CMT: It is pretty clear that the New Grass Revival was influenced by what gets termed today as classic rock. But where you listening to stuff apart from that and other American at the time you were making those recordings?

SB: I was born in ’52, so I had the advantage of watching television. I was a part of the first generation that could really watch great music on tv and literally learn to play by doing that – watching the Ed Sullivan Show. I got to see the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the Doors, the Jefferson Airplane, the Everly Brothers. At the same time I could watch local Nashville television since I grew up in Bowling Green, Kentucky. We would get reception from a couple of Nashville channels and watch some great musicians. I learned the mandolin from watching Bill Monroe, Jesse McReynolds and Bob Osborne. They unlocked the mystery of how you play this instrument.

I feel like I got to be one of the first to take advantage of television and use it like the instructional videos we have now.

At this point, Bush excuses himself because he’s got a “nose full of pollen.”Coming back to the phone, I try to get him right back to the where he left off.

CMT: So you watched tv to pick up some of the nuisances each of those players used.

SB: I was doing well at copying what I heard on records, just picking it up by ear. Because really, this is the kind of music you pick up by ear. It is not down on the written page. Watching how their hands worked – both the right and left – chord positions you would see people use.

I thought I knew how to play guitar like Eric Clapton until I saw him on tv and found out I was doing everything wrong. It was very helpful to me - very much so for playing mandolin when I would get to watch the Grand Ole Opry shows that would come on.

CMT: I was going to ask if you consider the music you play to be a folk music or an art music.  But you said that bluegrass is not really notated very frequently. I have read other interviews that you have done where you discuss playing with musicians that read music, which necessitates you to do the same.

SB: It is more about how you learn the music – like learning fiddle tunes from people that played it before you. In that way, tunes get passed along from generation to generation. And of course, they might vary a bit, because they are not written down. But that is just part of the music’s evolution.

I learned to read music in high school taking violin lessons after having been a fiddle champ. After playing for a few years, I just figured I needed to learn more about it. I took lessons for about a year – long enough to know that violin was not my calling. Mandolin and fiddle are. It did educate me to be able to read enough – no matter how slowly I go – to play in a situation with Bill Evans where he is teaching me a melody. For me, it is more of a learning aid. I am not good at what you’d call sight reading and going on the fly with it. I can read slowly.