Jerry Douglas - Koa / Engelmann GK Concert Windwalker 

Jerry Douglas started his professional career when he was sixteen.  The son of a steelworker, living in Warren, Ohio, Jerry played his instrument of choice, the Dobro, in bars. He has absorbed the sights and sounds around him and transmuted them into his own unique art by developing an eclectic style of playing and composing for the Dobro and other subspecies of resonator and slide guitars. His most clearly audible source is bluegrass—the genre in which he started and many would say now in which he presides.

You will also find folded into Douglas's music a great many other ingredients, among them rain, children's games, rivers, and a large amount of weeping—to say nothing of hogs, the war in Iraq, locomotives, confetti, bourbon, machine guns, and the entire cosmos. 

For all this variegation of influences and interests, two constants pervade Douglas's performances and compositions, and they are, as he has said in a recent conversation, “in some tension.” These creatively conflicting constants underlie all of the arts; one is discipline and the other is playfulness.

You can think of Jerry Douglas' artistic development, from his earliest, pure-bluegrass days to his newest CD as a continuing maturation—an ever-increasing instrumental mastery, a broadening of scope, a wider range of emotion, an expanding openness and generosity. He just keeps growing up.

Read more about Jerry at www.jerrydouglas.com