Patuxent CD-180 Angelica Grim - Look for Me

In Bluegrass music, a high spontaneous compliment you can pay some player or singer upon hearing their very best stuff is a three letter, one syllable utterance that would occasionally fall from the lips of the “Father” himself when he felt compelled by an extraordinary sound. That word is, “Son!” Had Bill Monroe lived to see this recorded debut of young Angelica Grim, Bluegrass vocabulary might have included a new entry, “Daughter!”

At the ripe old age of 19 Angelica demonstrates a booming set of pipes, perfect intonation, and that unquantifiable, indescribable something that personifies, “the high, lonesome sound.”

Hailing from the same fertile California farming grounds that produced the likes of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens, Angelica sounds as much at home with a mountain ballad such as Hazel Dickens’ “West Virginia,” a Stanley Brothers classic, “ She’s More To Be Pitied,” or Ginger Boatwright’s “Runaway Ramp.”

Her voice fits both genres effortlessly and naturally. But she carves new ground with a hard drivin’, inspiring version of the Box Tops, “The Letter.” That big hit single, which in 1967 topped the Billboard pop charts for four straight weeks, turns out to be a spectacular Bluegrass song in Angelica’s big voice–especially when she’s backed here–on all tracks no less–by a stellar cast of Bluegrass all stars. Among them are, fiddle virtuoso Michael Cleveland, mandolinist, Frank Solivan, who’s making a name for himself among Nashville’s elite players, the banjo players banjo player, Mike Munford, and legends Bill Emerson and Mike Auldridge. Based on this first outing, the sky’s the limit for this California youngster. Just say, “You heard her here, first!”

Now turn up your stereo, put on your headset, or thumb-crank that ipod in the clockwise direction, and in no time flat, you’ll be uttering to the outside world that definitive word of high praise, “Daughter!”

 Doug McKelway