Taking it back to his roots.
The “Cold Beer & Country Music” star, Zach Top, has not always laid down ’90s heaters. While the Washington native is known today for reviving the classic country sound of those who came before him, he got his start in a different sector of country music.
The artist, who some believe is the son of Alan Jackson (we’ll let you go down that conspiracy theory on your own), got his start in the music world by picking bluegrass. From a young age, Zach Top and his siblings played all together in a family bluegrass fan. Top started performing around the age of 7 with his siblings on acoustic guitar. But before Top picked up a guitar, his parents thought he might’ve been a good piano player, which Top claims he “kicked and screamed” through years of lessons before switching to guitar.
“I was playing piano before I was playing guitar. But, for whatever reason, I never had a lot of interest in Chopin and Bach and Beethoven and stuff like that. If somebody could have taught me to play piano like (Hargus) ‘Pig’ Robbins, maybe I would have been excited about that, but the style of music I was into guitar lent itself more to that, I guess.
I kicked and screamed through… shoot, seven or eight years it must’ve been of piano lessons, and they (his parents) finally gave up on that, I guess.”
Once he switched to guitar, he and his siblings decided to form a family band as they were all learning their respective instruments. The family band quickly became something bigger, as soon as all the Top siblings ran around, hitting all the bluegrass festivals to perform.
While the family band had a long run together, it was clear his brother and sisters were not as serious about the music as he was, and he frequently pushed them to practice more than they wanted.
“Yeah, we ran around 10 years. Luckily, I didn’t ruin any relationships with my siblings ’cause I remember having… we had some brutal band practices. I was definitely the one that wanted it really bad, and I’d sit down there and play guitar three hours a day and then try and get them to, you know, do a little band practice for whatever show we had coming up or something. I was definitely an unpleasant little tyrant a lot of times, I’ll say.”
Thankfully, as Top stated, no relationships were ruined. After the family band stopped touring, Top began covering more classic country songs before being discovered as a young adult.
However, that bluegrass foundation has made Top an out-of-this-world talent, as he’s not only a vocal threat but also a threat as a player. Top can pick. We’ve seen him lay down some classic bluegrass like “Freeborn Man” with Billy Strings, but looking into the archives of Zach Top shows you that he’s naturally always been good with a guitar in his hand.
A recent clip of 12-year-old Zach Top performing at the Wenatchee River Bluegrass Festival with many other young bluegrass players has surfaced on the internet. This appears to be a round-robin-style jam session, in which Top takes the vocals of the Jimmie Rodgers classic, “Mule Skinner Blues.” Of course, it was also famously recorded by Dolly Parton, Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe, Merle Haggard, Jerry Reed, and many more.
Top looks like a natural on stage, and even at 12 years old, you can tell he’s confident in what he’s laying down.
Check it out.
If you like what you hear while you’re here, check out Zach Top performing at Bluegrass From the Forest 2016 in Shelton, WA. It’s bluegrass goodness that will melt your face off.
