liners here.
It was closer to Hart’s family in Kentucky. It was closer to the festivals. It was closer to the music the two loved. The move changed everything.
Up north, Woodward said, the band had been treading water.
In Abingdon, Hart said, “the band was finally able to blossom.”
Before moving to Washington County, Woodward had been a founding member of The Ghost Rockets and Buddy Woodward & The Nitro Express in New York.
Hart had grown up singing in church choirs. She’d learned the violin in Kentucky’s public schools. Family told her she ought to sing country music. And she, as kids will do, rebelled, refused to even think of singing country music and moved away. When she got homesick, she said she decided to explore her roots musically. She started singing country music. Somewhere along the way, around the time the Bee-Liners became the Bee-Liners, she morphed into a bluegrass singer. She remembers it as her country band turning into a bluegrass band. He remembers hiring her as a bluegrass singer in his bluegrass band.
Despite what you might think, Woodward said there’s so much musical diversity in New York that it’s hard to get any kind of a scene together. There are about two people, he said, in the city who can play banjo at a professional level and are available for shows, tours, etc. Here, he said, the scene is different. The fans and the musicians are more serious about the music. In New York, he said, they’d “want to dress it up in clown clothes, do a Nirvana song” just for the giggles.
“I’m so over that,” he said.
Here they’re serious about the music and not ashamed of it, he said.
Hart said Woodward has described the Bee-Liner sound as Gillian Welch arm wrestling The Dillards at a Beach Boys Concert.
“It’s bluegrass,” he said.
Bluegrass strained through a lot of influences.
“I grew up on AM radio” where anything that was a hit would be played, regardless of genre, he said.
That diversity of sound, he said, has helped to define the Bee-Liner sound. What he and Hart hope for is something all its own. The first generation, he said, the Bill Monroes, the Stanley Brothers, the Don Renos and Red Smiley, weren’t cookie cutters. They didn’t sound like each other and bands today shouldn’t strive to sound too alike.
“I suspect that not everybody’s going to like us, but those that do, well they like us.”
Still, the Bee-Liners play to the audience. You have to, Woodward said. They’re there to dance. They want to hear certain things. It’s the band’s job to give them what they want. It’s a matter of showing respect for the audience, he said, a way of playing to them, not at them. At any rate Hart and Woodward say they love to do the old songs. They’ve had Carter Family material in sets since their early days. When they’re listening just for pleasure, it’s the stuff they turn up.
“We love that music.”
Bluegrass remembers its history, honors it even. Rock tends to eat its young, he said. And the fans, most of them play too, know the history of the songs, the singers, know what they want and seek it out. They “proselytize with the same fervor of a deacon” trying to win souls, he said.
Woodward grew up listening to bluegrass, along with any other good music that rode the airwaves back then. He said he’s been playing bluegrass for better than 20 years now.
Woodward said the community embraced the Bee-Liners from the beginning. Local bands, too, were welcoming.
“They didn’t haze us at all,” he said.
In fact, both said the community embraced the Bee-Liners from the moment they landed in Abingdon. Along the way, Hart said, they’ve learned a lot and had a lot of fun.
Among favorite spots, for Woodward is the three-day Rhythm and Roots Reunion. For Hart, it’s the Lays Hardware Building in Coeburn. It was, she said, “one of the most special nights of my life.”
For both the Carter Fold factors in, and anywhere, really that there’s a good crowd.
“I just love playing for a dancing crowd,” Hart said.
“Ripe,” the Dixie Bee-Liners second album, spent nine weeks at the No. 1 slot even before its April 15 release. The band held two release parties, one last Friday in Nashville and another at the Barter Theatre on Monday.
Hart said they didn’t want to release an album with lead song about the Crooked Road and not have a launch party somewhere along the Crooked Road.
Next, the Dixie Bee-Liners will play a couple of private events before heading out to Branson, Mo., St. Louis, Mo., Arkansas, Georgia and Texas. They’ll be on the road for a year and a half, till it’s time to make the next CD, Woodward said.