The Daily Grist: “I like to watch TV” (Peter Sellers, from the movie Being There)
Our world has changed dramatically since the days when Bluegrass music first came onto the scene. Given all that has happened since Bill Monroe took his new band, featuring banjoist Earl Scruggs, onto the stage at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville it’s somewhat amazing that more than seventy five years later there are still people who truly appreciate this unique style of hard driving music.
This Covid pandemic has threatened our Bluegrass music over these last two years more than anyone could have anticipated. Festivals and other venues have been the life blood of this struggling art form but they had to be canceled right and left. Essential places where you can go and be with your fellow arcane music lovers have been shut down for more than a year.
What do you do? Well, you adapt and many Bluegrass fans have adapted very successfully to preserve their music. Zoom jams, online lessons, endless YouTube concert videos, viewer supported concerts to support the artists we are unable to see live anymore. But it’s not enough.
Being there. That’s what it’s really all about. Peter Sellers’s insular world as a displaced gardener in the movie is a metaphor for how we have all been displaced from reality by a pandemic. More than that we have been displaced from reality by our necessary response to the crisis. We have flocked to the internet as a substitute for face to face human interaction. Don’t get me wrong. Thank God for the internet. It made it easier to get through some rough times.
But enough is enough! Are we real people or are we internet versions of real people? If we don’t exist on Facebook do we really exist? You could spend a whole day surfing the web in virtual reality and be very entertained. It is a world unto itself but it is not reality.
I remember a comment fellow welcome columnist Bruce Campbell made a while back about the video game Guitar Hero, in its day a sort of virtual reality. “Why don’t people just learn to play a real guitar?” was Bruce’s take on the situation and it rings true still in my mnd.
Music that is acoustically produced on site without pitch correction or studio sound tricks is real music. People who show up at your campsite to enjoy playing a few tunes with you are real people who play real music. Bluegrass is real music that needs to be played by real people singing together, hopefully without wearing face masks (unless it is truly necessary).
Summer is here. I hope we can have some fun playing real music with real folks.
