The Didmarton Bluegrass Festival in Gloucestershire, England, is one of the major music festivals in UK, but like all such events it started small, back in the 1980s, as a weekend of picking and singing at a country pub. Many of the local residents hadn’t heard anything quite like it before. I remember the bemused remark of an elderly gentleman who strolled into the pub hoping for a quiet Saturday evening drink, “But there are banjos everywhere…”
The five-string banjo, played 3-finger style, is undoubtedly the instrumental hallmark of bluegrass music. I was even going to leave out the word ‘instrumental’, remembering my own initial obsession with the banjo – the banjo was bluegrass music in my not so very humble opinion. An early addition to my record collection was Flatt and Scruggs – The Original Sound, with its cover photo of a piece of Poa pratensis pasture. The LP comprised twelve tracks of the band’s Mercury recordings, 1948-1950. As far as I was concerned fifty years ago the real business was on side 2 which included the only two instrumentals on the disc, Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Pike County Breakdown. There was lots of other great banjo picking on the record, but everything non-banjo paled by comparison, and Lester Flatt was a bit too much of a crooner for my liking.
I must confess that my perception of bluegrass music has changed radically over the years! Our music is created from a blend of sounds, vocal and instrumental, rhythmic and melodic. The 5:1 ratio of (vocal) songs to instrumentals on my old Flatt and Scruggs LP is about the right proportion for most listeners. All-instrumental sets at concerts or on CD have their place, but most of us (including me!) want to hear lots of singing. This was recognised back in the heyday of old-time music recordings. Riley Puckett often sang verses on the fiddle tunes recorded by Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, and Clayton McMichen in particular reckoned that Puckett’s vocals boosted the sales of their records.
As to the instruments in the bluegrass band, which would you say is the most important? An impossible question perhaps, or maybe just meaningless. But if I had to vote I would say the guitar. In the hands of a capable musician, the guitar can create and control the rhythm and timing of a band. This is particularly important when the other players are inexperienced, as in a jam session of amateurs. The bass has a similar function, and when the bass and guitar are working well together they form the rhythmic powerhouse of the band. You can if necessary have an effective session without a bass, but it’s more difficult without a good guitarist.
In the early days of bluegrass the guitar was not much used as a lead instrument. Typically the lead vocalist would also be the guitarist and keep things moving along while other instruments had their fun taking breaks. But on the vocals the lead singer would be centre stage, that essential member without whom there would be no band. When Flatt and Scruggs left Bill Monroe’s band Bill particularly felt the loss of Lester Flatt, with whom he had created the vocal sound of that classic powerhouse group. By comparison, Bill seems to have regarded Earl Scruggs as a young instrumentalist who could more easily be replaced – and Don Reno was waiting in the wings.
Since those early days bluegrass guitarists have developed as lead instrumentalists in their own right. Nowadays it is quite usual to hear blistering guitar breaks, often influenced by the likes of Tony Rice, David Grier, Bryan Sutton, Cody Kilby, Josh Williams and beyond. Players of other instruments are becoming more and more adept at providing complementary backup to the guitar. The duo performances of Chris Thile and Michael Daves have been a revelation to me, something of a new frontier in bluegrass. Their CD Sleep With One Eye Open is one of the most impressive bluegrass recordings I have heard for a long time. Think two voices plus a mandolin and guitar, playing classic songs from the early bluegrass era – does that sound like the Skaggs and Rice LP from many years ago? It’s actually something quite different – this is bluegrass music with the power of Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis! You must listen to this CD and pick up Thile and Daves’ live performances on YouTube. Their voices and instruments interweave with power and complexity to create the sound of a complete band. The CD comprises a selection of 16 bluegrass standards – even including a couple of titles from my old Flatt and Scruggs record. Check out their performance of Little Girl of Mine In Tennessee on YouTube as an example of how bluegrass music has progressed, but also stayed true to its roots. With musicians of this calibre turning their attention to traditional bluegrass we can look forward with confidence to the future of the music we love.
John Baldry
January 2017
