I've Got That Old Feeling

Alison Krauss

album cover

A Vitalizing Shot of Bluegrass

Child prodigy Alison Krauss probably didn't intend to transform bluegrass when she put together her first band. But then, she was only ten years old—and already a championship fiddler. By fourteen, Krauss, who also sings beautifully, began recording under her own name, and within a few projects, she'd single-handedly brought a wild-eyed youthful vigor to the style known for its staid adherence to tradition.

Krauss won hearts quickly because of the plaintive directness of her voice and the parallel terseness of her fiddle. On this, her third album, the native of Champaign, Illinois, proves that youthfulness does not equal recklessness: The up-tempo songs move with authority, the ballads with grandmotherly patience. Just when she finishes some heartbreaking verse, along comes a quietly dazzling instrumental caprice—led sometimes by Krauss's fiddle, but just as often by the dobro (played by the master Jerry Douglas, who also produced the album) or mandolin (both Sam Bush and Stuart Duncan). Like all the great ensembles of country music, her band Union Station is dazzling when it's moving at a disciplined gallop, just keeping time.

The album isn't exclusively bluegrass. There are country weepers ("That Makes One of Us"), folk-leaning songs ("Endless Highway"), and tunes that use rockera devices to update bluegrass themes ("Winter of a Broken Heart"). Krauss's skillful meshing of styles foreshadows the more ambitious genre-jumbling efforts she initiated later—most notably Raising Sand, her stupendous 2007 collaboration with Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant. I've Got That Old Feeling, which won the 1990 Bluegrass Album Grammy, marks the moment Krauss sneaks away from tradition, and discovers that the core bluegrass values she assimilated so well have prepared her to play anything.

Genre: Country
Released: 1990, Rounder
Key Tracks: "I've Got That Old Feeling," "Wish I Still Had You," "Winter of a Broken Heart"
Catalog Choice: Lonely Runs Both Ways; Raising Sand
Next Stop: Patty Loveless: Mountain Soul
After That: Bela Fleck: Bela Fleck and the Flecktones
Book Page: 435