| Bluegrass |
Whitman I am convinced would have loved bluegrass. He would have loved Bill Monroe's lonesome falsettos, the Stanley Brothers' dark harmonies, and Earl Scruggs' jazziest banjo licks. He would have loved the untamed echoes of Celtic and African dance rhythms, ballads and blues, shape-note hymns and gospel. I'm sure he would have cared little for the bluegrass lite offered today by groups whose "main stream" material and arrangements soften the yawp to a whisper. Many people prefer this pseudograss watered down to suit delicate palates. But if they took it straight from the likes of Bill Monroe or the Stanley brothers, or Flatt and Scruggs, they might find themselves conjured by the same mountain magic that drew Elvis, Buddy Holly, and Jerry Garcia, or a friend of mine who once told me, after hearing Foggy Mountain Breakdown for the first time, "You know something? That really moves."
Although Bill Monroe wasn't from the mountains, his musical affinities were shaped from an early age by the "ancient tones" of what we think of as the music of Appalachia. However, in the 18th and early 19th centuries reels, jigs, and hornpipes weren't exclusive cultural property; they moved wherever the frontier moved, rolling south on the same tide of Scots-Irish settlement that carried Bill's mother's people, the Dutch Vandivers, from Delaware to Maryland and Virginia, and before the Revolution to the Blue Ridge foothills of South Carolina's frontier. Early in the 19th century the Vandivers left South Carolina and settled in the wilderness of southern Tennessee where they sang the ballads of the Scots border, and danced to the reels.
After the Civil War Joseph and Manerva Farris Vandiver settled in central Kentucky, across the Green River from the village of Rosine and from Buck Monroe. In 1892 Buck married the Vandiver's fiddle-playing, ballad-singing daughter, Malissa, who gave birth to the brothers Monroe, and in a sense to bluegrass music. From the "reel-footed" Vandivers Bill inherited music. In later years Bill recalled hearing his mother sing ballads in a high, keening voice which became the hallmark of his own singing. The fiddling of his mother's brother Pendleton (Uncle Pen) was another major influence.
In the 1930s, after a stint as workers in a Chicago oil refinery, Bill and Charlie Monroe became minor sensations across the South as Bill's mandolin tore through old-time favorites at a break-neck pace. The brothers' sentimental crooning also inspired imitators like Charlie and Ira Louvin, who inspired Don and Phil Everley, who inspired innumerable rock-and-roll bands.
In 1938 Bill parted company with Charlie to form a new band, The Blue Grass Boys. In October 1939 they debuted on the Grand Ol' Opry, driving Jimmy Rodgers' Muleskinner Blues with the old Monroe Brothers' pace and pitch, but now with a jazzy quality that did for Rodgers' Muleskinner what Elvis, a generation later, would do for his own Blue Moon of Kentucky; he made Jimmy Rodgers rock. The Opry audience responded with three standing ovations.
In the southwest Bob Wills also combined old time fiddle music with jazz. But Wills performed with electric instruments and even a brass section. Bill Monroe insisted on a pure, acoustic sound, and to the end of his days never sacrificed what was valuable in the old by embracing the new. He also had the good sense to hire Earl Scruggs, and to make his dynamic three-finger banjo picking a permanent part of the bluegrass sound.
It might seem odd to people who believe bluegrass is synonymous with the banjo to learn that Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys didn't originally include a banjo. To Monroe, the banjo as played by Earl Scruggs was "the fifth child of bluegrass," the youngest sibling of fiddle, mandolin, guitar, and string bass.
Scruggs, however, was not the first banjo picker to play with a three finger roll, to use finger picks, or play with speed. Long before Earl Scruggs, some old timers didn't only "frail" (i.e. flail) down on the strings; they also plucked the banjo with two fingers or, in the case of Charlie Poole, with three and even four fingers. Further refinements were made by others, including Snuffy Jenkins, whose fast, dynamic picking on North Carolina radio in the 1930s inspired Junie Scruggs, as well as his younger brother Earl, to name a few. However, Earl's prominence on the Grand Old Opry gave him a larger pulpit from which to spread the gospel of the three finger technique, and made him the virtuoso popularizer of the banjo.
| Old Time |
Old time music is the foundation not only of bluegrass but of all country music—simple, archaic, the product of ancient sources and comparatively recent innovations. I assume the process began as soon as African-born slaves re-made the music of their enslavers using goard banjos. In the 18th century Scots protestants evicted from tenant farms in northern Ireland brought their firey reels and sanguinary ballads into the isolation of Appalachian hollows. Before the Revolution they had pushed through Cumberland Gap, and in 1775 were playing fiddles in the bluegrass region of Kentucky. Some well-to-do settlers brought slaves to the frontier, but it wasn't until after Indian attacks ceased around 1795 that the Old Southwest became a true plantation society.
In the nineteenth century white minstrels blacked their faces, "frailed" banjos, and sang songs about the "sweet sunny South," warning slaves of harsh conditions in the alien North. Over time, black and white musicians—including Bill Monroe's Uncle Pen—with no intention of being the guardians of tradition, adapted these popular songs to their own vocal and instrumental styles. Even in lonesome mountain valleys, where soil was poor, slaves were few, and Celtic folkways persisted, minstrel tunes like Arkansas Traveller and Turkey in the Straw eventually took their place along side venerable old-world fiddle pieces like Soldier's Joy and McLeod's Reel. In the mouths of mountaineers songs about the sunny South became anthems to their native soil instead of cautionary songs for discontented slaves.
Few mountaineers had any social contact with African Americans until the dawn of the twentieth century, when southern industry and rural poverty brought whites and blacks together in mining and mill towns where black musicians africanized fiddle tunes and ballads, and white musicians celtified rags and blues. The recordings of Dock Boggs provide some of the best examples of these cross-cultural currents.
In the 1920s performers like the Carter Family recorded commercially and started the country music industry. And later, musicians who had only sung and played for their own and their neighbors' amusement recorded for archivists Alan Lomax, John Cohen, and others who spent decades combing the "hollers" on a quest for the "high lonesome sound" of artists like Roscoe Holcomb. None of these performers were very smooth or polished. They sang into recording mics the way they sang in church, and played the way they played for country dances; but this was their charm, and their power. They spawned the first generation of country performers; and one of them, Woody Guthrie, profoundly affected the music of Bob Dylan, and through him a generation of American music.
| Blues |
By blues I mean the type of acoustic, up-tempo blues often inaccurately called Piedmont blues because of their popularity in the Carolinas, the home of such blues artists as Gary Davis and Etta Baker. In fact, most blues artists, no matter where from, included syncopated blues in their repertoires. Charley Patton, Skip James, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Bill Broonzy all recorded "rags." And the Mississippi delta produced John Hurt, perhaps the most influential "ragtime" finger picker. Although much of this music isn't blues in a conventional sense, it can be very bluesy, punctuated with bent notes and with the stinging slides of a knife blade on guitar frets. The earliest songs were gospels, or ballads about the death of John Henry, Stagger Lee and Billy the Lion, and the sinking of the Titanic. Many songs were collections of floating couplets from dimly remembered minstrel ditties, stray verses of ancient ballads, and biblical proverbs. Phrasing and rhythm were paramount, because most early blues was dance music.
Guitar music was virtually unknown in the rural South until black soldiers returned from Cuba with guitars and at least one tune, Spanish Fandango, that quickly made its way across the land from the Carolinas to Texas, carried by itinerant workers riding the rods from job to job, and putting the restless sound of wheels and rails into every form of rural southern music. The Carter family would have sounded significantly different if not for the influence of A. P. Carter's ballad hunting partner, bluesman Leslie Riddle. And country music's first superstar, Jimmy Rodgers—who learned his blues from black section gangs in Mississippi—was as much a bluesman as a country performer. John Hurt played guitar at square dances with white fiddler Willie Narmour. And in western Kentucky a black man, Arnold Schultz, fiddled at dances to Bill Monroe's guitar backing. It was "guitar man" Schultz, according to Monroe, who was most responsible for putting the blues in bluegrass.