Rose Maddox Sings Bluegrass

Although she’s known (along with her brothers) primarily as one of the architects of the Bakersfield sound, Rose Maddox also recorded this fun collection of straight-ahead bluegrass material in 1962. The sound is just a bit overproduced, but her voice is sharp-edged and powerful, and she delivers meat-and-potatoes bluegrass fare like “Uncle Pen,” “My Rose of Old Kentucky,” and “The Old Crossroads” with complete authority. Bluegrass was almost entirely a boys’ club for the first few decades of its existence, and this album was, among other things, something of a powerful feminist statement in its time.