This is a going to be a rambling column about recent and upcoming ramblings, made possible by a vaccine, a negative COVID test, and a mask.
Ramble 1: Local
I went to a jam this past weekend, and a certain fabulous bass/guitar player (okay, it was Steve Pottier) called the song “The World is Waiting for the Sunrise.” I had heard the Les Paul/Mary Ford version before, but it got me curious about its history, since a little internet digging gave me recordings from not just Les Paul, but also Willie Nelson, Bing Crosby, Benny Goodman, Django Reinhardt, the Beatles (really? Was I absent that day? But actually, it’s a horrible recording ) and loads of others, notably for the bluegrass world, Seldom Scene, Don Reno, and a Smithsonian Folkways recording with Roger Sprung and Doc Watson. Doc Watson.
Turns out it was written back in 1918 by a concert pianist named Ernest Seitz (lyrics by Gene Lockhart). Word on the street is he was embarrassed to be writing “pop” music, so it was originally published under his pseudonym, Raymond Roberts. It became a jazz standard and a banjo tune long before Les Paul picked it up in 1951. Now, I’m working on it on the fiddle. It has one of those damned diminished chords, but it’s pretty and swingy and worth the work.
Ramble 2: Hawaii
I joined the 60,000 other tourists who decided to get vaccinated and COVID tested and go to Hawaii this month. Best of all, I went to my first live concert since early 2020. It wasn’t bluegrass, but it was a small (only about 50 of us) intimate, outdoor, Hawaiian slack key concert at the Napili Kai Beach Resort Pavilion. This venue has been presenting slack key concerts for years, on the beautiful island of Maui. There were a few players who were featured in the event, but most important to me was the great, Grammy winning George Kahumoku, Jr. Listen to his lovely “O Makalapua” .
If you aren’t familiar with slack key, it’s a style of guitar that started in Hawaii after Mexican cowboys introduced Spanish guitars there in the late 1800s. The Hawaiians re-tuned the guitars to open tuning and developed their own style of finger picking. Most slack-key tunings start with a guitar in standard tuning and “slacking” one or more of the strings until the strings create a single chord, typically G major. One of the great things about slack key is that it shares the kind of jam culture that bluegrass has. It’s common at family parties and jams at luaus.
Ramble 3: Future Rambles
What will future rambles look like? A few more small jams, some camping, a road trip to see my family in Washington State and hopefully do some singing with my talented cousins, a Marty Stuart concert in September at the Freight and Salvage (proof of vaccine required), and the Wailin’ Jennys there, too. But, as the Delta variant of the COVID virus is on the rise, and the rest of the world still waits their turn in line for the vaccine, future rambles are still uncertain.
The world truly is waiting for the sunrise. But we aren’t there yet. Get vaccinated. Wear your mask.
