Most folks love to sing whether they admit it or not. Singing is a very natural thing to do for most people no matter if they have a good voice or not. Still many of us are embarrassed to sing in public. We’ve heard professional singers and they are much better than we are so we sing their catchy tunes on the sly. We sing in our shower or in our car while we are driving alone. Nobody will make fun of us there because they can’t hear us. And many of us have experienced situations where someone flopped and made a fool of themselves while trying to sing a tune.
When I was a kid there was a popular TV show which tapped into people’s need to sing (and reluctance to do so). All you needed to do to be a singer was to use the miracle of television and tune into Mitch Miller’s show on NBC. A chorus of singers was there and all you had to do was “follow the bouncing ball” to sing the lyrics on the screen at the proper rhythm.
Years later the karaoke craze hit and it was like Mitch Miller all over again. But this time there was a difference. Instead of singing in the den by a television the idea was to have a performance in front of an audience (hopefully as mellow as the performer). People liked the idea in part i think because they got a thrill out of overcoming that natural shyness most people have when it comes to singing in public.
A lot of people have learned to sing by participating as a volunteer in a chorus, glee club or choir. Usually the director has experience teaching music and in training voices. The experience can be time consuming but it’s a good environment for an aspiring singer because their mistakes are absorbed by the other singers and they get free music instruction.
Bluegrass music is famous for great instrumental picking. We’ve got banjos playing at warp speed, mandolins splitting strings, guitars doing G runs, etc. But mostly bluegrass is about singing. High lonesome notes, tight harmonies, that’s what it’s really all about. If you play bluegrass and you don’t sing, why not? You are denying yourself that rush that comes from overcoming the singing block, that reluctance to do what comes so naturally.
I’ve been around a few really good pickers who never seem to sing and when I finally hear them sing I am usually very pleased. A good musician can almost always sing pretty well. Earl Scruggs was a banjo picking machine but I love to hear his quartet singing with the Bluegrass Boys.
Earl had a nice resonant voice for singing but you don’t have to have a good voice to be a good singer. Everybody’s individual’s voice is different, its own unique voiceprint. If your voice happens to sound like A.J Lee’s, almost anybody would like your voice. But if you had a voice like that and didn’t know the first thing about singing it would be of little interest. On the other hand if you had one of those voices that I might consider very unusual or even annoying (like for example Bob Dylan, Iris Dement, Roy Acuff or Ethel Merman), you could still make some really good music that I would want to listen to.
We need good singers in bluegrass whether it’s on stage or around the camp at our next jam. If you’re a picker in the shadows who knows a few song lyrics you need to sing lead on your next call instead of playing that fiddle tune you can kill every time. You need to put a nice tenor harmony to the next song or even better find the baritone or high baritone nobody else can sing. That karaoke rush of overcoming your inhibitions awaits.
