Stuart Duncan

Okay.

Because of the history of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Vassar Clements and John McEwen and the fiddle players on the Circle Records, Stuart Duncan and Mark O'Connor and name them.

Yeah.

To play the songs in this band, I certainly play them the way I play them.

Well, we had played it without the part a couple times, and then we're like, okay, now we'll have to play it without that singing part in there.

And so we had never even done that before, and I was like, how's that going to go? And then we got a fiddle player, Stuart Duncan, in there that's never played the song except for the time before that.

Mm-hmm.

And he played the fills between the vocals exactly without the vocals there.

Yeah, totally.

I mean, there's a lot to be, I guess, learned from with different styles and different fiddle players.

And I mean, gosh, with Stuart Duncan, he's been my idol ever since I could ever...

I hear him in you a lot.

And we're finally just like, man, let's do this thing.

And he set it up and took three days and, and one of the coolest studios sound Emporium uh we had Stuart Duncan play fiddle with us uh for the record so that was dream come true he's a hero of all of ours you know and um it was amazing man um and it you know there was one point when T-bone was kind of talking about like you know, the, the, he was like talking about like the pressure of like a kettle, you know, he's like, right when it's about to boil, you know, it's like, it's there.

He's like, you don't have to be louder, but you have to like kind of hold that energy and intensity.

He was like kind of giving us, you know, some, some suggestions and things like that.

Yeah, Tim came and recorded, um, BVs and octave mandolin.

My friend Sam Grizman came and played the double bass and put together a team of players that I didn't know, uh, amongst others, uh, Brian Sutton on flatpick guitar and, uh, Stuart Duncan on fiddle.

Um, and it all just together brought me that, yeah, the cultural connection, so to speak.

Like, recording with musicians I used to look up to, now they're recording on my album, telling me how proud my dad would be of the body of work I put together.

And they turned me also on to strengthen numbers.

So that was the first time I heard like, you know, Stuart, Stuart Duncan and Mark O'Connor playing real slick, nice fiddle, you know, along with all those, you know, classic tunes that those guys did.

So that's the one that really flipped it.

So, you know, that's another part of why this is called 50 years of clown school, because it was a, Literal clown, you know, Jeep that got me down the fiddle road with the clown.

Yeah, yeah

... and besides guitar, mostly guitar, thankfully, and Stuart Duncan.

And, um, but anyway, so when we went in the studio, uh, to, and began work on a second record that kind of then petered out at that time, they, they did finish it, um, Robert called me and said, "Hey, man, let's, let's do a record.

Uh, let's put a band together, and let's do a record." And we put a band together called The Band of Joy.

If there was a starstruck moment in this process, it was being around the session players.

So like Stuart Duncan on fiddle and Paul Franklin on steel.

They were kind of all of...

We were all giddy to be around Stuart and...

John Jarvis is the other.

That's crazy.

You know, I'm standing behind Stuart Duncan and Eddie Dunlap next to Jed Hughes.

Wow.