One way to measure the extent of Alison Krauss’s popularity is to look at the crowd at her outdoor concert at New York City’s Lincoln Center one steamy August night. The crowd, which was mostly composed of young, elegant people wearing Banana Republic, sat quietly as Krauss and her band played. The crowd was so large that it kept the 24-year-old bluegrass diva’s platinum album, Now That I’ve Found You: A Collection, in the top 10 of the country charts for 31 weeks; it’s the only bluegrass album to enter the Pop chart’s top 15).
After a month, the atmosphere at a bluegrass festival on the New Jersey-Delaware border is a little looser. A nearly toothless woman, spilling out of a “Gone Pickin” tank top, dances at the stage while the crowd cheers raucously. A man, about sixty, sprawled out on a lawn chair, wearing a T-shirt and shorts, opens the cooler next to him, throws a beer to a friend two rows back, and then exclaims, “Let’s hear more blues!”
The world is listening to more blues, specifically bluegrass, and it’s never been hotter thanks to Krauss. The lead singer and fiddler for Union Station, Krauss doesn’t create the traditional high-lonesome sound of seasoned fiddler Bill Monroe, who has dominated the genre since its inception in the Kentucky hills in the late ’30s. However, her pop-rock-influenced style, which some refer to as “newgrass,” is authentic enough to win over hardcore bluegrass fans, accessible enough for the urban Tower Records set, and powerful enough to have earned her three Grammy Awards and four Country Music Association Award nominations, including best female vocalist.
Krauss has a pure, piercing voice that has been compared to Dolly Parton’s; her skill as a fiddler is equally impressive. Bill Monroe, 84, says of bluegrass, “It’s pretty simple.” ”You just got to hit the high notes and put some blues in it and you got bluegrass. But not everyone can do it. Alison can do it.” Adds a beaming Roy Cox, 72, who attended the New Jersey festival and has followed her career for 10 years: ”She plays so aggressive, and she’s a girl! Before her, this style of music was dying. Bluegrass was truly elevated by her from the barnyard.
As she eats her favorite snacks, candy corn and spicy pickled sausages from Tijuana Mama, while sipping chocolate milk on her tour bus following the New Jersey gig, Krauss dismisses the remark with a firm hand. The straightforward Krauss, who may sing like an angel but is as droll and grounded off stage as the hardscrabble circuit she has toured with Union Station for the past ten years, declares, “I don’t want to take bluegrass out of the barnyard, I want it to stay there.”
