(This is the first of my California Bluegrass Association Welcome Columns, posted on April 19, 2009. You can check out the CBA and our other columnists at www.cbaontheweb.org.)
Well…..this is my inaugural California Bluegrass Association Welcome Column and I have been casting about in my wee brain for ideas to write about. Turns out I don’t have any shortage of ideas for the columns and most of them do somehow relate to bluegrass and related musical genres…but jeez where do I begin. And after all since I am a Welcome Column addict, it’s on my morning web page route, I know there is a pretty high bar to clear for the writing and content. So maybe the best thing to do in this first column is give an introduction and a bit of my history and kind of slide into the experience (after all I am a dobro player).
For starters, I just participated in the Winter 2009 Take The Stage workshop, which was offered through the Freight & Salvage and supported by the CBA. One of the things I volunteered to do with that was blog the 8+ weeks of practices, achievements, carnage, and gossip. The blog turned out to be a whole lot more fun than I expected and my band mates are still talking to me, which I take to mean I must not have embarrassed them too much. The blogs are all posted in the CBA news section if any of ya’ll are interested.
At the end of the Winter ’09 Take The Stage I was pleasantly surprised when Rick Cornish contacted me and asked if I would contribute to the Welcome columns. I guess my blogs created the illusion that I passed an English course somewhere in my misty past. What Rick doesn’t know yet is that my mother and upbringing forever ruined any hope I have of speaking or writing normal American English. Take growing up in the deep South, with a British mother, to completely muddle my language skills so that I simply don’t know how to pronounce half of our American vocabulary. For example, I always make the wrong choice in putting the pronunciation emphasis on a word’s first or second syllable which means I always get confused on how to pronounce words like Caribbean and adjective……..and then there is my fondness for British slang and the Brit’s inborn talent for creative cursing, only surpassed by the Scots and Irish talent. Anyway, so here I am.
Maybe the more relevant thing to talk about is just what the devil am I doing by getting into bluegrass at this rather “mature” stage of my life. And I should clarify that “mature” only refers to my physical age and has nothing to do with my behavior and mental age….at least according to my wife.
Actually, I think it’s pretty ironic that this good ol’ boy from Georgia didn’t really dig into bluegrass until after moving to California, 20+ years after leaving the South. It’s not like bluegrass wasn’t around when I grew up, but as with most kids for me it was all about rock and roll, and jazz. Now, growing up in the South meant a lot of that rock and roll was the southern fried variety, which is really a mishmash of blues, country, and rock. My FM radio was pretty much filled with music from the Allman Brothers, Charlie Daniels, Marshall Tucker, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Atlanta Rhythm Section, and the Dixie Dregs in addition to all the Brit bands. One of the Dregs had a house that I drove by everyday on my way to Georgia Tech where they parked their band truck. I always wanted to stop and ask if I could listen to a practice but never got up the moxie.
Most of the other music was on “Country” stations, which weren’t cool to admit listening to. I do remember hearing some Earl Scruggs and Doc Watson and a few others, but they were played alongside the standard country artists and I don’t remember anything on the airwaves really devoted to bluegrass at the time. Having said all that, we did listen to a fair amount of bluegrass…though almost exclusively from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and almost exclusively the Circle album. We listened to the Circle Album.......a lot. I went to several Dirt Band shows in Atlanta and even saw The Earl Scruggs Review in the 70’s at an Atlanta landmark club called “The Great Southeast Music Hall” where the beer was sold in buckets, which might be a contributing factor to my hazy memory and pronunciation problems. Apart from those two bands I wasn’t aware of any of the big name bluegrass groups that surely must have played Atlanta in the 70’s.
It is more surprising that bluegrass didn’t stick with me back then because I spent an awful lot of time in the hills of north Georgia and North Carolina fishing, hiking, climbing, and white water kayaking…..gotta a whole bunch of good stories there. If you’ve ever seen the movie Deliverance then you’ve seen a slice of north Georgia that was a home away from home for me…..the real life Chattooga River was the “river double” for the fictional Cahulawassee River and the closing supper at the end of the film was in the Dillard Hotel in Clayton, GA….and I can tell you first hand that the food, the scenery, the music, and the people you see in Deliverance aren’t movie fiction. There’s nothing like coming across a couple of good ol’ boys hunting out in the middle of the woods who say “ya’ll ain’t from around here are ye”.
If you wanted to listen to music back then, far away from the big city of Atlanta, you had two choices…..AM radio or your 8 track tape player. The standard thing to do at the end of a kayaking trip, while our gear was drying, was pop in a tape and blast the Circle album as loud as our speakers would allow, kick a little hacky sack, and imbibe……. One advantage in going to an engineering-based college was that the students were always into the latest and greatest technologies…even back then. So I can say with some pride, and hubris, that we didn’t have little car speakers……nooooooo, the electrical engineers among us designed and built the biggest, baddest speakers and amplifiers they could pack into a Ford van…….we were just the kind of kids many of us complain about now…..how does that saying go…”we are the people our parents warned us about”, something like that. I will bear witness that the hills rang out with amplified high wattage Tennessee Stud, a modern day siren’s song that drew in other groups of itinerant kayakers to ignite spontaneous bluegrass raves, usually on the shoulder of some state highway bridge in the middle of nowhere. Maybe anthropologists in the future will analyze that behavior and conclude it was a mating ritual similar to those going back millennia, but with some odd 20th century cultural twist involving beer, bluegrass music, and little leather bags full of beans.
There might have been a few guitars around in the evenings at camp, but the music played was generally folk, inevitably someone wanted to play Stairway to Heaven or Freebird, and after a mason jar of product from the local distillery it really didn’t matter much what we tried to play.
Sunday mornings in the hills had a very different rhythm from the city. Usually the AM radio would be on while someone cooked breakfast and I can remember waking up in my sleeping bag to the rhythmical, sonorous preaching from one of the local evangelists mixed with smells of eggs and bacon. The best mornings were ones where the sound of rain on my tent, or if I was lucky the cook shed roof, provided the percussive accompaniment to the sermons…..kind of nature’s own banjo…mostly too loud, a little out of tune, unpredictable entrances, and never quite in tempo. In thinking back on it, I have to wonder if rap music doesn’t actually have roots in the rhythms and tempos of evangelical radio preachers. Anyway, the rest of the Sunday morning radio fare would have a generous helping of Gospel music that was energetic enough to get us off our tails and back on the river.
The other reason I am a latecomer to playing bluegrass is probably because back then I was heavily involved with playing jazz and classical...in fact I still have my horn. Been dragging that thing around for over 30 years.
One thing about the South is that churches often work as social centers in communities, even large communities like Atlanta. In addition to hosting every sport, as long as it was basketball, football, or softball, they were where you went to play music outside of school….and they often had a better musical offering than we could get in school. I had my plate full with vocal choirs to sing in, brass choirs to play in, and folk services to perform in. It was sometimes music 7 days a week, several hours a day. We would do the Sunday rounds of singing choir in the Baptist church, playing brass choir in the Presbyterian church, and playing guitar at the folk service in the Episcopal church. Can’t say that any of the preaching rubbed off on me though.
And frankly, back then, guitar fret boards were a mystery to me. Playing horns, at least at the level I was at, was a pretty linear experience….you might have 2 1/2 to 3 octaves to really work with, which is only about 20-24 notes not counting sharps and flats….but in contrast, the fret board of my dobro has 120 notes. Whenever I picked up a guitar back then I always wondered how does anyone know where to go on that fret board to find the right note. And since we had cheat sheets for jazz and classical….aka sheet music, we didn’t have to memorize the music. So my horn seemed a lot easier by comparison.
So how did I end up playing bluegrass and ultimately contributing to the Welcome column? Well after not playing for 30 years I was missing music too much…..practicing, playing, and performing. Some folks shoot hoops, play baseball, do woodworking, dance, or yoga……I guess I do music. Sure I took a 30+ year hiatus with the bizarre delusion that I was too busy with my career to play…….and I wish some of my friends would have had the insight to do a musical intervention and bring me back into the fold, but it didn’t happen that way. What did happen is that I just couldn’t stand not playing anymore…so I went to the 5th String in Berkeley and after some consideration purchased not a guitar like I intended…but instead bought a resophonic guitar, known as a dobro to most of the world. Best damn thing I’ve done in a long time. Some folks say you don’t choose the dobro….it chooses you. I do endorse that wisdom. The other thing that happened was discovering the CBA…the music camp and the Father’s Day Festival. There is a reason why many of the classes at the CBA camp fill on the first day of enrollment…..the instructors and experience is unsurpassed. But then again most of you already know that. So one thing led to another, I rekindled my obsession with playing music, and renewed my acquaintance with blue grass.
Now life is almost back to the way it should be. I get to practice my dobro at home for hours at a time, I get to play with friends and interesting strangers at jams, and I even occasionally get to have the thrill and embarrassment of performing. It’s all strangely comfortable.
I just can’t seem to find my old hacky sack.
When you get down to it though, bluegrass is a music that speaks to me in a profoundly personal way. Bluegrass has deep roots in the South and describes life in a language, panorama, and rhythm that is my home and heritage. And when I go home, and most of the folks that I know that grew up in the South still refer to it as home, now I look at the landscape and people through the lyrics and hear the language and rhythms in the melodies. Ain’t it glorious.
"In the South, perhaps more than any other region, we go back to our home in dreams and memories, hoping it remains what it was on a lazy, still summer's day twenty years ago." Willie Morris
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