'City of Gold' by Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway
An artform needs fresh bodies and young blood to survive. Lately, long-standing musical genres have not been lacking in such bodies and blood: blues has guitarist and songwriter Samantha Fish, 34; jazz has saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, almost 26; and bluegrass has Molly Tuttle, 30.
Tuttle’s fourth album, City of Gold, acknowledges the importance of bluegrass continuity: her co-producer is Jerry Douglas, a renowned Dobro player and a member of Union Station, and her main songwriting collaborator is Ketch Secor, a fiddler who fronts Old Crow Medicine Show.
If Douglas and Secor connect her to previous generations, then Golden Highway, the band that made its official debut on2022’s Crooked Tree, connects her to her contemporaries. A bluegrass gal needs a sassy fiddler of her own, and Bronwyn Keith-Hynes is plenty sassy, while Shelby Means supplies the crucial bottom end—there’s no drummer, after all—on stand-up bass.
Kyle Tuttle (no relation, apparently) and Dominick Leslie dab in all the melodic colors on banjo and mandolin, respectively, and Molly herself is a gently virtuosic flatpicking acoustic guitarist. Not unlike Punch Brothers, she and Golden Highway show off collectively rather than stepping on each other’s strings to get a spotlight moment.
The songs on City of Gold help foster this spirit of dexterity within comity: all 13 are originals, all 13 leave room for fine musicianship, and all 13 pay their respects to bluegrass traditionalism. A gold-rush tale like “El Dorado” and a breezily Dylanesque folk song like “When My Race Is Run” could’ve been written yesterday or 75 years ago.
Tuttle is an exceptionally easy singer to like, too, as she guides Dave Matthews through “Yosemite” or implores Tennessee to legalize a “Down Home Dispensary.” Bluegrass is probably never in any real danger as long as there’s open country left to travel, but Molly Tuttle’s youth and Golden Highway’s energy are shots of life anyway.
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Stream City of Gold on Amazon here.
