What is it about hats and musicians? It just don’t seem right to play music with an undressed head. Mark Evans recently asked why so many bluegrass bands wear cowboy hats with the one side pressed upward. Cowboys don’t wear their hats that way, because the rain would drip right down their backs, but it apparently doesn’t cause the same problem for bluegrass musicians. At least not for the good ones. like the big Mon. The little Mon, on the other hand just wears his hat like a cowboy and keeps his neck dry.
I once played in a rock and roll band with a guy that carried the hat tradition well beyond where it was meant to go. He wore a different hat almost every time we played, sometimes every set. And it wasn’t like a baseball cap or cowboy hat, no, he alternated between a Abraham Lincoln Stovepipe, a fedora, a flipflop, and on more manic occasions, a football helmet. (THAT worked really well when he played his electric fiddle.) Somehow he thought that part of his apparel was a necessary musical tool, like a capo, or a guitar strap, but then he also thought that living in the back of his truck, on white bread, peanut butter and baloney, and talking to himself about why birds fly was also important so I’m not sure that he’s a reliable source of information about the lids on the top of guitar players.
However…
I’m not always a deep thinker, especially about hats and musicians, but if I were I might think it has something to do with an alter ego, perhaps part of a double life, like the lawyer that takes off his tie and one button suit and puts on a crushed leather hat that looks a little like someone sat on it, and picks up a open-backed banjer and claw hammers it till 3 o’clock in the morning playing songs about pig parts and possum eating with a circle of disguised district attorneys, tractor salesmen and recently released lay-abouts.
Maybe this is the life we were meant to live, this life under the hat. Instead of the one we got stuck with because we were born with a modicum of good sense.
And I recognized all of you by your hats, (and the brand of your guitar). And I judge you by that hat. If you wear the wrong hat I might suspect you of being like that banjo player in the logo of the breakdown. You wouldn’t want that would you? To have somebody think you were a BANJO player?
Of course I could be wrong about hats and musicians. Maybe we wear these things just to keep our heads warm.
