3 stars


While his name may not ring bells for the casual listener, fans of fiery fingerpicking are well aware of Jim Mills. A former sideman for the Bass Mountain Boys and Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver, the Durham native recently landed the starting banjo gig in Ricky Skaggs’ Kentucky Thunder; he also just finished a three-year stretch as the International Bluegrass Association’s Banjo Player of the Year. Add to that the fact that his first solo album, 1998’s “Bound To Ride,” won the IBMA’s Instrumental Album of the Year award, and it’s fair to say that Jim Mills is making quite a name for himself.

For “My Dixie Home,” Mills recruited some famous fellow travelers as vocalists: Skaggs, Tim O’Brien, Paul Brewster, and man of constant sorrow Dan Tyminski share singing duties on the album. The tunes, handpicked by Mills, borrow heavily from the bluegrass canon; tracks include numbers penned by Earl Scruggs (“Mama Blues”), J.D. Crowe (“Black Jack”) and Grandpa Jones (“It’s Rainin’ Here This Mornin’”), to name a few. The result is tight and smart and even sweet, as Mills and his cronies dish up a round of banjocentric bluegrass that will surely please the purists. Despite the vocal firepower on “My Dixie Home” — and Mills’ guests acquit themselves admirably — the highlights here are the instrumental numbers. Melodic, inventive, and, yes, bouncy, Mills shows once again just why he’s picked up all that hardware over the years. He even grabs the git-tar and turns in a lovely bit of “thumbstyle” picking on “I’ll See You In My Dreams,” the album’s best and final cut.

Yet for all the professionalism brought to bear on “My Dixie Home” — or perhaps because of it —the album lacks any real punch or swagger; it feels a little too careful, a little too predictable, a little too traditional. The most interesting of the current crop of bluegrass songs are those that drive at some other notion than, to pick a few obvious targets, My Sweet Liza Jane, My Old Mountain Home, or Grandpa’s Generic Front-Porch Jamboree. Those are great and fine things, and rightfully part of the songwriter’s stock set of images, but they can’t do it alone. Bluegrass wasn’t a hidebound tradition when Bill Monroe pulled it together out of the dynamic elements in his midst — mountain music, field hollers, instrumental swing — but ever since it has seemed to be backing into the future, looking to the past rather than the present to draw inspiration. (I, for one, wouldn’t mind a bluegrass song about canned tomatoes or, for heaven’s sake, the city bus.)

Perhaps it is unfair to lay this diatribe on the feet of “My Old Dixie Home” — a fine and skillful album that accomplishes precisely what it sets out to do — but even as expert lick piles upon expert lick and high lonesome tenors came floating down telling familiar tales, I find myself wishing for something different.