Surprising though it may be to those who think the music comes exclusively from the Appalachian Mountains, southern Ohio has been a major center of traditional bluegrass for decades. A large-scale migration from Appalachia, which accelerated with the end of the Second World War and the scaling back of the coalmining industry, provided and continues to provide this area with a steady stream of talented musicians and a relatively large audience capable of understanding and appreciating what they do. The Osborne Brothers got their start in southern Ohio, as did Dave Evans, Larry Sparks, and Ron Thomason. Ralph Stanley, reminiscing recently about the later career of the Stanley Brothers, said, “We used to just nearly live in Dayton and Cincinnati and Columbus and Middletown and around those places.” Record companies like Vetco and Jalyn and radio programs like Wayne Raney’s on WCKY helped spread the bluegrass message throughout the area.

And a large part of that message is that singing, rather than instrumental virtuosity, lies at the heart of bluegrass music. Hence it is not surprising that singing lies at the heart of Next Train Headed South by the Cincinnati-based band known as Union Springs.

Most of the band members came to their art by inheritance. Dwight McCall is the son of bluegrass pioneer Jim McCall, who served as a sideman in some of the greatest aggregations of the early days of the music. Tim Strong was performing traditional bluegrass with his brother Gary at the age of 14. Randy Pollard also came from a musical family. The apparent anomaly is classically trained musician Jon Weisberger – but only an apparent anomaly, since he, too, is following a tradition, that of the urbanite who discovered bluegrass at a relatively late age and wound up working with traditional musicians: banjoist Bill Keith, the first college student to play with the Blue Grass Boys, and the late Ralph Rinzler are two early examples.

Weisberger recalls how he, McCall, and Pollard were working for Vernon McIntyre’s Appalachian Grass before forming Union Springs. “The three of us started singing together on the bus and between sets, concentrating on trios and more ‘modern,’ high-lead stuff that didn’t fit in Vernon’s repertoire. What we took from working with Vernon, more than anything else, was a belief that solid timing, especially in the rhythm section, had to be the foundation of our sound. Vernon played banjo for a little while with Jimmy Martin, and is firmly in the Martin camp of rhythm guitar playing, and Jim McCall had always had an outstanding rhythm lick in very much the same vein. So the idea, in our minds, was to marry that branch of traditional timing to a more contemporary approach to vocals.”

Next Train Headed South, Union Springs’ third album, represents this approach at its mature best. Much of the material – “My Heart’s Bouquet,” “In My Dreams,” “In Memory,” “Lost in Love,” “Life Still Goes On,” and the album title cut – is the band members’ own creation. “A Rambler And Rover” and “A Hard Road To Travel” come from Dwight McCall’s father Jim. Following a pattern established in earlier recordings by the band, “Pride” comes from traditional country music (in this case from Ray Price, via the singing of Janie Fricke). Lesser-known performances by bluegrass bands provide the rest: “Leaves That Are Green” and “God’s Own Singer,” for instance, from J. D. Crowe, and “The Sky Is Weeping” from the Virginia Squires.