Bluegrass Music

I grew up in a home with a commercial designer and an English teacher. Great music and literature abounded. I remember listening to Liszt, Chopin, Boots Randolph, and Thelonius Monk. My mom, now 92 and a children’s author after retiring from teaching, read me Huckleberry Finn every day after lunch during one Summer vacation from school. By age 10, I was reading Robinson Crusoe, watching Masterpiece Theatre and going to the Art Institute of Chicago, where my father had studied art during the Depression, to see the Rubens and Rembrandts. I was a spotty performer in school. If a subject didn’t interest me, I’d get middling grades. If it did, I’d ace it. Big things were expected of me. I was encouraged to take Latin in high school by a counselor who was laying the groundwork for a medical school future.

One summer day I was going through my oldest brother’s album collection. He’s a good bit older than me, so he was off to college or some job; no longer living at home, at any rate. Mostly it was the college stuff of the day; The Lettermen, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and the like. I happened on an album by the New Christy Minstrels, checked it out with some mild interest until it came to a song titled “Billy’s Mule”. Folk, by this time (about 1964) was in the process of changing. In a few years it would take on nearly a unified protest theme, but for the time being, it was kind of nudging up gently against country music (its own form of folk, really). The song started out quietly and slowly, with a single instrument playing. I haven’t heard this song in over 40 years, but I can remember those notes clearly enough to be able to play them today. It was a 5 string banjo. The notes plinked, then “bent” or slid, one tone to the next, like an acoustic pedal steel guitar. I had never heard anything like it. I couldn’t tell you about the rest of the song because I just kept picking up the needle and dropping it over and over on the first few notes until the album was so scratched the song would hardly play.

I filed this experience away for perhaps a year. One evening I was watching The Andy Griffith Show with my family. I recall this episode pretty clearly. In fact, it airs fairly frequently on the classic TV channel here. In it the bluegrass band The Dillards appear as a family of mountain folk who come down to town to create trouble for Andy. Can’t tell you much else specific about the episode (which I later learned was not the first in which they appeared) except for a scene in which the boys play “Shady Grove”, an ancient Appalachian song, in the jailhouse. I was by now about 10 years old, interested in baseball and basketball mostly, fishing at the creek (I was lucky enough to grow up on a farm after my Chicago parents decided to do a “Green Acres” mid life move), running the fields with a couple of dogs, playing with friends in old hay lofts. The banjo player, Douglas Dillard, was leaned back in a chair, slacked faced, relaxed, staring blankly ahead while playing a crystal clear rapid fire staccato of notes that machine gunned out of the TV and shot me dead in the soul. The ancient tone of the 5 string banjo resonates with some Celtic corner of my soul. Within 24 hours, I owned a banjo.

A turning point came to me about 1973, while a freshman at college. Rather than study – ever – I would find a friend, some beer, and pack off with a banjo and guitar to play in a park, or down the railroad tracks. One night, a close friend, Russian exchange student and I packed off to play an open mic night at a club. As we were leaving the dorm, a pair of perfectly collegiate young girls passed us at the door, me with a banjo slung on my back. To this day, I can remember the disgusted stairs as they looked at the ragtag couple. At that moment, I realized that I had fallen off the merry go round. I had – unintentionally, inadvertently – made some decisions that would put me on a very different road. No more med school. No more pre-med. I had become a misanthrope.

Bluegrass music has always run just under the cultural radar. From time to time a song will come along that will cause it to perk it’s head up and get noticed. “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”, the theme song from the movie Bonnie and Clyde.. ‘Dueling Banjos” from the movie “Deliverance”. More recently, the movie “Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou” brought some interest with its semi-bluegrass, mostly just old rural Southern music. At these times, we bluegrassers take some pride in our music and occasionally get a little notice. Mostly, though, you can listen to the radio from now until Christmas and not hear one bluegrass song. It is niche music. I guess all music is niche music, but some niches are extremely broad and deep. Not bluegrass. If popular music is a mile wide and an inch deep, bluegrass is an inch wide and a mile deep.. If you go to a blues festival or rock concert, you will see big name bands on stage and spectators. Go to a bluegrass festival, and there will be more music going on in the park, campground, parking lot than on stage. Most people who follow bluegrass also play it.
When people ask what I do for a living, I softball my answer and just say “Musician”. If asked what type of music I play, I usually prefer “Acoustic”. If really pressed, I will more accurately respond with “bluegrass”, but only when I think the audience is open to it.

If you want to understand bluegrass music, do this. Find a good three day festival near you. (They’re there. Guaranteed. Just have search a little). Listen to the name acts on stage if you want, kill time, lay under a tree, but wait until dark. Then, as campfires light walk around and listen to the small groups of rank amateurs and band act pickers all gathered doing bluegrass communion in the night. Then, in the small hours when the night breezes come through the low branches of the cedars and elms, listen to Bruce Hornsby’s lyrics and hear the banjo wind and mandolin rain . You will hear the ancient tones.

“A cool evening dance
Listening to the bluegrass band takes the chill
from the air till they play the last song
I’ll do my time
Keeping you off my mind but there’s moments
That I find, I’m not feeling so strong

Listen to the mandolin rain
Listen to the music on the lake
Listen to my heart break every time she runs away
Listen to the banjo wind
A sad song drifting low
Listen to the tears roll
Down my face as she turns to go”

Later.