MOLD BREAKERS

Making a Name for Themselves

Of the hundreds of musicians who have learned and played in the area, there are a few who have realized the full potential of their talents and become recognized by international audiences.

Featured on this page are Sam Bush, his band New Grass Revival, and The Kentucky Headhunters. These are musicians who learned within the local community but were open to influences that transformed their genres and expanded the range of their respective musical traditions. Both the Kentucky Headhunters and New Grass Revival are remembered in the collective memory in Southcentral Kentucky as monoliths of music and exemplars of what makes the Southcentral musical landscape excellent and unique.

Sam Bush

NEW GRASS REVIVAL

Sam Bush started playing mandolin at age 11. Born into a traditional Bluegrass family, he was a teenager in the late 1960s when the sounds of Rock and Roll were a constant, pervasive force. While he was learning fiddle breakdowns with his father’s generation, he was also playing Rock and Roll in his high school band.

Bush leaned into more experimental sounds with the band Poor Richard’s Almanac that he was in with Courtney Johnson. Johnson and Bush went to Louisville in 1970 to join Bluegrass Alliance, where they moved the group into new territories of experimentation. Bush and Johnson went on to form New Grass Revival in 1972. They were joined by Curtis Burch and, later, John Cowan. The first single Bush cut with New Grass Revival in Nashville in 1978 was a cover of Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Great Balls of Fire,” an early commercial Rock and Roll classic.

New Grass Revival’s album covers were just as vibrant and diverse as their musical styles. Check them out below.

Covers are scanned from the collection of Kelley Hammers.

TOMMY JOHNSON
EXCERPT FROM KFP INTERVIEW

TOMMY JOHNSON

“This really crazy, nuts friend of mine... could always turn me on to great music that was coming around. He says ’I'm gonna take you to see something tonight... You got to watch this.’ We're going to Caribou. Well, I was still like 20, but they all knew me so I could go in they would let me in. And it was New Grass Revival, man, that was a life-changer. I didn't know that even existed. I mean, I knew Bluegrass all my life. I didn't know that level of expertise even existed much less right here. And then that was the original New Grass. My god, I mean they peeled my ears back, and then they became like, you know, a staple around here.”
An early line-up of New Grass Revival in 1974 featuring Courtney Johnson, Sam Bush, John Cowan, and Curtis Burch. Courtesy of Kelley Hammers.

Legacy

While today you can find a bluegrass version of almost any popular song, 50 years ago that was not the case. The genre’s boundaries were much more restricted and defined. New Grass Revival helped to change those boundaries, expanding and opening the genre to experimentation. 

After New Grass Revival, Bush went on to have a robust bluegrass career. He is still looked-up to by many in the Bowling Green Music community as a beacon of the kind of talent that exists in the region. To this day he comes back to play with his former bandmates whenever he gets the chance.

“...They didn’t like the fact that they were taking the bluegrass approach and incorporating the whole world of music in it. In other words, bluegrass has a fence around it, and so to people- If you call something ‘bluegrass,’ then you can’t step outside that fence. That fence was built by Bill Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs, and many other people. So, you know, what Sam wanted to do was- there’s no fences. If he hears something he likes, he’d play it in New Grass Revival, it could be classical, jazz, rock, blues, whatever. Other bands that emulated what New Grass Revival did just started calling themselves ‘new grass’ bands.”
KENNY LEE SMITH
KENNY LEE SMITHKFP 2016
“We did some bluegrass festivals, the ones that were more open than the staid, bluegrass freaks, you know… At the festivals, when they’d get onstage, and all you could hear were the chairs being put away. Because it was the bluegrass people, they didn’t want to hear the hippies.”
HAZEL JOHNSON
HAZEL JOHNSONKFP INTERVIEW
“It didn’t take me very long to figure out how great [Sam] was, you know. And you want to gravitate toward guys like that, where you can learn from them… I look forward to every time I can see Sam. You know, I’ve jammed with his band, he’s jammed with us, and I look up to him a lot.”
GREG MARTIN
GREG MARTINKFP INTERVIEW
The Kentucky Headhunters

The Kentucky Headhunters

Straight out of Metcalfe County and originally known as Itchy Brother, The Kentucky Headhunters aspired to be the next great Southern-Rock band. They formed when Greg Martin and Richard Young met while riding the same bus to school. They played together throughout their school years and in various bands during the adolescence of their careers, and began to tour seriously as Itchy Brother in 1977. When one of the executives of their initial investor firm died, the band was put on pause.

Pickin on Nashville

In 1986, Martin and Young decided to start Itchy Brothers back up again. They found some new members and went by the name Thoroughbred for a while until settling on the Headhunters. Ricky Lee joined, and the boys started playing Nashville and got money to record an album together. From there they started getting interest from record labels. A Mercury Records rep found their tape and saw them perform at Picasso’s; the band was signed with the label within a matter of weeks. They changed their name to the Kentucky Headhunters.  Influenced by many styles, including Honky Tonk, Rock, Blues, Country, Rockabilly, and Bluegrass, they broke onto the national scene with their sensational record Pickin on Nashville. The rest is history.

Influence

The Kentucky Headhunters’ influence is still felt around Bowling Green to this day. Every Monday night, you can hear Greg Martin host the beloved Low Down Hoe Down on D93. The next generation of the Young brothers went on to form Black Stone Cherry, who have enjoyed great success touring in Europe.

The Kentucky Headhunters continued a tradition of Southern Rock and helped to bridge that to mainstream Country audiences in the early 1990s. That down-home, gritty feeling is something Nashville producers spend millions of dollars trying to reproduce, and it rarely ever sounds as good as the real thing.

We’re not saying that The Headhunters brought a Rock and Roll attitude to Nashville, but 6 months after Pickin on Nashville reached number 2 on the billboard Country charts, Garth Brooks was on stage smashing guitars.

KENNY LEE SMITH -
EXCERPT FROM KFP INTERVIEW

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