(The following text is an excerpt from the book “High Lonesome Below Sea Level: Stories and Faces of Bluegrass Music in the Netherlands” by Loes van Schaijk and Marieke Odekerken. The book can be ordered in the webshop of the Bluegrass Music Museum or the official webshop of the book itself, www.bluegrassportraits.nl.)
There is a farmhouse in Rijen named the Grand Ole Opry, guarded by donkeys. Its residents AG and Kate spend one half of the year there and the other half in the United Kingdom or the United States to visit prisons as “musicionaries”—a cross between musicians and missionaries, a term George Hamilton IV used to describe them.
Arent Geert Buining (called “AG” by his English-speaking friends who couldn’t pronounce “Geert”) first heard Pat Boone on Radio Luxembourg when he was fifteen years old. Through Pat Boone’s father-in-law, Red Foley, he got interested in country music. In 1972, two Johnny Cash concerts in Amsterdam inspired him to round up a few colleagues and students at the school where he worked as an English teacher and start the Johnny Cash Singers. After two years, the group broke up. AG and a girl named Ria, who changed her name to Kate (after the Johnny Cash song of the same name), decided to carry on.
AG and Kate have hosted concerts in the living room of their own Grand Ole Opry from the very start until the present day. In the ‘70s, they formed a network with other organizers to bring American musicians over for tours in the Netherlands—among them the Bailes Brothers, who in return organized AG and Kate’s first US tour in 1983. They have been back there every year since then and played at the original Grand Ole Opry in Nashville on several occasions. After they had gone professional in 1978, they spent a lot of time touring in England and the Shetland Isles. On one of these tours in Shetland in 1985, they got acquainted with the hymns of Charles Wesley. Over the next ten years, the duo recorded ten albums filled with Wesley hymns and found their place in the community of the Methodist church. AG and Kate aren’t members of any church, but they say Methodism, which stresses free will and God’s grace for all, appeals to them more than the “hell and damnation” approach of Calvinism.
In 1989, AG and Kate were invited to perform in a prison in England. One thing led to another, and before they knew it, they were doing more than one hundred fifty prison concerts a year in England and the United States. It is demanding work: it can be a nuisance getting through US customs at the airport, getting themselves and their instruments cleared to enter the prison, getting the sound systems to work, and so on. They recently had a very disappointing experience in Arkansas when almost half of their prison concerts were cancelled without due notice. But they find their work so fulfilling that it’s worth the hassle every time. They always report on their touring experiences in a bulletin they print three times a year for members of their Grand Ole Opry—Country and Gospel Music in that Old Tradition.
I notice how they consistently avoid the word “play” when they talk about music. To them, it’s “work.” Many people might find that odd, though it does make sense: it’s hard enough as it is to be taken seriously as a musician sometimes. AG and Kate have more habits that have raised a few eyebrows in the bluegrass scene. Their performance style is clearly influenced by Johnny Cash and June Carter; not only the singing, but also the interaction with the audience. They have always done their presentation in English, even when their audience is a hundred percent Dutch. “People thought we did it because we were egomaniacs pretending to be Americans,” AG says calmly, “but I still stand by it: if you’re talking to the audience about a song, and the song is in English, then it’s easier to refer to the lyrics in English.” This conviction is one of the reasons they prefer to work in English-speaking countries.
After their performance in the Mount Olive Correctional Complex in West Virginia, an inmate gave them a mountain dulcimer he had built especially for them to express his gratitude. He gave them a second one later. These particular instruments are symbols of the mutual respect between the musicianaries and the people they work for. AG: “People don’t always understand what it is we do. We want to see the prisoners laugh, to make them forget for just a moment that they’re in jail. The people who have been in there for a long time don’t get any mail or visitors anymore, so they write to us. We still get an average of twenty-five letters a month, and we always answer every one of them. Often, we are their only connection to the outside world. And as long as there’s a connection, there’s hope. That’s our mission.”