Well, you make a real good stab, Leon. One album that really came out of left field and knocked my socks off was your 1979 album with Willie Nelson, One for The Road. Willie actually has a background in radio. He was a DJ for a time. He actually knows a lot about the record business, beyond being an artist. He had this idea that he was going to do a string of duet records with people he ad- mired, and the one he did with me happened to be the first one of the series. I think he did eight or nine all together. he used to say that if we worked together we would be the biggest thing in country music. We cut 126 songs in five days. So somewhere there's about an- other 106 songs that didn't make it to the record.
Speaking of country. Like so many oth- ers, I loved the Hank Wilson albums. Did you ever do a tour as Hank Wilson? Yeah, I did. I did a Hank Wilson tour with The Gap Band. I have been told it was the in- spiration for that band down in Florida. Who was it? KC and The Sunshine Band. It was me and an all black band playing cowboy songs.
Why could I have not seen that! Man, that's cool! Yeah, it lasted a couple of months. It was a lot of fun.
Are you planning another Hank Wilson album? Yeah. It is a record called Rhythm and Blue- grass, and I cut it with The New Grass Re- vival about 23 years ago. I never released it because I felt that the powers that be didn't understand what was going on. Bluegrass, in many ways, has kind of always had a stigma attached to it- at least in Nashville. they kind of freak out. But there's been a resurgence of music by T. Bone Burnette, and themusic in that movie Oh Brother Where Art Thou. Oddly enough, this music is like that. It's got
a Ray Charles tune on it, and a Beatles tune. But it's a bluegrass album.
Those New Grass guys were, and are great. Was Bela Fleck in the band then? Bela wasn't in the band then. It was Sam Bush, Courtney Johnson, Curtis Burch, and John Cowan on bass. I toured with those guys two years. We went to Australia and around the world. People in Australia walked in, and they didn't see any drums, and they started looking weird. They just kind of sat there and watched us for the first couple of songs. The new wavers got up and started jumping around, doing that funny little pogo
dance.There were mixed reviews. We were playing with The Amazing Rhythm Aces. I think they actually liked them better. (Laughs) It was quite a different kind of show than what they were expecting.
Another favorite of mine is Edgar Win- ter. I know you've done a lot of work with him. Your thoughts on Edgar both as a musician and as a person? Edgar is a music master. You talk about dif- ferent genres, he's the real article. I don't think that many people know that there was a series of records done in Las Vegas style. David Lee Roth did one, and Edgar played on it. He plays the sax on the standards album I have coming out after the first of the year.
He was on some Tina Turner records too. Another album of yours I enjoyed was Anything Can Happen, produced by Bruce Hornsby. How did you come to work with Bruce? Tell us a little about Bruce. He's a great musician and he makes great records. I think he's responsible for inventing a genre of music that I think of as Shenan- doah music. "Mandolin Rain" and stuff like that. Then he started drifting into jazz and away from that. i think he is primarily a jazz musician.
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