‘Projects Like This Haven’t Been Done in Bluegrass’: Lindsay Lou Leads All-Star New Album Celebrating the Women Songwriters Who Shaped the Genre

Vocalist and guitarist Lindsay Lou had played songs such as Ricky Skaggs’ “All I Ever Loved Was You” and Ralph Stanley’s “I Only Exist” in bluegrass jam sessions for years, before realizing that some of the songs so closely associated with the bluegrass canon’s most popular trailblazing male artists were actually written by women.

“You’ll hear these songs in almost every jam, so to find out they were written by women felt like this beautiful piece of encouragement, to find out that all along there have been women’s voices in this music, and they are pinned to some of the most-jammed songs, like ‘I Only Exist,’ ‘High on a Mountain,’ and ‘Freight Train.’” Lou’s new album, Bluegrass Women , out Friday (Aug.

14) on Work of Bart Records/Soundly Music, aims to balance the scales, placing a long-overdue spotlight on an older generation of women bluegrass songwriters whose musical creations have been often overlooked.

Lou co-produced the album with Shani Gandhi.

For the album, and an accompanying four-part mini-documentary about the making of the project, Lou assembled a who’s who of today’s top women bluegrass stars; alongside Lou, there’s Molly Tuttle, Sierra Hull, Aoife O’Donovan, Alison Brown, Sarah Jarosz, AJ Lee, Gena Britt, Laurie Lewis and more.

“I just started keeping a list of songs like this.

And the timing just happened to be perfect,” Lou says of the album that has been a decade in the making.

“We’re living in this time where government websites, NASA websites are being scrubbed of articles that mention the word ‘woman.’ You can’t scrub the word ‘woman’ from the project that’s called Bluegrass Women .

The sort of political climate, the social climate felt like the right time.” Lou points to projects such as Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will The Circle Be Unbroken and David Grisman’s Home Is Where The Heart Is as models of works that have paid homage to classic songs, though they are oriented toward the music of male stars.

“All of these projects are these men in bluegrass and country honoring the pioneers who paved the way and have cross-generational sessions. [But] these projects like this [haven’t] been done in bluegrass with a group of women, honoring other women,” Lou says.

“I’m not pointing a finger at anybody, I’m just kind of telling it like it is.

That’s just been the history, the way it’s played out.

And so it felt like an important enough project that I wanted to capture as much of it as I could.” Bluegrass Women includes a version of “All I Ever Loved Was You,” recorded by Skaggs and Keith Whitley and included on their collaborative album Second Generation Bluegrass .

The song was written by Skaggs’ mother, Dorothy Skaggs.