I get to play an occasional fundraising party for our neighborhood school. It’s the most fun gig I do all year. The tone for the band is set by Mabel, a fifth grader who is as enthusiastic about her fiddle as she is about her iPod Touch.
Frequently she wants to play with both of them at the same time. I think the thumb strength she’s built up from texting must be helping her fingering and bowing, because she’s getting really good. At both of them.
Mabel’s mom and dad do their best to channel the energy, but their hands are full most of the time, one with a guitar and the other with a bass, so it can get pretty chaotic. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen the fiddle played from a standing position on the back of a couch.
When my own kid was in grade school, the best place to practice my banjo was sitting on a bench in the schoolyard waiting for her to come out at the end of the day. Kids have a complex, ambiguous relationship with music. They love it, and it’s kind of scary. It can be just one more part of the adult world, trying to make them conform, play it this way and not that way. But at the same time it’s full of rebellious possibility. The banjo sits right at that border, mysterious and shiny and loud.
I would sit there running through my exercises until the bell rang, then I’d have to stop because I’d be mobbed by curious grade schoolers asking, “What is it?”
There is no word for banjo in Spanish. That doesn’t stop kids that don’t speak English from asking you what it is. I tried different approximations; I’ve found “African guitar” seems to get it across OK.
I‘m sure Carlton Haney didn’t think about this for a moment when he came up with the festival as the main way of participating in this music. We soak our kids in picking for days at a time; no wonder so many of them get the itch. Lots of other genres have festivals, but you don’t see a lot of young kids picking up the oboe or the berimbau spontaneously and joining in jams with their parents and uncles and aunts.
I owe my own participation in bluegrass to a kid. It was her idea to pick up a mandolin and start singing; it didn’t seem like there was anything I could do but get a banjo and back her up. She’s moved on to higher culture now (I’ve lost her to jazz, for now at least), but the banjo appears to be a permanent condition.
And of course if I hadn’t grown up required to sing in every church choir between Chicago and Lake Superior, I wouldn’t have had the gall to take up this strange, scary practice in the first place.
My own kid has graduated from grade school and never had much time for bluegrass anyway. I’m OK with that, because I have a purpose in life. Mabel’s going to be needing a banjo player for the next few school fundraisers, so I’ve got to go practice.
