Bluegrass and barbecue had a hard week.
The music kept looking backward to move forward. The barbecue business kept looking ahead and finding the bill.
Claire Lynch released Empty Pair of Shoes, her first album in nearly ten years. It is her fifteenth record and the first on which she wrote or cowrote every song. That matters. A singer can spend a career interpreting the words of others. Then one day the room becomes quiet and the songs have to come from somewhere closer.
Lynch has been one of the important voices in modern bluegrass since the days of the Front Porch String Band. She has sung with power, patience and a kind of clean sadness that never needs to announce itself. Now she has made a record built around her own writing.
There are eight songs. The collaborators include Becky Buller, Jon Weisberger, Cathy Fink, Carl Jones, Pamela Brown Hayes and Dawn Kenney. The record is not a return made for nostalgia. It is a return made with something to say.
That same sense of continuity appeared in another important release this week. Bela Fleck announced Live Heart: My Bluegrass Heart at the Ryman, due October 16. The concert was recorded at the Ryman Auditorium in January 2022.
The musicians on the recording make up a small history of bluegrass. Sam Bush is there. Michael Cleveland is there. Jerry Douglas, Stuart Duncan, Sierra Hull, Edgar Meyer, Billy Strings, Bryan Sutton, Tony Trischka and Molly Tuttle are there.
They are not arranged like exhibits in a museum. They are playing together.
That is the important part. The older musicians are not standing behind a rope while the younger ones perform in another room. The language is shared. The banjo, fiddle, mandolin, dobro and guitar pass between generations without asking permission.
Jim VanCleve will receive another kind of recognition. He will be inducted into the National Fiddler Hall of Fame on October 4 during an Appalachian Road Show concert in Boone, North Carolina.
VanCleve entered professional bluegrass as a teenager. He played with Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver. He helped form Mountain Heart and Appalachian Road Show. He has worked in Nashville and in the deeper country beyond Nashville.
His playing is fast when it needs to be. It is exact. But speed is not the heart of it. The heart is the sound of Appalachian fiddle music still alive inside a modern arrangement.
The past also came back at Camp Springs in North Carolina.
The restored Blue Grass Park held its Labor Day Bluegrass Festival on the same ground where Carlton Haney built one of the early great festivals in 1969. The 1971 festival was filmed for Bluegrass Country Soul. This year, people watched that film at the place where it was made.
That is more than preservation. A museum keeps a thing still. A festival lets it breathe.
There were campers on the grounds. There were musicians on the stage. There were people listening who had not yet been born when the cameras first arrived. The land did not become a monument. It became itself again.
Bluegrass also looked toward a difficult future. Tim Stafford will give the opening keynote at World of Bluegrass in Chattanooga on October 19. His subject will be AI and the bluegrass business.
The title is From AI to G Runs.
Bluegrass depends on the hand. It depends on timing, touch and the slight difference between one player and another. Yet the musicians work in a world shaped by artificial intelligence, digital distribution and machines that can imitate almost anything.
The question is not whether bluegrass will change. It always has. The question is what it will refuse to give away.
Chet Rhodes, who died at 78, represented another part of the music. He worked behind the scenes in distribution through County Sales and Record Depot. He helped independent labels and regional artists reach listeners when larger businesses had little interest in them.
A genre is not made only by the people onstage. It is made by the people who sell the records, book the halls, run the radio stations and carry the boxes.
The barbecue news was less gentle.
Lenox Barbecue in Houston will close on September 30 after eighty years. The business began as the Lenox Cafe in 1946. Erik and Melissa Mrok took over in 2001. They survived a changing city, rising costs and the long labor of keeping a smokehouse alive.
They are retiring. The meat, insurance, utilities and everything else have become too expensive.
Treviño’s Craft Smokehouse in Jacksboro also closed. Dustin and Sara Treviño said the business had placed too much financial pressure on the family. They had opened in 2021, closed once before and returned with Central Texas brisket, ribs, pork and sausage. The sides carried the influence of Tex Mex cooking.
The food was not the problem.
That is becoming the plain truth of craft barbecue. Good meat does not repair bad economics. A beautiful brisket cannot lower the insurance bill. Smoke cannot make labor cheap. A family can love a restaurant and still be unable to keep paying for it.
At the same time, Terry Black’s Barbecue is opening its eighth restaurant in New Braunfels. The location has a large pit house, a two story covered deck and smokers placed where customers can watch them work.
The contrast is sharp. An eighty year old restaurant is closing in Houston. A large and carefully financed brand is opening near Lockhart, where barbecue already has a long memory.
This does not mean people have stopped wanting barbecue. It means the business is changing hands.
The small operator must fight for every dollar. The larger operator can build a room around the fire, hire more people and spread the cost across several locations. The smoke may smell the same, but the structure beneath it is different.
Pinehurst offered another model. Its barbecue festival lasted three days and treated the food as a discipline. There was a pitmaster dinner, a grilling class, bourbon pairings and a seven pitmaster contest. There were sauces, rubs and Southern sides.
People could eat. They could also learn.
That may be the future of barbecue tourism. Not just a plate passed across a counter, but a place where visitors meet the people who make the food and understand how the work is done.
In Chicago, Soul and Smoke opened its first full sit down restaurant in Evanston. Chef D’Andre Carter and Heather Bublick began with catering in 2015. The new restaurant keeps barbecue at its center while moving toward a broader menu.
That is a difficult step. Customers want the brisket they remember. They also want a neighborhood restaurant they can visit on a Tuesday night.
The company is testing whether a smokehouse can grow without losing its soul.
The outdoor cooking business is facing its own division.
Meat Church turned its Holy Cow and Honey Hog rubs into limited release beef and pork jerky with Jack Link’s. The rub company is no longer selling only seasoning. It is selling a flavor identity that can live in a grocery aisle, even in the hands of someone who has never owned a smoker.
Camp Chef, meanwhile, appears to be leaving the full size grill category. The company has not formally confirmed a complete withdrawal, but many full size products have disappeared from its online range. The remaining Woodwind 24 has appeared through outlet channels.
This is a sign of a crowded market.
Grilla Grills offered a different signal. Its parent company, American Outdoor Brands, reported strong sales in its outdoor lifestyle segment. New products such as the Mammoth vertical smoker and Pie O pizza oven helped drive interest.
The grill market is not simply dying. Buyers are becoming more selective. They will pay for something excellent, useful or different. They are less willing to pay for another machine that does the same thing as the last one.
That is where the week leaves us.
Bluegrass is carrying its history forward by putting generations in the same room. Barbecue is carrying its history forward by deciding who can still afford to keep the fire burning.
The music has its hands on the old instruments. The restaurants have their hands on the old recipes. Both are trying to survive a new economy.
The work remains difficult.
But the strings are still ringing. The smokers are still hot. And somewhere in North Carolina, people are camping on old festival ground while a fiddle begins the next song.