Last week I received a phone call from an old friend and picking pal who I had not seen for some time. We got to reminiscing about the bluegrass bands and musicians we had played with over the last forty-five years. Much of our discussion was about other players who had influenced and helped us.
A few days later BBC Channel 4 was showing a rockumentary about Buddy Holly and the Crickets entitled ‘The Chirping Crickets’. I was intrigued by the attention it drew to the musical relationships in the group. Unlike Elvis Presley, who was a solo performer with a backing group, the Crickets were an integral band, and this was unusual in rock ‘n’ roll music at that time. All the guys lived in the vicinity of Lubbock, Texas, and had known each other as school friends or through mutual acquaintances. Buddy and Jerry (J.I.) Allison were the heart of the band. “They developed this incredible rapport with each other, where each one knew what the other was going to play or sing as they played it… J.I. was playing drums like a guitar or piano, he’s there with all sorts of little fills and things that you didn’t hear on records at that time just with two guys.” The string bass player Joe B Mauldin (no relation to Bessie Lee as far as I know!) “was very understated, very just kind of solid, moved the bass and knew the value of leaving space. The drive was in the drums, and the bass was just the rock, and it was almost like a lot of times Joe would play almost half time, there’d be so many holes, and that was part of the uniqueness.”
Here was a band in which a natural musical relationship had developed to stunning effect. It’s easy to see the parallels with groups of musicians of other genres. In bluegrass music there is often great musical rapport between brothers, notably the Stanley Brothers, the Osborne Bothers and Jim and Jesse. And larger family groups have included, down the years, the Stoneman Family, the Lewis Family, the McClain Family Band and more recently Cherryholmes. Bill Monroe’s classic band with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs is another prime example of a band with natural musical chemistry. Much has been said and written about how Bill Monroe inspired and developed the many musicians who played and sang in his band over the years. A good introduction to this complex subject would be James (Jim) Rooney’s book ‘Bossmen – Bill Monroe and Muddy Waters’. I have found the section on Muddy Waters equally fascinating. Muddy told Jim Rooney that some bandleaders “don’t give their members enough opportunity. They holds ’em back and I don’t. I let the whole thing work. Sing. See who likes you. I try to expose my band. A whole lot of them (bandleaders) don’t do that. They want everything for themself. They’re jealous. They’re afraid that one of the band members may beat them to the point that night. But when one of my band members goes over big I really like it. I enjoy it. That makes me feel good.” And Muddy Waters said much more to this effect – do read it!
As I get older I appreciate more and more what is going on in musical genres outside bluegrass. Of course we don’t get much in the way of bluegrass documentary programs on British television so I pick up on anything else that is being broadcast. The same night as “The Chirping Crickets” I was able to see a couple of programs about Roy Orbison, one a very moving account of his life story and the other a famous session filmed in Los Angeles in 1988 entitled ‘A Black and White Night’ with Roy Orbison and Friends, who include Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Jackson Browne, k.d. lang, Bonnie Raitt and T Bone Burnett . The session exudes musical chemistry, with everyone having a great time playing Roy’s hits interspersed with plenty of blues numbers and other material. You can just feel what it must have been like to play in that special band on that night. Not to be missed!
John Baldry
