Feedback -- Blueground Undergrass -- December 1999

"You're an Aquarius, aren't you?" Blueground Undergrass founder, vocalist and banjo man, Jeff Mosier, asks me. We've been talking less than two minutes and he's already figured out my birth sign. "I'm an Aquarius, too," he says. Divining a relative stranger's birth sign within seconds is just one example of the marvel of the mind of Mosier.

During our afternoon phone interview Mosier speaks dreamily, punctuating his anecdotes with a laugh that can only be described as a giggle. Behind this laid back demeanor lies a mind that is obviously always at work ferreting out new creative possibilities, pondering what might be.

Despite his strong intuition Jeff Mosier says he could never have forseen the success his "psychedelic hick-hop blues-grass band" would have just a year and a half after its formation: touring with Boulder, Colorado jam sensations Leftover Salmon; steady sales of their CDs Barnyard Gone Wrong and Live at the Variety Playhouse through their Web site, and headlining major jam festivals. "I can't even tell you...I was gonna give it three years to see if it was gonna work, and we're just going gangbusters. It's just going great," the "Reverend" testifies.

It's certainly a long way from where he and his younger brother, Johnny, started playing traditional bluegrass 23 years ago in the mountain town of Bristol, Tennessee. "We heard bluegrass growing up. My grandmother on my mother's side still flatpicks guitar and plays bluegrass. When we were teenagers she was in her 60's and she would put on jeans and boots and we would go to bluegrass festivals. All these old guys would come to her house and sit around and pick, and they would make peanut butter cookies. That was my first exposure." Mosier wasn't swept away by bluegrass initially, however. He and Johnny mostly listened to the same music as other teenagers of the mid-70's: The Eagles, Elton John and Kiss.

It was not until a friend brought a banjo over to his house that Jeff Mosier officially caught bluegrass fever. "I had never seen one up close. It was really heavy and it was really loud! I asked him if I could put his picks on my fingers, and the minute I held it, I just thought it was the neatest thing ever. That was my senior year in high school and my life's really never been the same since."

Brother Johnny Mosier picked up the acoustic guitar and within one month they were providing the tunes at their Southern Baptist church. "I was the only banjo player for miles around, and we were the only guys that played bluegrass, so we always got asked to do the sing-alongs, 'Do, Lord' and 'I've Got Peace Like a River.'" It was shortly thereafter that the Mosier brothers formed the bluegrass band that would dominate their musical lives for the next 20 years, Good Medicine. The pair moved to Atlanta and got to work.

"We played barbecues, weddings, Six Flags, just anywhere people needed bluegrass. Johnny and I have done tour buses where we literally played the music on the tour and would do requests." Not surprisingly the Mosiers didn't find playing bus tours artistically satisfying, "I call that kind of career a cheese career because you're playing stuff like 'Rocky Top,' 'Dueling Banjos,' 'Fox on the Run,' 'Country Road'...It wasn't our music. We were just replicating bluegrass and doing it for money." Johnny went to work for Delta Airlines while Jeff got involved in theater, doing Cottonpatch Gospel with Atlanta's Alliance Theater. "My brother's the sane, calm one and I'm the more nutty one," Jeff says of the siblings' divergent personalities, laughing.

The brothers did take time each week to host their own show on Atlanta's community radio station, WRFG-FM, a bluegrass show called Born in a Barn. It was here that they created the popular Phone Festivals where listeners were invited to call and jam with the brothers via the telephone! "People who didn't even like bluegrass would tune in just for that because it was like David Letterman or something; it was a pretty nutty thing to do," he says.

The Reverend says his musical world truly turned upside down when, in 1988, he met one of the icons of the jam scene, Colonel Bruce Hampton (ret.). "I became an original member of the Aquarium Rescue Unit and it changed my musical life. It was the first time I had ever played with a drummer, it was the first time I had ever played rock n' roll. I started playing for hippies and I had never been around hippies. It was thrilling! And I needed my world turned upside down; I say it gladly." Best of all, for the first time Jeff Mosier felt appreciated for his own musical style. "That was the first time I had ever been listened to. Instead of people saying, 'PLAY "ROCKY TOP!" or, 'PLAY "FOX ON THE RUN!"' people were wanting to hear me play my music. That first year with Bruce I wrote 17 songs and I had never written a song in my entire life. Its like my artistic mind woke up." The Colonel also gave him his nickname, "Reverend," because of his bachelor's degree in Theology.

Eventually Mosier came to the same conclusion Earl Scruggs came to as part of Bill Monroe's band: he just couldn't make enough money playing for someone else (unlike Scruggs and Monroe, Mosier and Hampton are still close friends, however). He quit the Aquarium Rescue Unit to spend three years working with sufferers of Alzheimer's Disease. "I started doing music therapy, went and got certified as a nursing assistant and worked in a nursing home for three years studying the effects of music on Alzheimer's Disease. Its still one of my big loves. Something I do when I'm not touring is I work with Special Audiences, an organization in Atlanta that books artists to work with special populations. My specialties are geriatric dementia, Alzheimer's, head injuries and mental retardation. I take my banjo into a nursing home or a mental hospital and its an amazing thing, what happens when you sing music to these people." During this time he also penned an original musical, The New Old-Time Christmas Gathering, which he performs each Christmas season at Stone Mountain's Art Station.

While playing with the Colonel, Mosier had made the acquaintance of an up-and-coming Vermont band called Phish. While he was working at the nursing home he got a call from the band requesting bluegrass lessons. Mosier quickly schooled Phish in bluegrass and sat in with them for a few shows in Michigan. He also appeared onstage with fellow Georgians, Widespread Panic. Away from the live stage and music therapy, Mosier wrote the soundtrack for the HBO film, Ms. Ever's Boys, starring Lawrence Fishburne. All the while, the concept of Blueground Undergrass was developing in his mind.

In 1997 the concept came to fruition. Blueground Undergrass is currently comprised of "The Reverend" (lead vocal, banjo), Johnny Mosier (vocal, guitar), Mark Van Allen (pedal steel guitar, backing vocal), Edward Hunter (fiddle), Bob Stagner (drums) and Kenny Palmer (bass). "Its a fusion of my past, Bill Monroe and Bruce Hampton, if you can imagine that," Mosier laughs. "I like traditional bluegrass, I like Phish, I like Widespread Panic, and these worlds are just now coming together for the first time." .

Mosier says he's also appreciative of the "hippie" audience he's found, "The hippies, in my opinion as a musician, are the greatest audience. They're very loyal, they like the old music and they like rock n' roll. They're the most musically educated and savvy-eared crowd ever. They want to know where bluegrass came from, they want to know about Bill Monroe. They buy Flatt & Scruggs records but they also listen to the Grateful Dead."

What does Jeff Mosier want Blueground Undergrass to contribute to the encyclopedia of American music? "I would like Blueground Undergrass to be the first band to expose a large number of people to bluegrass music. I would like to crossover into pop. Not bad pop, not Madonna; 'popular' meaning I'm not afraid of the mainstream. I think the mainstream deserves to hear banjo and fiddle, and to hear it in a context that they can understand. It's thrilling and its happening, its truly happening to the band right now."

What has also happened is that Johnny Mosier quit Delta Airlines after over a decade with the company to concentrate on Blueground Undergrass full-time. The band is also currently searching for a tour bus.

The boys of BGUG seem to have found cult-rock stardom through the most unlikely route of old-time mountain music. The road less travelled has taken them from bus tours to tour buses. All aboard!

Read also Watching the Undergrass Grow on this site.

Live at the Variety Playhouse is on sale at bluegroundundergrass.com.

Blueground Undergrass opens for Gov't Mule at the Roxy December 31, 1999.