After years of ascending the bluegrass charts with Grammy-winning band Steep Canyon Rangers, ace banjo picker Graham Sharp has discovered a brand new ardour for climbing crags within the Blue Ridge.
It’s an early fall day, and Graham Sharp—founding member of the Grammy-winning bluegrass outfit Steep Canyon Rangers—is hanging off a cliff, clinging to a granite face on Rumbling Bald Mountain in North Carolina’s Chimney Rock State Park.
At 75 ft, the game route—colloquially referred to as Bear Cub—is comparatively brief. However it’s stout, and simply troublesome sufficient that Sharp’s coronary heart kilos slightly sooner and his imaginative and prescient narrows. The sensation isn’t not like what washes over him when he steps on stage to carry out for a packed live performance venue.
“Getting in entrance of 1000’s of individuals remains to be nerve-wracking,” the musician admits. “However what helps me is to deal with the small issues like my respiratory or hand positioning as an alternative of all of the folks on the market watching.”
Climbing, Sharp says, isn’t all that totally different.
“There’s loads of crossover,” he notes. “You don’t wish to deal with what’s under you and even what’s too far above you. You simply wish to keep proper there within the second, along with your massive toe crammed right into a tiny, tiny piece of rock, hoping that it’ll take you slightly bit increased.”
A self-described “climbing novice,” Sharp was launched to the game about two years in the past when his teenage son Wade joined the mountain climbing membership at his highschool. A pole vaulter, nationwide cyclo-cross and mountain bike racer, and all-around “meticulous, hard-working athlete,” Wade was decided to grasp his latest curiosity. He was additionally decided for his dad to hitch in on the enjoyable.
“We began taking a few of his good mates to Rumbling Bald and spending whole days down there,” says Sharp, who lives in Asheville, about 50 minutes north of the climbing space.
The daddy-and-son duo have additionally logged fairly a couple of hours at a cheekily named place referred to as The Dump. Nestled off Freeway 221 between Blowing Rock and Linville, the realm dishes up a smorgasbord of sandstone cliffs with steep, slabby routes. Throughout their final journey to the realm, Wade stepped up as lead climber, which was no straightforward job.
“I don’t assume he bit off greater than he may chew,” says Sharp. “However it undoubtedly took all of him to tug it off.”
Undeterred, Wade is setting his sights on even harder routes that snake up Stone Mountain, an enormous granite dome that rises from the North Carolina foothills. He’s additionally pushing his dad to climb The Nostril, an iconic, 500-foot route on Trying Glass Rock in Pisgah Nationwide Forest.
As Sharp continues to discover new climbing pursuits, his music profession is heading in some new instructions.
Earlier this 12 months, Sharp and the remainder of the Rangers gathered on the Inn Bat Collapse Bat Cave, N.C., for per week to file the band’s 14th studio album, “Morning Shift.” Formally launched on September 8, the file is the primary produced within the wake of guitarist and vocalist Woody Platt’s departure.
For these unfamiliar with the band’s backstory, Platt, Sharp, and former bassist Charles Humphrey III met within the late Nineties as college students on the College of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 2000, the trio formally emerged as Steep Canyon Rangers. A 12 months later, they launched their debut album, “Previous Goals and New Goals.”
“We didn’t have loads of targets for it at first,” says Sharp. “Music was simply one thing all of us liked, and issues naturally advanced.”
That pure evolution has included three collaborative data with comic and film star Steve Martin, a Grammy for Greatest Bluegrass Album in 2013, and a spot within the North Carolina Music Corridor of Fame. By way of all of it, Platt fronted the group on lead vocals. However final April, the Brevard native introduced he can be stepping away after almost 20 years with the band. (Humphrey departed 5 years prior.)
With Platt gone, the 5 remaining guys labored their community of music contacts and stumbled upon Aaron Burdett, a singer-songwriter and guitarist based mostly in Saluda, N.C. Three weeks later, Burdett discovered himself on the Hollywood Bowl performing in entrance of 18,000 followers alongside the opposite Rangers. The transition was seamless, says Sharp.
“Aaron is a extremely robust musical character who has been writing songs for a very long time,” he notes. “He brings a deep effectively of music to us, and it blends completely with our type.”
“Morning Shift” is a testomony to that. In accordance with Sharp, the file delivers the signature Steep Canyon Rangers sound however is extra “dynamic.”
“As we recorded the album, our producer, Darrell Scott, was intent on ensuring that Aaron would sing a track, Barrett [Smith] would sing a track, I might sing a track, after which we might repeat,” he explains. “So, it’s totally different from different data in that we’re all telling tales from our viewpoints.”
The songs are additionally a bit extra narrative in nature, says Sharp. “Hominy Valley,” as an illustration, steps centuries again in time and rehashes Basic Rutherford’s marketing campaign towards the Cherokee through the Revolutionary Battle.
“I dwell proper close to the massive bend of Hominy Creek right here in West Asheville the place the English arrange camp,” says Sharp, who co-wrote the track with Burdett and Smith. “There’s an house advanced being constructed that has prompted a giant brouhaha within the neighborhood, so the track combines this historical past of the Cherokee preventing for his or her land with these fashionable confrontations of who will get to decide on how the land is used.”
It’s so much to pack right into a four-minute track, therefore why it took Sharp a number of years to fine-tune the lyrics. He lastly skilled a revelation one random night time after dinner—an instance of how songwriting can occur anyplace and anytime.
“I don’t should be sitting in entrance of a bit of paper,” he says. “I may very well be mendacity in my mattress half-asleep. Or I may very well be strolling down the road.”
Although Sharp has but to write down a track whereas mountain climbing, he’s positive that inspiration may strike whereas he and his son, Wade, are summiting a crag.
“My writing course of is type of ongoing and all over the place,” the musician notes. “It’s only a matter of paying consideration within the second.”
The Steep Canyon Rangers will carry out at The Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tenn., on Saturday, Dec. 9, and the Jefferson Theater in Charlottesville, Va., on January 19. For tickets and a full tour schedule, go to steepcanyon.com.
Cowl photograph: Graham Sharp and his 17-year-old son Wade. Photograph courtesy of Graham Sharp.
