If you’re in a casual jam at any bluegrass jamming venue you are certain to come across a situation where a great song is in progress and the lead singer has a brain freeze. The solo breaks might be very good but a song tends to falter unless there are lyrics. Most songs tell a story and it’s up to the singer to tell that story. Forgetting the lyrics mid-song can be very embarrassing. I’ve even I forgotten lyrics on songs I wrote. It happens.
Even polished bands can have this problem on stage during a performance. If you’ve been to enough bluegrass concerts you have no doubt seen this happen. What’s really fun is seeing how bands adapt to the lapse and keep the music going. One of the legendary bluegrass bands of old actually staged a lyrics lapse as part of their act and it was quite amusing:
https://youtu.be/59MoVqcEYcs?si=FKfvBvTeXhokalYn
Nowadays there are things called cell phones which make easy crutches for nervous jammers a bit uncertain of the words they are challenged to sing. I have no problem with that as long as it makes the music better but some hard core bluegrassers don’t like to see anything resembling a music stand or other form of “cheat sheet”. They have a point and sometimes it’s more fun to butcher a song with substandard lyrics than it is to sing it like they did on the record.
Singing it like the record can be a bit boring and many jammers alter the lyrics to their own tastes by certain key alterations. But if you do that you better know the lyrics you want to offer flawlessly.
Most jammers go over lyrics of songs they might sing before venturing out. It’s so easy to get caught up in the emotion of a good jam you don’t want to have to think. If you can at least get started with the first line that helps but maybe you should memorize the first letter of each verse just to make sure.
There are all sorts of tricks but there is no substitute for doing a song over and over like jammers are doing for forty eight hours in Bakersfield this weekend.
