Interview: Michael Daves on Muleskinner, New York, and Experimentation

When I meet Michael Daves at a pie shop in Park Slope, he’s come straight from a rehearsal, guitar slung across his back.

He’s here just for the week: He and his wife split their time between Brooklyn and the Berkshires these days, so when he’s back in the city, he’s slammed with gigs and teaching.

Michael has a sort of casual professorial quality to him, buttoned up in a blazer underneath his parka, yet his long hair falls wildly. When he talks, he speaks with confidence and direction, displaying his incredibly vast sense of studied knowledge. It is clear he has devoted his life to the history, performance, and preservation of bluegrass. In fact, it is quite possible Daves has written, as he claims, the most expansive archive of bluegrass transcriptions. An hour with him is enough to convince me of that.

Born and raised in Atlanta, Daves had bluegrass in the house from a young age, both of his parents were musicians. He’s perhaps best known for Sleep with One Eye Open, his duo record with Chris Thile (Punch Brother, Nickel Creek), which earned him a Grammy nomination in 2011. Since then, he’s put out albums with Nonesuch Records, collaborating with greats like Sarah Jarosz, Noam Pikelny, Mike Bub, Brittany Haas, and many more. Daves is also a very devoted teacher with over 25 years of experience, leading both private lessons and group classes about a variety of American roots traditions.

In this interview, we talk about his fascination with Clarence White’s 1973 bluegrass supergroup album Muleskinner; how New York has shaped him as a musician; experimental genres; and much more.

Sofia Wolfson: This summer, you are putting together a Muleskinner tribute at the Green Mountain Bluegrass & Roots Festival. What is the importance of the Muleskinner record to you?

Michael Daves: Clarence White is my favorite guitar player, hands down. Always has been. Muleskinner was his very last studio recording. They recorded it around April of ‘73 and he died in June of that year, within a matter of months and before the record came out, so I think it’s significant.

[Clarence] had just left the Byrds. Since 1969 or so, he’d been touring internationally and playing mostly Telecaster. He was coming back to bluegrass and embarking on a solo career. He had a three-album deal with Warner, which he started working on, but he didn’t finish the first record before he died. I think his playing is fascinating on that record because he’s coming back to bluegrass with this whole other perspective from playing psychedelic electric music and B-Bender and touring the world. It’s like his playing had changed. Specifically, he’s gotten into the hybrid picking thing, which he had developed on electric, but then he was reapplying it to acoustic. There was the Muleskinner record and then the Live in Sweden record, which is right around the same time. I think those are really interesting recordings because he’s rediscovering his roots as a bluegrass acoustic guitarist.

On Live in Sweden, he’s playing with his brothers, which is this fascinating mind meld. They’ve been playing their entire lives. And then Muleskinner is this super group thing where he’s interacting with David Grisman and Peter Rowan and Richard Greene and Bill Keith. It’s this round table of people doing fascinating, progressive things with the music that’s coming out of Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs and whatnot.

SW: I’d love to hear more about your upcoming tribute.

MD: At Green Mountain Bluegrass Festival in Manchester, Vermont this summer, we’re going to present a tribute to Muleskinner, featuring Peter Rowan, who is the original singer/songwriter for that band; David Grier on electric; and Tony Trischka on banjo, kind of in the Bill Keith mode.

We’re [also] trying to get Tony to play pedal steel. Bill doubles on banjo and pedal steel on the Muleskinner record. TBD. He’s trying to pass the buck, but we’re working on it. The idea for doing that came out of this Zoom class that I taught at the end of 2024 on Clarence’s playing on the Muleskinner record. It was this deep dive, a five-week Zoom class where I transcribed a bunch of what he played on both the studio record and the live recordings.

SW: How many students did you have?

MD: About 30. My classes are generally limited to 10 people, but if they fill up, I’ll add another section. There were people interested, so I filled three sections of people wanting to do this deep dive into Clarence’s playing, which was great. I loved it.

This is not an album that a lot of people know, so I was thrilled that there were that many people wanting to really have a close look. I’ve played a number of times at Green Mountain Bluegrass before. I know the Turpins, who put the whole thing on. They typically do a tribute set as part of their festival. A couple of years ago, it was a Dolly Parton tribute. Actually, I was there, Peter Rowan was there, and we did one together.

SW: What did you sing?

MD: We did “Just Someone I Used to Know,” a Cowboy Jack Clement’s song in the Porter & Dolly catalog. And then last year, I wasn’t around for it, but they did the Bluegrass Album Band with Chris Eldridge.

SW: Is the Muleskinner tribute something you’re only doing one time for the festival?

MD: Well, actually, we did have another festival ask about it too, so we’ll see. It is possible. We’ll see how this one goes.

SW: I know you’re a deep New York head. I would love to hear about your experience in the New York music scene.

MD: I’ve been in New York over 20 years, and I’d say during that time, New York has had one of the strongest bluegrass scenes in the country. It’s sort of trailed off a little bit these days in terms of the number of professional players who live here, but in the past 20 years, there was a time when we had all of the Punch Brothers, Aoife O’Donovan, Sarah Jarosz, Ross Martin, Grant Gordy, Courtney Hartman…just this incredible list of players. And then there’s the old guard, like Andy Statman and Kenny Kosek, who have been around since the 70s.

The professional contingent comes and goes, but New York still has one of the strongest bluegrass jamming scenes of anywhere in the country. Most nights of the week, you could go to a bluegrass jam in New York. There are a lot of people who play at various levels, from beginners to semi-pros. And then there’s definitely still a critical mass of professional, touring musicians based here.

I think part of why it thrives in the city is because it gives people a sense of family and it makes the big city seem small. You can be a regular at a jam and get to know people in a way that you might not otherwise. Being in the city can be sort of anonymous, and some people like that, but for people who enjoy community and whatnot, bluegrass music provides a really tremendous way for people to get together. They’re appreciating each other and appreciating culture, creativity, and history. I think people into bluegrass in New York tend to be history nerds about it.

There are a lot of different ways of engaging with bluegrass. I grew up in the South and spent a lot of time there, too. In parts of the South, people’s interest in bluegrass tends to be more identity-based, like, this is our music. This is music of our land and our culture and our people. So they’re into the history of it, but more as it relates to them as a cultural group and as individuals.

SW: It’s an identity thing.

MD: Yeah, it’s an identity thing, whereas I think New York people tend to be more into the history of it as a nerd. I mean, I get both things. I’m a nerd, and almost went into ethnomusicology back in college.

SW: What did you study?

MD: I studied music. I ended up focusing on composition and arranging, more in the jazz and experimental music world.

SW: That’s a good segue because we’ve talked about bluegrass, but I am very interested in your life in experimental music. When did you come to more experimental practices?

MD: Part of the question you’re asking now relates to your last question about New York and the music scene. I really love that there is a strong bluegrass community here, and you are surrounded by people doing all sorts of creative stuff in other disciplines at such a high level. I think there’s a lot of inspiration that people get from the visual arts or dance, opera or synth music. It tends to energize people who are doing bluegrass in a special way that I think is really good for the music, especially when that combines with them being nerds about the history of the music, but then getting all this energy from other genres. That’s something that really excites me in New York and is special in that regard. My own involvement in music has always been intertwined between trad music and other things. My parents played fiddle and banjo, so it was in the house. That was very foundational, playing fiddle tunes in the kitchen. My mom took up fiddle when I was around eight. She’d been playing banjo and guitar before that. I heard her playing fiddle tunes slowly at a time when I was taking Suzuki piano, so I was used to learning by ear. I just absorbed it all. I came of age during the grunge era of the early ‘90s, so I have an appreciation for the way that music came in like a bulldozer and had this grit.

There was a sort of destructiveness to it, certainly in looking at what it was responding to, which was ‘80s hair metal.

SW: Glam.

MD: Well, there’s some interesting glam elements in grunge, too. Look at Mother Love Bone, for instance. But that was the era of the fancy guitar solo. And then grunge came in, very elemental, this seething, emotional thing. For me, that was sort of core because of when I came of age. At that point, I hopped off the train of pop music for a good long while and started getting into jazz standards and studying American roots styles, a lot of ragtime, blues guitar, flatpicking, and Western swing. I got really to Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, and stuff like that. And then I hopped into jazz stuff, following jazz sort of chronologically. That’s always an interesting thing, because you can really look at how that genre developed from the ‘20s through the ‘70s. There’s a whole story there.

I followed the development of jazz music, and then when I got to college, I got to work with Yusef Lateef, who’s a legendary jazz music instrumentalist and composer, and who was very experimental in his music. I studied with him for four years. The combination of interesting, grungy rock and experimental jazz has always been inspirational. Then, in the early aughts, I jumped back into more of the pop side of things. The whole garage rock renaissance was going on and I started getting more into classic punk and proto-punk like Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, MC5.

SW: Do you feel like your approach to playing traditional music and playing something more experimental are completely different, or are there some similarities in how you approach both?

MD: Yes and no. The trad music that really speaks to me is stuff that is very elemental, very visceral, like the way Bill Monroe just played all these totally out there, outrageous things on the mandolin, and his singing seems like it’s a matter of life and death. You listen to Hazel Dickens, Ralph Stanley, and in the old-time world, Roscoe Holcomb… it’s the same way. Their music is so visceral, so elemental, so emotional.

To me, there is resonance between traditional musicians of that ilk and the best rock and experimental music. There’s this urge to break free from the violence of life. It’s like medicine in a way, so I think there is some sympathy there. I’ve always been more into that side of bluegrass and trad music than New Grass. It’s all amazing music, but it doesn’t hit me in the same way.

As far as trad music, one of the things that makes it engaging is that you’re interacting with the tradition. There’s an expectation that you learn where things came from, you do your homework, you study source material, and maybe do your own thing with it. You really need to spend a lot of time paying attention to the details of how the masters did it. It’s like a transmission that requires deep listening.

You’re interacting with a tradition, with a cannon, and that’s cool because it facilitates the whole community aspect of being together and playing music with people. But there’s also, in that, a gravity towards playing it safe and doing it like you’ve always done.

I feel like when you’re doing experimental music, it’s all about finding new sounds, playing from your own experiences, and finding ways to create a resonance in the listener, which is not incompatible with doing traditional music. I feel like the best traditional music should be like that as well, but it’s just not the focus of that culture, as far as a musical community. I feel like engaging in multiple worlds helps keep me honest a little bit.

As far as doing traditional music, it helps keep it from being a museum piece. If you hear straight experimental music, you can’t fake it. You have to do something that’s immediate and is your own, that is in the moment and of the moment. There’s a discipline to that. You can’t just go on autopilot and just do the traditional thing. The traditions are also cool. I find New York to be a good place to help keep that balance.

SW: You’re clearly super knowledgeable and into the history of things. Any current obsessions or research trains you’ve been on recently?

MD: The Zoom classes I’ve been offering are thanks to the pandemic. I used to offer group classes in person in New York, and those were fun, but they had to be pretty general because finding 10 or 20 people who want to sign up for such a narrow deep dive in New York is a tall order.

When everything went online, I could offer classes on much narrower topics. Since 2020, I’ve been trying to offer a series of classes that cover the classic bluegrass guitar literature. A lot of Clarence White, Norman Blake, Tony Rice, and Doc Watson in particular. A little bit of George Shuffler. I definitely intend to teach on Larry Sparks and a few others, too.

I’ve been trying to cover a lot of the classic albums and building a transcription library, which I can only assume is probably the biggest and most detailed transcription library of bluegrass guitar at this point. That might not be true, but I’m not aware of others having transcribed as much and as detailed as what I’ve been able to do because of these classes. I’m looking into ways of publishing those, whether it’s books or having a website. One of the problems is that it’s a whole rat’s nest of intellectual property because this is not a version of the tune. I’m transcribing exactly what Norman Blake played on this tune that he wrote, so there’s copyright control stuff. Even if I present it as an educational thing, I have to deal with royalties and stuff. That’s one of the projects to try to figure out in the coming year or two, how to start releasing this.

For the classes, I do the transcriptions. I do tab things out for better or for worse. I have mixed feelings about tablature, but I think for this project of actually documenting the detail of what was played, it’s the best way I know. For the classes, I also provide videos. I’ll play my transcriptions at a couple speeds and I’ll usually do multi-track audio. When it’s the Blake & Rice record, I multi-track the two parts so people can isolate either Tony’s or Norman’s parts, or hear them together. It would be nice to offer the whole compliment of materials for people who really want to dig into this and for people who learn different ways. On the educational front, that’s a big project. I think it’s a great tradition that needs to be documented.

We’ve lost Tony. Norman is still with us, but he’s reclusive. I’ve been able to get some really amazing guests in my classes, but I’ve not been able to get through to Norman. I actually got Larry Sparks on a Zoom call one time, which felt like a major accomplishment. I got him to talk about the Stanley Brothers. He’s one of the last men standing who actually played with the Stanley Brothers and he was happy to talk about that. I think he has a flip phone, so basically I routed a phone call into the Zoom meeting and just had a phone conversation, which my students were able to hear, and I would relay questions to them. It was really amazing. For the Muleskinner class, I got Peter Rowan, David Grisman, and Richard Greene together on a Zoom round table talking, sharing stories. It was amazing and hilarious. Grisman actually lit a bowl during the class, which was the least surprising part of it!

Catch Michael Daves Performing at these Upcoming Venues and Festivals: 

Jordan Tice w/ Patrick M’Gonigle + Michael Daves & Jacob Jolliff at Café Wha – March 21

Shetland Folk Festival – May 1-4

Green Mountain Bluegrass & Roots Festival – August 14-17 (Muleskinner tribute)

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Photographs by Manish Gosalia.