Jesse McReynolds (Jim & Jesse)
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All on Mon Jun 26 16:09:32 2023
By Bill Friskics-Warren
Published June 25, 2023Updated June 26, 2023, 2:34 p.m. ET
Jesse McReynolds, who for 55 years was the lead singer and mandolin
player with the first-generation bluegrass duo Jim & Jesse, died on
Friday at his home in Gallatin, Tenn. He was 93.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Joy McReynolds, on her Facebook page.
The longest-running brother act in bluegrass, Jim & Jesse — Mr. Reynolds
and his older brother, Jim — developed a smooth blend of harmony singing
that contrasted with the more piercing, down-home vocal arrangements of
Bill Monroe and the Stanley Brothers. Mr. McReynolds sang the melody
line in a crystalline baritone, while his brother, who died of thyroid
cancer in 2002, added honeyed tenor harmonies on top.
The McReynolds brothers’ instrumental approach was likewise more
polished than that of their peers, creating a bridge between the
barnyard twang of early sibling duos like the Delmore Brothers and the
more streamlined sounds of mid-20th-century country music.
Typically backed by banjo, fiddle and bass, the duo’s music — built
around Jesse McReynolds’s plaintive mandolin playing and his brother’s metronome-like rhythm guitar — was not without its experimental side.
Most notable was Mr. McReynolds’s widely imitated cross-picking
technique, which employed a flat pick to approximate the three-finger
banjo roll of the bluegrass pioneer Earl Scruggs.
“I was sort of listening to what he was doing,” Mr. McReynolds said, discussing the origins of his Scruggs-style picking, an approach that influenced mandolin virtuosos like David Grisman and Sam Bush, in a 2019 interview for the website candlewater.com.
“I didn’t know how he was doing it,” he added. “I knew he was using a three-finger roll on it, but I was trying to do it with a straight pick
so I could play my other style, too.”
That other style, which also qualified as an innovation in bluegrass,
involved a split-string technique in which Mr. McReynolds used his
pinkie to hold down one string of his mandolin’s four pairs of strings
while letting its counterpart reverberate to achieve a droning effect.
This sleight-of-hand, which required great precision, produced two
distinct notes from a pair of strings that were usually played in unison
on the mandolin.
The duo’s 1963 recording of the instrumental “Stoney Creek” is often cited as the quintessential vehicle for Mr. McReynolds’s prowess as a mandolinist. His Scruggs-inspired “mandolin roll,” though, could already
be heard a decade earlier on gospel recordings like “I’ll Fly Away” and “On the Jericho Road.”
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