Bluegrass
I consider myself to be an amateur bluegrass musician, which is a nice way of saying that I’m a bad bluegrass musician. I love bluegrass, I love listening to it, and I love playing it, but I’m not a top-notch player by any stretch. There’s not really any middle ground in bluegrass – either you’re excellent, or you’re an amateur. It’s highly possible to find some sort of “saxophone savant” out there, who is someone that can play with a beautiful, natural tone without any kind of training or instruction. I guarantee you will never find a “banjo savant.” Anyone who is really good at bluegrass banjo is someone who has devoted their life to it, and worked their butt off to get to where they are.
The most basic origins of bluegrass music extend back to the Scots-Irish refugees from the Jacobite Rebellions, who fled to Appalachia and brought their folk music and instrumentation with them. The Scots-Irish were very isolated in Appalachia, and they were very proud of that isolation. Any sweeping changes that effected the rest of the United States largely skipped over Appalachia, which meant that their ancestral ways were able to remain intact and authentic a lot longer than in other parts of the country – all the way up into the 20th century, in fact.
In the early 20th century, a British musicologist named Cecil Sharp traveled through Appalachia with the purpose of discovering the origins of Appalachian folk music. He slowly moved from one holler to the next, asking people to sing and play their songs while he wrote them all down and analyzed them. What he discovered really shocked him. Not only had the music of the Scots-Irish survived intact, he found more authentic British folk music in Appalachia than he did in Great Britain. He published his collection of Appalachian folk songs as English Folk Songs from Southern Appalachia in 1932.
As he traveled, Cecil Sharp followed an old 19th century musicology tradition of manually notating folk songs on paper, but the invention of the phonograph by Thomas Edison in the late 19th century made Sharp a dinosaur in his own time. The newest portable recording technology of the early 20th century allowed folk songs to be recorded on the spot and stored on tape for both prosperity and profit. While modern musicologists were overjoyed at the simplicity of being able to store both the songs and the performance, the modern entrepreneurs realized that these things would sell.
The only barrier in using this new technology to capture folk songs was electricity. Since the rural areas did not yet have electricity, it would be impossible to capture the folk artists at their homes in Appalachia (as did Cecil Sharp). Instead, recording sessions were set up in towns and cities, advertised, and they simply waited for the folks to come to them.
The details of those early recording sessions will be documented later in a separate post about Appalachian music, but what’s important for us in this post about bluegrass music is that those early sessions captured The Carter Family. A.P. Carter, his wife Sarah, and Sarah’s sister Maybelle answered a call to be recorded in Bristol, Tennessee in 1927, and those recordings became instant sellers. The Carter Family became famous as their records sold nationwide, yet they were simply performing those old Scots-Irish tunes they’d learned growing up in Appalachia. Inspired by the recordings of The Carter Family, brothers Bill and Charlie Monroe formed a band known as The Monroe Brothers, and they began touring nationwide and recording their own versions of those same folk tunes which they performed at a completely different pace. Bill Monroe played mandolin and his brother Charlie played guitar, and they featured themselves on their recordings playing their instruments at breakneck, virtuoso levels. Their music was lightning fast and infectious.
When The Monroe Brothers disbanded in the late 1930’s, Bill Monroe continued by forming a new band that he called The Bluegrass Boys, thereby giving a name to the style of music that he played – bluegrass. At this time, there was no style of music known as “bluegrass.” He simply chose that name for his band because Kentucky was known as “the Bluegrass State.” Today, a lot of people mistakenly assume that bluegrass music has been around for centuries like those old Scots-Irish folk tunes, but it really didn’t exist until the 1940’s when Bill Monroe invented it. The style of music played by The Bluegrass Boys was called “bluegrass music,” and the name stuck. The trademark features of Bill Monroe’s bluegrass music were a lightning-fast tempo and an extremely high level of solo virtuosity. The specific songs played by The Bluegrass Boys were a mixture of old country songs, gospel songs, black work songs, and the blues. So, once again, it was BASED on Scots-Irish folk tunes, but blended with other contemporary Southern sounds of the day.
Modern, contemporary bluegrass is mostly instrumental. Although there are a few famous bluegrass tunes with vocals, the vast majority of the repertoire is instrumental. Bluegrass music also presents a round-robin format of solo breaks, featuring everybody. Everyone takes a solo on every song, and the only other style of music where everyone takes a solo like that is jazz. As it turns out, jazz and bluegrass have a lot in common.
Bluegrass music REQUIRES an incredibly high level of virtuosity from the performers. You’re not allowed to be “okay” if you play bluegrass. You have to be the best you can be at all times. The most popular bluegrass performers usually have a trademark style of playing that’s copied by other players. There’s the Maybelle Carter style of scratch guitar, the Bill Monroe style of mandolin, or the Doc Watson style of picking guitar. Perhaps the most important innovations in bluegrass came from Lester Flatt’s G-run on guitar and Earl Scruggs’ roll style of picking on banjo.
The Lester Flatt G-run is a little tag ending put at the end of a phrase on guitar, and you’re pretty much not allowed to play bluegrass guitar without it. Prior to Earl Scruggs, the banjo was played by either strumming it or by a combination of picking and strumming known as “claw-hammer.” The fast strumming sound is usually associated with Dixieland jazz, and the claw-hammer style is usually associated with the sound of Civil War camps. Earl Scruggs invented a new style of playing banjo for bluegrass by “rolling” the three picking fingers continually, which creates a breakneck pace of sound. Legions of bluegrass fans were already familiar with the Flatt and Scruggs style of playing, but the world was introduced to it in TV show called The Beverly Hillbillies and a movie called Bonnie and Clyde.
In this clip, notice how each performer takes turns playing a solo while the rest of the band plays the same accompaniment in the background. This is the exact same thing you’d find in every jazz club. Bluegrass music does have a “jam session” quality that is very similar to jazz, which makes it a very self-indulgent art form. In bluegrass, the performers aren’t really playing to please the audience. They’re playing to please themselves. It’s incredibly FUN to play bluegrass at that breakneck speed of high virtuosity, and you forget that the audience is even there. It’s all you can do to keep up with the other monsters in the band, and it never lets up. I’ve performed a lot of different styles of music – everything from rock, jazz, country, bluegrass, gospel, etc., and I can easily say that jazz and bluegrass are the only two styles that REQUIRE total concentration at all times. In rock or country, you can let your mind wander and kind of play on auto-pilot for a while, and nobody will ever know. In jazz and bluegrass, you have to listen intently to everything played by every performer, because you’ll be expected to use what you hear when it’s your turn. In bluegrass, you are constantly being tested by your band-mates, and it’s incredibly exhilarating. At a bluegrass festival, there could be 50 people in the audience or 5000 people in the audience, but it wouldn’t make any difference either way to the musicians. They’re too busy trying to impress each other than worry about an audience.
At the outset of this post, I mentioned that I played amateur bluegrass. In high school, my parents bought me a banjo, and I taught myself to play the Earl Scruggs roll by listening to a ton of Flatt & Scruggs and copying what I heard. I was okay, but not great. Years and years later, while living in Iowa, I was contacted by the Des Moines Symphony Orchestra because they needed a banjo player for a New Year’s Eve performance. They were planning to perform a Stephen Foster medley, and they contacted the only Southerner that they knew, assuming I knew how to play banjo since I was from Alabama. Well, I can’t fault their logic, because they were right. I DID know how to play banjo. So that year, I spent my New Year’s Eve playing banjo onstage with the Des Moines Symphony Orchestra. How many people can say that?