Number 71
I'm getting back in the Parvum Opus saddle with a wedding music story, and maybe a few bits about language to pay the way (like when you make a business call on vacation so you can call it a tax-deductible business trip).
We had a great band at our wedding reception, Sonny Robertson's Howard Street Blues Band. Expect to read more about him here in the future, as we're planning to collaborate on Sonny Robertson's memoirs, to be called When Sonny Gets Blue (thanks to Fred for that idea).
Then Fred and I did a 180 for the honeymoon; after a trip to the Outer Banks, we went to Jack Hatfield's weekend (see photos online, including some of me and Fred) in the mountains of East Tennessee, with some of the best pickers in the world, plus one screechy peacock. Fred plays banjo though he didn't bring it along. I don't play anything.
The one musician you might recognize, even if you're not a bluegrass aficionado, would be Doug Dillard. Remember the deadpan Darlings on the Andy Griffith show? Those were actually the Dillards and Doug was the banjo player. He's now semi-retired in Nashville and happily collecting residuals. I didn't know who he was at first, other than one of the workshop instructors, when we chatted on the porch and I told him about the Throat Singers of Tuva, whom I'd seen in Cambridge a few years ago. Throat singing is a peculiarity of Tuva, a little country between Russia (Siberia) and Mongolia. (See Friends of Tuva.) The Tuva musicians played some odd little instruments, made of horses' hooves and skin, and when they started picking I said to the erstwhile friend I'd come with, "Those are mountain pickers!" The sound was familiar.
The funny thing was, and my point is, that this person had told me she liked most kinds of music except bluegrass. Couldn't stand bluegrass. I could sort of understand. Some of that real hillbilly music is very nasal, and bluegrass, moreover, from my standpoint, is lacking in eroticism and/or romance, not unlike the Tuva songs, which are mostly about horses. It's got sex, in songs about courtship and murders of passion, but not eroticism. But it's got a good beat, you can dance to it, I give it a ten. My friend enjoyed the Tuva singers, who had a similar sound. But that "high lonesome sound" of bluegrass has been popularized, or at least used, by movies set amidst white Southern culture, such as Deliverance, Bonnie and Clyde, and O Brother Where Art Thou ~ uncongenial to some persons of the nonwhite and nonsouthern persuasion. Dress bluegrass in Chinese silk robes and one might hear it differently.
Bluegrass faded in popularity in the 1950s, and went through a revival in the 1960s and '70s, when outdoor bluegrass festivals drew both old fans and stoned hippies newly turned on to the genre. Unlike other music festivals, the musicians mingled and picked with the attendees, thus helping pass on the skills. Fred used to go to these festivals as a fan, before he picked up a banjo himself.
Bluegrass is relatively new. It acquired a distinctive sound and its name around the 1940s, coming out of Celtic music, an African banjo-type instrument, and even blues in an upbeat kind of way (note Bill Monroe's "Muleskinner Blues"), but like jazz it's improvisational. The connections between seemingly separate genres of American music are fascinating: bluegrass, blues, jazz, rock and roll, gospel, western swing, rockabilly, country, etc.
You might have been as surprised as I was to hear master banjo picker Bill Keith (no relation) play a harpsichord tune by Bach on the banjo, or "Night in Tunisia" by Dizzy Gillespie, or "Caravan" by Duke Ellington. Bill is a brilliant technician, and invented the Keith banjo tuner.
You might also have been intrigued to hear master banjo picker Butch Robbins touch on the mystical aspects of musicianship. But he's got a real down-home way of talking that I enjoyed. He said of a musician he knows who's about to die of cancer, "One more clean white shirt is about all he's going to need." I bought Butch's book, What I Know 'Bout What I Know.
A nice lady at the banjo workshop named Nancy Nitchie, editor of Banjo Newsletter, would come up to me from time to time and ask sympathetically, "Are you all right, dear?" Her late husband had been into jazz, and when he heard bluegrass for the first time on the car radio, he had to pull over to the side of the road. She was in the car with him. I bet there's a lot more she could tell me.
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