One Lucky Guy 
Adrienne Yauk - resophonic guitar, guitar * Pat Alger
- bass * Jim Hilburn - mandolin, guitar * Terry Strassmann - guitar
Exactly Like Bluegrass—Only Different by Tom Stuart, from Pow'r Pickin',
August 2005
I like honesty. I’ll tell tall tales and war stories with the
best of them, but most folks know when I’m having a little fun.
In promoting your band you’ve got to be honest. That’s one
thing I like about the quartet my friend and I saw a few weekends ago
at the D Note performing under the name One Luck Guy. Now I don’t
know if Jim’s lucky or not, that’s not the point here. They
bill themselves as “Exactly like Bluegrass, only different.”
That is a true statement. They play country, they play cowboy, I think
I even remember a little Texas swing and probably a Big Band tune from
the ’40s, but not a lot of Bluegrass. They are a CBMS member band
and are invited to perform at various Bluegrass functions, but they
just don’t play a lot of traditional Bluegrass tunes. It’s
true that they don’t have a banjo player and some folks feel that’s
a drawback, but I don’t think so. The Blue Canyon Boys seem to
be surviving without it.
These folks have great harmony. About as close as you can get without
being a family band. They feature Pat Alger on bass, Adrienne Yauk on
guitar and resophonic guitar, Terry Strassmann on guitar and Jim Hilburn
on mandolin and guitar. I have not noticed any original tunes yet, but
then I don’t get to see them perform as often as I should. I believe
Adrienne is a song writer so, it’s probably just a matter of time
on my part.
These are some talented folks with long and varied musical careers.
Terry has been performing since her early teens, both as a vocalist
and a guitar player. I understand she started out in Eastern Seaboard
coffee houses. Her singing styles go from Big Band to Elizabethan to
cowboy. Adrienne has been performing professionally for 30 years now,
including an appearance at the New Folk Festival in Kerrville, Texas.
She’s done session work in Nashville and holds the honor of being
the group’s only native Coloradan. Pat has been performing traditional
Bluegrass for the past 13 years and has done session work too. Jim,
the lucky guy, is also a session artist and has been performing with
a Bluegrass band in Boulder CO for 30 years. He builds custom mandolins
and guitars in his spare time.
As a newly formed group, they cast about a bit for the right IMAGE
/ ICON, truly stating who and what they are. In the meantime, Pat found
a little note pad that had the cartoon version of a man and some women—scantily
clad—doing leg kicks. She sliced and diced the note pad into three
girls and one man which became what they used as their first business
card. They laughed at this preposterous representation until they handed
out a few and received some VERY disapproving glances. Ok, so you can’t
please everyone. Still hoping for the correct image to magically come
to us, they continued to use the “Rockettes” figures.
That Summer when Jim’s birthday rolled around, Terry took the
card to King Soopers Bakery in the hopes of having this as the topping
to his cake. They laughed too at how cute this image was. But the next
day, a call came from the Bakery stating their business card fell clearly
into the category of pornographic. Humor prevailed. With a few strategically
placed stars, they were able to have the image on their Lucky Guy’s
cake. He loved it as they all did.
The seeds of the band were planted when Jim moved to Colorado in ’69,
as a young rock and roller. A year later, he moved into an apartment
next to an old house where a bunch of guys stayed up late playing bluegrass
and jugband music. One of those guys was Fergus, the long-time bluegrass
D.J. at KGNU. Jim got an acoustic guitar and then a mandolin and started
playing with them, and now, 35 years later, he still picks with those
same guys.
Fergus also would jam with a group of folks in Longmont, and in about
’79, Jim was invited to their jams. Through another “moved
next door” coincidence, Terry happened to live next door and also
started coming to the jams. These jams were fairly constant for nearly
10 years, but some had kids, some divorced and some moved away, and
the jams kind of faded away. He had nearly no contact with the Longmont
group for nearly 10 years, but one of the guys decided to get everyone
back together on New Years Day, 2000 and they had a big ole time. Then
they did it again on New Years Day in 2001, and that day, Adrienne was
invited. By this time, Pat, Jim’s wife, had taken up bass playing,
which she had never done in the old jams. The jams became more frequent
and at some point, Terry and Adrienne decided to get together to work
on some songs. Jim got wind of it and invited himself along, and as
usual, where he went, Pat went, too. So they got together one night
at Terry’s, tried a few songs and it clicked. The rest, they say,
is history.
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