‘They’ve never conserved anything’ — bluegrass singer Ron Thomason (l) doesn’t buy the term ‘conservative.’

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Dry Branch Fire Squad
Calgary Folk Club
Friday, February 5 - Friday, February 5

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Calgary Folk Club

As the single constant of the Dry Branch Fire Squad, a (now) four-piece bluegrass outfit he founded in 1976, it’s no surprise that Ron Thomason sees himself as a conservative. Bluegrass, after all, derived from so-called old-time music and harkens to the very roots of American music. Echoes of the Mountain, Dry Branch’s latest album, includes traditionals like “Dixie Cowboy” and “Grayson’s Train,” along with the 1899 hymn “Power in the Blood.” Thomason can even recall the day when Bill Monroe, whose Blue Grass Boys gave the genre its name, bought him a five-cent Coke.

But while Thomason hails from southwestern Virginia, where he describes growing up without electrical power until the age of 16, and while his family boasts multi-generational service in the U.S. Army, his particular brand of conservatism doesn’t line up with the expected American paradigm.

“I think it’s all been turned around here in our country,” he drawls over the phone from his ranch on Colorado’s Eagle Peak Mountain. “Because I don’t think you could get more liberal than the Republicans. They call themselves conservative but they’ve never conserved anything. Last year they were running on ‘Drill baby drill!’ You can call that what you want; I would call that liberal. If you mine that now, it’s oil, but in 100 years, it’s gold. They’re pretty consistent in that way.”

Gently violating expectations in his banter while his band thoroughly nails down the fundamentals is what has made Dry Branch such a consistent draw at music festivals across the continent, including New York’s Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival, which the band hosts. Onstage, Thomason is an earthy, wry presence joking through a southwestern Virginia drawl warm enough to melt and thick enough to slow his speech. (“When I was in college they tried to teach us to speak correctly, and I never could,” he says, “and they decided I had a speech impediment.”)

Weaving together references to the American political scene, the history of the band’s songs and some hoary old jokes, Thomason has the skill to make those elements seem like natural complements. It doesn’t hurt that this banter happens to bookend the soulful and often lightning-fast skill of bandmates Brian Aldridge, Tom Boyd and Dan Russell, who all crowd around a single vocal microphone.

A successful horse trainer whose skill with the bridle enabled him to retire from teaching high school English in Ohio in 1996 — he notes proudly that he was recently inducted into his former school’s hall of fame — Thomason is well aware of the issues raised by his seeming contradictions. For years, he refused to answer questions about his faith (Golgatha, released in 1986 by an earlier incarnation of the band, was a gospel album), realizing that a religious label was a surefire way of manipulating expectations. “It’s really easy to lose control of that,” he says, “and one of the things I like to do is put the music in context.”

But sometimes that context is elusive, as it was when an angry festival-goer at The Father’s Day Festival in Grass Valley, California, wrote to the California Bluegrass Association Newsletter to say, “We were surprised and appalled at the derogatory comments made by Ron Thomason during the first appearance of the Dry Branch Fire Squad when referring to Pat Robertson as ‘spewing hate’ and President Bush in such a derogatory manner. Such comments, in our opinion, were inappropriate, especially for this venue.”

But Thomason, who considers himself a humanist Christian, makes no bones about either the context of venue or his arguments against Robertson’s preaching.

“I have no problem if Pat Robertson stands for what you believe in, then that’s good,” he says. “But let’s not say he stands for something he doesn’t. When your entire ministry basically revolves around hate and you’re preaching ‘Love your neighbour,’ then you have to deal with that issue. I think people were loathe to think of themselves as haters, but it’s hard to find someone who doesn’t have that in their heart.”

As an unorthodox conservative railing against American “conservatism,” Thomason seems only too happy to add an extra layer of complexity to a traditional genre. If Americana — and America itself — needs another layer of complexity to be added by a sober second opinion, the singer will certainly oblige.

“It’s not a problem,” he says. “I just find it very humorous. I kind of think of myself as a satirist, and it’s easy to poke fun at. I’m not a particularly smart person — there are a lot of people smarter than I am — but I do find it frustrating that people have kind of lost their desire to be critical thinkers.”