DALE ANN BRADLEY GETS SERIOUS

BY JIM PATTERSON

Dale Ann Bradley, an artist better known for casual virtuosity than outspokenness, found herself motivated to take on social issues on her first album since the pandemic.

“You knocked me down, you just can't let it be/You think you've got the right to,” Bradley aggressively opens the Things She Couldn’t Get Over album on Pinecastle Records. “When you push me to the ledge, it's plain to see/You think nothing's wrong with you.”

Is the song, “Living on the Edge,” a response to physical abuse? It could be, but not necessarily, said Bradley in a telephone interview with The Contributor from her Kentucky home.

“I think it’s any kind of bullying, abuse, any kind of manipulating,” said the bluegrass veteran, whose career stretches back to the early 1990s when she started out as a member of the New Coon Creek Girls. She recently ended a long stint with the Sister Sadie, who was named best entertainer and vocal group in 2020 by the International Bluegrass Music Association. Bradley has won five IBMA Awards for best female vocalist.

“You’re not going to bully me anymore, or smack me a bit with your opinions about anything,” Bradley added.

With three songs written or co-written by Bradley, the album covers the mistreatment of Native Americans, mental illness and Vietnam War veterans. There’s a touch of confessional singer-songwriters like Jackson Browne on the album, along with folk.

“I’ve never been a big activist, but I certainly have the consciousness to say something when I feel it needs to be said,” Bradley said.

Her warm, comforting voice and subtle acoustic backing from her band Moon Runner allow the messages to go down easy.

On “Lynwood,” written by David Morris, Gordon Roberts and Donate Gardner, she weaves in instrumental allusions to Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind” before singing a snippet of that song’s chorus at the end. The song chronicles the decline of a war veteran.

“Bluegrass resembles its larger cousin, country music, in the way that it’s dealt — or hasn’t dealt — with current issues,” said Jon Weisberger, a bluegrass songwriter and award-winning music journalist.

“Oblique references, or the casting of themes in a sort of general light, rather than treating specific events, policies or socio-political trends, tends to be the order of the day. Work and social or cultural or economic environments are more likely to appear as background ‘facts of life’ than as focal points for lyrics.”

The album’s tone was set with the first song recorded for the project, “Things She Couldn’t Get Over.” The only selection solely penned by Bradley is an autobiographical look at a mentally ill woman’s struggle to cope. Bradley went to high school with the woman who inspired the song.

School officials let the afflicted girl wander the halls most of the day since she wasn’t able to settle down in a classroom.

“After a few episodes of trying to handle the situation wrong, because they didn’t know what to do, they would just let her go,” Bradley said. “She had some pretty crippling issues.”

On most of her solo albums, Bradley records a cover song as a bluegrass romp. In the past she’s done hits by Journey (“Wheel in the Sky”), Stealers Wheel (“Stuck in the Middle With You”), Fleetwood Mac (“Over My Head”) and Tom Petty (“I Won’t Back Down”).

“Dale Ann’s something of a unique figure in bluegrass, insofar as her personal roots are so deep in rural southeastern Kentucky soil — an area that has leaned strongly toward the ‘mountain’ style of bluegrass exemplified by the Ralph Stanley sound, not to mention a pretty conservative kind of culture,” Weisberger said. “(At the same time) her musical tastes and interests have been relatively eclectic, as exemplified by the variety of rock, pop, folk and country songs she’s covered over the years.”

This time around, she didn’t find room for one of those.

“I think it was maybe the way society and we all have been the past year and a half (because of the coronavirus),” Bradley said.

“As a person, I feel like I’ve grown from singing the lyrics (on the new album),” she said. “I hope it brings about positive and good and loving change.”

The album ends appropriately with “In The End” written by Jill Gilliam, about what’s really important in life.

“Did you do your best?/Did you love your most?” she sings. “That’s what matters in the end.”