Andy Hall of the Infamous Stringdusters and Roosevelt Collier of the Lee Boys are set to release their collaborative album, Let The Steel Play, on Friday, June 16. This is Hall’s Music City dobro meeting Collier’s Sacred Steel from the Deep South in an all-instrumental record, and the result is a full-bodied, highly conversational sound that you will not want to put down.

The Poke Around is very excited to bring you the exclusive premiere of Hall and Collier’s version of “Crazy Fingers” by The Grateful Dead, which is the fourth track on Let The Steel Play.

We had a chance to catch up with Andy Hall this week, and he had this to say about “Crazy Fingers”:

“When I think of songs that will work for the dobro or slide guitar, what I’m looking for is a melody, and Crazy Fingers has a really cool, beautiful, unique melody. So we chose Crazy Fingers for that, and it’s a pretty complicated song. If you’re not a musician you wouldn’t necessarily know that, because it’s done so well, but it’s not an easy song to play. We definitely had to come up with an arrangement that was totally our own. We played through the song and I lead the melody on most of the song; and at the end, if you know ‘Crazy Fingers’ at all, at the very beginning of the Grateful Dead version, there’s this sort of rolling, pretty intro, it’s just this soundscape that we also put at the end of the song and let Roosevelt just rip over the top of it, just soar. So yeah, we took pieces of the song and used them a bit differently, but with all the Grateful Dead stuff that’s been going on, and all the stuff that I’ve been doing with Phil and Friends, and Keller Williams’ Grateful Grass, I thought it was really appropriate to do a Dead tune, and Roosevelt thought so too (laughs).”

Look out for the full Q&A with Hall to be published on Let The Steel Play’s release date, this Friday, June 16.

Article by Richard Oakley