What's This - Another Bluegrass Blog?

This one isn’t about politics.  And it’s not about poetry.  But it is a subject that I return to now and again even though I don’t think my reading audience is packed full of Bluegrass music fans.  My hope is that you good folks will read this thing and be moved to take a fresh look at the freshest thing going on in the world of music.  And what is prompting my muse today, you ask?  You did ask, didn’t you?  Well, the answer is the annual International Bluegrass Music Awards events which were held in Raleigh, North Carolina over the past several days.

Usually I’d go on and on about how my friends the Gibson Brothers were the highlight of the event, walking away with the top awards.  They did.  But I’m more inclined to tell you all about the awards show and the peripheral events that were enjoyed by thousands of fans.  Even though I wasn’t in attendance in Raleigh the magic of modern technology brought the excitement and feel of the festivities right up here to little old Dover, Delaware.  There was a live feed of the awards show over the internet and on Sirius/XM radio, Facebook feeds and YouTube video postings also kept us involved and fired-up.  It’s winding down now but at various times on Thursday and Friday it was hard to keep up with everything.

We’ve all seen awards shows.  They’re highly predictable with just enough suspense and controversy to keep an audience coming back after the commercial breaks.  They’re packaged events that follow a reliable formula, often with lip-synced musical acts and tiresome acceptance speeches.  Music awards shows are closely watched for the “scandalous” fashions and profane verbal “faux-pas”.   There was none of that at the IBMA awards.  There were awards and some brief and honest acceptance speeches.  There were a couple hall of fame inductions.  One of those involved a miracle of sorts, with guitar virtuoso and singer Tony Rice demonstrating how his voice, lost about nineteen years ago, was gradually coming back to a point where he may just sing again.  And there was music.  But this music wasn’t mouthing and pretending over some studio produced recording.  This was live music, driving hard, with strong instrumental solos – some of them inspired, and real, solid heartfelt vocals.  These folks weren’t faking.  They weren’t putting on airs.  Nope, they were delivering their art.

It’s hard to single out any one performer or group for accolades.  They all gave performances that were award worthy.  The flow of the show wasn’t always without a glitch here and there.  But it was all warmly received with an incredible amount of goodwill between the audience and the performers and between performer and performer.  People were happy to be there and it showed.  The audience didn’t need cues for applause or laughter.  It was all natural.

Then after the awards show (and in the time leading up to it) there were concerts and jam sessions all over the Raleigh area.  There was a “Kids on Bluegrass” show, there was a Red Hat Amphitheater top name concert, and there were late night and early morning shows at various venues featuring bands with guest musicians.  Jam sessions popped up in hotel rooms, building lobbies and in backstage areas all around town.  There was even a banjo players’ “flash mob” at the Sir Walter Raleigh statue.  Many of these great performances can be seen on YouTube.  I was particularly impressed by one I saw that featured the Gibson Brothers Band and Sierra Hull.

So, after reading all of the above you’re probably wondering how a sophisticated and erudite individual such as myself could possibly be so smitten with all that twangy hillbilly plucking and whining.  If that question is in your mind then friend, you haven’t listened to Bluegrass lately.  There is no fresher music, music that draws on the origins of traditional country and American roots forms, being made today.  Yes there are plinking mandolins and banjos.  But they are played with drive and innovation.   The guitars are acoustic and the fiddles are sometimes mournful.  But the players are often masters of their instruments.  Even less skilled musicians are making valuable contributions to the great body of Bluegrass music.  And the rhythm section of a Bluegrass band is usually supported by a big old stand-up bass fiddle.  Today’s bass players know how to build a foundation for some mighty fine beat keeping.

That’s not the whole story though.  Another part of modern Bluegrass is songwriting.  Great songwriters are contributing to the genre every day.  Eric and Leigh Gibson, Sean Camp, Sam Bush, Joe Newberry, Tim O’Brien, Jamie Dailey, Claire Lynch and dozens of others are bringing new songs into this traditional form.  Though new music is being created there is a great deal of reverence and respect for older songs.  It’s a rare Bluegrass show that doesn’t feature a very large percentage of traditional songs and music from the founders of the form.  Those songs won’t always sound exactly like the originals because most Bluegrass performers eventually put their own personal touches on them.

Finally I want to mention a facet of the Bluegrass business that I’d been thinking about for a long time but was unable to express adequately.  Credit for a breakthrough in my thinking must go to my friend John Saroyan who tosses ideas around like they’re a common commodity.  John said that there seems to be a move away from “packaging” Bluegrass acts which had been a burgeoning trend.  It was then that I realized that most regular country music and virtually all of “pop” music is a packaged product.  There is a sameness, a cookie cutter approach to recordings, an effort to make every show identical and to stifle the honest emotion that should be a part of art.  But packaging is rare in Bluegrass and it seems that the more a band or performer moves towards becoming a packaged product the less appreciation they find from the audience.  Bluegrass can most often be found in festival settings.  I went to three festivals this year and each one had a different ambience and audience make-up.  Every line up of performers was varied and interesting.  There were bands that were playing for the first time and bands that had been playing for more than thirty years.  There’s also a lot of what I call “cross-pollination” in Bluegrass music with musicians changing bands, sitting in as fill-in players or just joining in with spontaneous invitations.  It adds a lot to the freshness of the music.  This kind of forming and re-forming discourages packaging.

Did I say finally up there?  Well, I want to add a couple more little things.  The first is that Bluegrass is the only musical form that does so much to encourage listeners to become players.  Most every festival has workshops where folks are encouraged to bring instruments or note pads and participate in making music.  There are workshops for every instrument and for vocalists as well.  I attended a songwriting workshop at the Plattsburgh Bluegrass Festival given by the IBMA songwriter of the year and his brother (sorry Leigh).  There are special sessions for young people and performances are scheduled so they can show off their new found skills.  All of those things add to the honesty, traditions and freshness of Bluegrass.

And finally, and I mean it this time, my friends the Gibson Brothers won “Vocal Group of the Year” “Song of the Year” (They Call it Music) and “Entertainers of the Year” at the IBMA awards show this past Thursday night.  And Eric Gibson won “Songwriter of the Year” earlier in the day.

Give Bluegrass a listen.  Take your time and think about it.  Go to a festival or concert.  You won’t regret it.  Now have a fine day.

Help Me, I'm A Poet

I’m a poet.  In some circles a confession like that is equivalent to admitting that one is a degenerate of the worst sort.  At a conference of MFA’s those who are unfortunate enough to pursue the poetic arts are shunted off to small corners of a dark room where they are left to indulge in their esoteric language of iambs, tropes and pentameters.  I don’t even have the academic credentials of those cornered poets.  Out in the real world admitting to poetry is admitting to a wastrel’s life.  “There’s no money in poetry” is the mantra.  “Get a job” follows close behind.

There are young folks in a couple of my writing groups (similar to group therapy but with homework) who write poetry though they usually have day jobs.  Some teach, some do research and others occupy cubicles where they push around multiple pieces of virtual paper.  There are the rare few who have a sponsor and are therefore allowed to write full time.  I fall somewhere in between.  My working life came to a close when I reached sixty.  Since then I’ve survived through the kindness and generosity of my dear wife, with a little help from social security.  During my working life I wrote poetry and stories and articles but I never tried to get published or in any other way recognized.

Now that has changed.  I write most every day for at least a few hours.  Sometimes, when I’m on a creative roll, I might even put in eight hours broken up into two or three hour segments.  When I get enough finished poetry I send it off to various publishing houses, literary journals and poetry competitions.  Rejection is my constant companion.  My successes so far have been limited.  I had a top ten finish in the Margaret Atwood Poetry Contest last year.  I was a runner-up for first place in the William Faulkner Writing Competition; Poetry Division, also last year.  I’ve had a few poems published here and there, none with remuneration.  And I had ten poems in an anthology published by an independent publisher who subsequently cheated all the contributors by not living up to our contract in any way.  This year, nearly finished as it is, has seen less success than last year.  I have had several poems make short-list and semi-finalist lists.  But I have had only one piece make the finals of a competition.  The results on that contest are due in a couple weeks.

It’s not a Tom Clancy or James Patterson world for a would-be senior citizen poetic soul.  So why do I do it, is the rhetorical question.  Well, I write because I feel inspired to write.  I write to say things that, for some reason, seem important.  That’s not a very humble statement I suppose.  I also write for the joy of seeing words work themselves into the shape of a poem that might provide a glimpse of beauty or an atom of rational meaning.  And on some days I write just to amuse my own rather challenged intellect.

But I’m serious about this poetry stuff.  I read a lot.  I’ve almost exhausted the poetry section of our local library and I’m re-reading my favorites.  Some days I get online and read poetry on various literary sites.  I read the poetry of my writing group friends and write commentary on their work.  And I read articles about writing and critical works about many, many great poets.  My academic credentials are non-existent but I have studied the art and craft of poetry.

So here we are, finally, at the reason for this little article.  I’m setting up a new blog page which will be devoted to poetry.  More specifically it will be used as a modest showcase for my own work and will link to other poets as well.  Now and then you’ll see on Facebook that a new poem or article is posted on the soon to be named poetry blog.  If you like poetry check it out and see if it has any value.  If you don’t like poetry check it out anyway and give me a chance to change your mind.  I promise no flowery verse, no obscure Greek or Roman mythological references, no confusing language or messages buried in five layers of metaphor.  Nope, it’s all plain talk in short poetic lines.  I’m a specialist in short lines.  So when you see the announcement of the new blog check it out.  You’ll be glad you did.

Now have a fine day and find a poem to read.

Family Connections

My mother’s side of our family is in the planning stages for a reunion next year.  We have a big family with all kinds of diverse folks who have different ideas, different lifestyles and different political views.  And we’re a garrulous bunch who will discuss things in a loud way, not afraid to voice a point of view exactly the opposite of what might happen to be prevailing in a particular assemblage.  It isn’t unfriendly.  We laugh a lot and tend to tolerance.  But we will get loud especially when the wine and spirits start flowing.  Thinking about the differences in individual members of our very large extended family I was knocking around in my mind how it can be possible that we can get together, laugh and argue, share ideas and memories and still stay friendly. 

We have folks in the family who fit the classic political definitions of “Left” and “Right”.  We also have people who stand somewhere in between.  And there are still others who might be left wing on some issues and hardline right on others.  We have Republicans, Democrats, independents, socialists, separatists, Southerners, Northerners, moderately rich, quite poor, Catholics, Protestants, an atheist or two and on and on.  There are people in our family who have lived all over the world and others who have rarely left the confines of their hometowns.  So as I was thinking about all of these diverse people I started to wonder how we seem to be able to get along pretty well most of the time.  It goes without saying that we haven’t always had harmony in the family, but we seem to overcome those discordant times eventually.

After a while, in my ruminating, I hit on the notion that we must have some basic, deeply underlying sense of understanding that allows us to get along.  Polar opposites should repel each other.  But we seem to have somehow overcome that law of physics.  When one of my rough and ready, right wing, red-neck cousins puts his arm around the shoulders of one of his gay liberal relatives and shares a family story, the affection isn’t faked and there is no hidden animosity on either side.  It isn’t tolerance dictated by some legislative edict either.  No, it is the understanding that we’re all in this together and there needs to be some place we can find shared ground if we’re going to survive as a family.  So what is that common, shared ground?

It’s pretty simple really, as most good ideas are.  The common ground is the family.  It’s those ties – by blood, by marriage, by adoption – that allow us to set aside differences.  No, that’s wrong.  It’s those ties that allow us to embrace and celebrate our differences.  We can argue, discuss and bicker.  But we’re still family.  We can accept that we’ll never change the opinion of the person we’re talking to (but we might) and it’ll still be okay.  We won’t be shunned.  We won’t be kicked out of the family.  As long is that level of tolerant understanding flows along like a quiet current, things will work out.

When I look at the complex and divisive problems in our country and our world, looking for the root causes of the troubles I always (in my simplistic way of thinking) end up with the idea that a whole lot of the difficulty arises with the fall of the family.  As families have scattered and broken over the past sixty years or so, troubles have increased.  People have lost touch.  Fathers disappeared leaving mothers to care for children.  Children became un-important, or worse, un-wanted.  That leads to abuse.  Abuse becomes a vicious cycle.  All kinds of unhappiness comes out of the ashes of burned down families.  We have seen some of that unhappiness in our own extended family.

 

But recently I have seen a small ray of hope.  It might just be wishful thinking on my part, but I sense that people seem to be trying to reclaim that sense of family.  And I hate to give too much credit or credence to technology but some people seem to be using modern tools to rebuild family connections or to construct new family groups.  These electronic connections often lead to face-to-face meetings.  And reunions.  So there you have it friends my philosophical meandering thoughts for today.

Now go make some connections and have a fine day.