I have never, ever been very pleased with my face or hair, so it’s a happy coincidence that I began playing the most hat-friendly form of music ever: bluegrass.
It could be argued that country music is even more hat-friendly, and maybe it is, but recently, the trend there has been away from hats. This is partly due, I suppose to a recent influx of women and men in the genre with magnificent hair. There was even a term in the industry for a plethora of bands with cowboy hats: “hat acts”.
Bluegrass has embraced all kinds of cool hats: Monroe’s perfect Stetson. Jimmy Martin’s ornate taco-bend lids. John Hartford’s derby. Flatt and Scruggs’ perfectly tilted cowboy hats.
When I first joined the Alhambra Valley Band, they were NOT a hat band. Nobody wore hats. We had a strict rule against ball caps, but nothing specific against nice hats. My first few months with them, I did not wear a hat but it bugged me so I began wearing a hat.
My wife bought me a very nice 7x beaver gray Resistol, and i had a hatter (a real hatter) give it a good bend, and that is a fine hat indeed! It looked great onstage, too, but I found that sartorial finery is subject to the same wear and tear that instruments go through from being tossed into trucks, etc., so I resolved to save that nice hat for special gigs only, since I didn’t have a hardshell hat case..
Then I bought a straw cowboy hat and that became my principal topper, but it got so worn out that some CBA members actually took up a collection so I could buy a new hat when I went to IBMA in Nashville (shameful, but true!). I did buy a decent hat, but now it’s looking shopworn, so the acquisition continues to this day.
It’s become a mild obsession – when I travel, I expect to come home with at least one new hat to add the collection
Since then, I have picked up all kinds of hats. Glancing at the stack, I see at least 8 cowboy hats, 2 Fedoras, 1 Porkpie, 1 (gold sequin) Top Hat, 2 large straw hats, 1 wizard hat and about a dozen ball caps, about evenly split between sports team logos and breweries and music logos.
Many have some real sentimental value – the aforementioned Resistol, my tie-dye Giants cap, my San Francisco Seals cap, the Indiana Jones hat that has been on countless camping and backpacking excursions, my OLD orange bill Giants cap and my (now filthy) Niners cap from the 1980’s. Some have been lost – left on planes, or in one instance, yanked from my hand by the wind when I tried to shake out orange peels from it from the window of a moving car.
The hats tell stories, and the stories are still being written!
