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The Old Lyons Recorder
December 18, 2003
Time Out of Mind: KC Groves and her band Uncle Earl keep the old music alive
By Mike Oatley

The room was small, but full. There was a table in back where cold drinks where for sale, but if
you know who to ask - possibly the preacher who let out build-ing- you could probably get a
cup beer. A string of lights was strung on the back wall, a make-shift stage where five musicians
alternately leaned into a single microphone for their solo turns. It’s a scene that could have
come from many places, and dis-parate times: a live broadcast from the hazy early years of the
last century, somewhere in the Kentucky hills, or any number of similar scenes I tripped into
while thumbing around the backwaters of Alabama in the 1980s. Or over at Rogers Hall in
Lyons last week.  The band in this case was Uncle Earl, a shifting ensemble of old time and bluegrass
musicians hailing from various points on the map. At Rogers Hall the other night, Lyons’ Sally Truitt
pitched in to hold down the acoustic bass for banjo player Abby Washburn, fiddler Rayna Gellert
and guitar-ists and mandolinist KC Groves. A clogger, Kristin Adreassen fly in from North Carolina
to clog and pick up a guitar for a few songs.

KC Groves is a familiar face on Lyons music scene, being a regu-lar at the Stone Cup bluegrass
jams on Sundays, and being the driving force behind the High Street Concert Series that so far
has brought Mollie O’Brien to the Old Stone Church and her own band to Rogers Hall the other
night, among other shows. KC Groves landed in Lyons about three years ago, after leav-ing
her native Michigan, where she was already well established on the Ann Arbor-Detroit
y’alternative music scene. Uncle Earl, having been formed back in Michigan, had released a
well-received first recording, She Went Upstairs..., produced by Lyons’ own Sally Van Meter,
and KC had put out a record of her own, 1999’s Can You Hear It.” That record had been produced
by the legendary and late Charles Sawtelle, of Hot Rize fame, and featured a list of recognizable
names from the bluegrass world near and far like Tim O’Brien, Tony Furtado.
She’s wrapped up work on a second recording of her own that will be out soon but for KC, Uncle
Earl remains the main act. The band gathers about once a month for a long weekend’s run through
any shows they can line up in a given region, mini-tours like last week’s set of stops in Lyons, Fort
Collins, Denver and Gunnison, or a recent string of shows in the Pacific Northwest. The band be-gan
as a duo, with the full band assembled to support the record, but, as KC said, “We’ve taken
Uncle Earl and run with it.” And Uncle Earl remains a separate entity from the KC’s own music.
Uncle Earl sticks closer to old time music, breath-ing life back into dusty old moun-tain ballads.
The point of Uncle Earl, KC told the OLR, is to help keep the tradition of American string band
music alive. These tunes could get lost but we want to help pre-serve it and bring it to other
people.”  While Uncle Earl’s first record is largely a run through Uncle Earl's She Went Upstatirs..
KC Groves Can You Hear It” traditionals, with a few choice covers - Utah Phillips’ “Orphan
Train,” for example - tossed in, “Can You Hear It” collects KC's own compositions and collabora-tions.
The songs are lighter, less dirthful. Poppier, even. I basically write pop songs,” says KC. “Anything will
sound bluegrass-y with a banjo on it.”  Like many of today’s blue-grass musicians, bluegrass and old time
music is not where KC started, it’s just where she’s ended up. Her family roots ex-tend into the mountains
of West Virginia, and her father is a signer, a country yodeler, so the mountain music was always around
when she was growing up. At six her parents forced her to take piano lesson -- “I fought it tooth and nail,”
KC says (though the piano she learned to play on recently waas trans-planted from Michigan to her Lyons
home) - “and I was more into punk and jazz in high school. In college I discovered the folkie thing.”  She
became a fixture at open mic’s in places like Ann Arbor’s The Ark, put out a pair of records and put together
Uncle Earl.  Then she made the semifinals of the songwriter competition at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, and
flew out to Colorado. KC said she decided she had to move to Colorado. “I decidedthere was a lot going on
out here, so much bluegrass going on, that I decided I had to come.” The Detroit scene is better known for
Motown and rock more indus-trialized, from the Stooges and the MC5, to the Bob Seger Sys-tem and Ted
Nugent, to Eminem and the White Stripes, than pas-toral or old-time-y. “There were no banjo players. If I
wanted to put a band together, I couldn’t find anyone.”  In Lyons, finding someone to play with has been no
problem.  “Everybody plays music here,” KC said.