By all accounts, Stacy Phillips knows how to throw a party. Raising one hand, weathered fingers festooned and shining with pick rings, he summons Bill Monroe & His Blue Grass Boys. His foot begins to tap, and Alison Krauss is knocking on the door with a jug of moonshine in one hand and a fiddle in the other. A quick nod of his head to the left, and Webb Pierce and Cindy Walker have arrived just in time to eat dinner and dance barefoot around the table.
Phillips’ group, Stacy Phillips & His Bluegrass Characters, brought this all-consuming form of traditional bluegrass to the Institute Library (IL) on Chapel Street last week, commanding the room as he and the group kicked off the IL’s new “Member in the Spotlight” series. A new effort by the IL to “convey the variety and depth of our support in the community,” the program will highlight the skills and talents of one of the IL’s 500 members each month.
“First, it [the series] highlights the particular talents and passions of the night’s performer(s). Second, by ‘featuring a different member every month … it gives members and prospective members a special chance to tour the Library and mingle with one another in a low-key setting,” wrote library Executive Director Natalie Elicker in an email to the Independent after the event.
Phillips, a Grammy winner who lives in Westville and who joined the IL earlier this year, can add one more point to Elicker’s list: he loves listening intently to the feedback – aural or otherwise – of those around him, like the original members of the IL. Seated in the round with the other members of the group (Phil Zimmerman, mandolin; Betsy Rome, guitar; Pete Kelly, bass; Red Kaufman, banjo), Phillips put the deeply conversational element of bluegrass on display.
Take the group’s performance of Pierce’s 1955 “I Don’t Care [Anymore]” (video at the top of the article). Forget the loping lyrics to the song: far more compelling was the sorrowful strain and catch in Rome’s throat, or the way Zimmerman leaned in and closed his eyes on certain harmonies, or Kaufman’s rhapsodic solos. For Phillips, every piece is about this kind of communication.
“When I’m playing with people, I’m socializing,” he said after the event. “This is why all of us come to play.”