Vinson’s Variety: Bluegrass is grass roots music
I’d been tinkering with this idea for some time. However, it wasn’t until I watched a recent CMT segment featuring Ricky Skaggs, and his relationship with the late Bill Monroe, known as “The Father of Bluegrass,” that an unseen hand tapped me on the shoulder and pointed me in the right direction.
Along with Alison Krauss & Union Station, the Del McCrory Band, and others, Ricky Skaggs, unquestionably, has proven to be a “torch-carrier” of traditional bluegrass music. With the help of the T-Bone Burnett/Nashville-produced, mega-successful “O’ Brother, Where Art Thou?” album, Skaggs has been instrumental in helping raise bluegrass from the grave and carrying it into the home entertainment centers of mainstream America (as did the late Stevie Ray Vaughn for blues music).
A hardcore fan of R&B, blues-rock music, I, too, love bluegrass music. One of my earliest memories of being truly affected by live music is bluegrass-related. Back then, my life-long friend Randal Smith, an outstanding, multi-instrument playing bluegrass musician, (at the 1975 Bluegrass Jamboree in Smithville, Randal won first place in the flattop guitar category) and his father, the late Cecil Smith, would go somewhere just about every Saturday night and play bluegrass music. I happily tagged along.
I vividly recall going with Randal and Cecil to the old Cannon County Theater, located on Main Street in downtown Woodbury (no longer there), and listening to them – Randal on banjo and Cecil on either dobro or flattop guitar – perform with local bluegrass pickers. Sometimes, Randal’s older sister and her husband would join in
“Along with my grandpa, Paul Boren and John Peak – who both, at one time or another, played banjo with The Sand Mountain Boys, I’m pretty sure – showed me some of my first licks on banjo,” Randal recalled. “After that, I started listening to a lot of stuff by Doug Dillard, Earl Scruggs, and Ralph Stanley.”
I asked Randal for his definition of bluegrass music: “Well, your basic bluegrass band has a banjo, a dobro, a fiddle, a flattop guitar, a mandolin, and an upright base. Best I can find out, none of those instruments is native to America. So, that, in itself, tells you that, even though we credit it with getting its start with Bill Monroe, in Kentucky, and The Stanley Brothers, in Virginia, bluegrass was influenced by people from different countries who ended up settling in America.
“Bluegrass, for me, came from a bunch of uneducated, country-mountain folks, who, like the black slaves, created a music that gave them a break from hard times when nobody else or nothing else would or could.”
“A little bit slave field-hollers, a little bit Jimmy Rodgers, a little bit Carter family, a little bit gospel, a little bit cast-iron spirit?” I asked.
“Sounds about right to me,” Randal said. “Before it was called bluegrass, my grandpa and my great uncle used to play at square dances. They called ’em hoe-downs.”
Regardless the actual definition, it can be said that bluegrass music, indeed, is a grass roots music, the ground broken and hoed, and the seeds sowed, by a combination of threat, sweat, creativity, and the desire to turn a negative situation into a positive one.
My all-time favorite bluegrass tune? I initially said Doc Watson pickin’ and singin’ “Tennessee Stud,” off the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s 1972 album, “Will the Circle be Unbroken?” However, Randal, somewhat, corrected me, informing me that Doc’s “Tennessee Stud” is as much a high-spirited folk tune as a thoroughbred bluegrass one.
I concede. However, it’s grass roots music, just the same.
(Mike Vinson is a Warren County columnist. His e-mail is [email protected].)