On Music
COOK, BRUCE
On Music BLUEGRASS IN THE AIR BY BRUCE COOK Of all genres, subgenres and styles of American music, the one least known but most readily identifiable is bluegrass. Play 30 seconds of practically...
...on banjo, joined Monroe...
...Monroe has always cited Shultz, who played blues and country dances, as the first and strongest influence on him...
...On its latest album, Dream (United Artists UA-LA469-G) the group is almost too eclectic...
...If you don't know who Bill Monroe is either, maybe you owe it to yourself to look inside Artis' brief guide to the music, or into Steven D. Price's even briefer one, Old as the Hills (Viking, 128 pp., $7.95...
...When Monroe, trying to be helpful, mentioned bluegrass, they blanked on that, too...
...RCA has reissued a two-record set on the old Bluebird label that originally put out all their songs...
...Moreover, while there is much that is good on the album, overall the production is marred by a lack of seriousness, an inclination to goof around that seems, unfortunately, to be an essential part of the band's nature...
...There were plenty of male duos around then—Mac and Bob, Karl and Harty, for example, both with the WLS National Barn Dance in Chicago—but most of them specialized in religious and sentimental songs...
...This was quite a feat because the instrument he played then and has played since is one that seems unlikely for anything even remotely like jazz—the mandolin...
...Monroe was once conned into appearing on a daytime TV game show, To Tell the Truth...
...In a way, that's exactly what it is...
...Charlie formed his own band and went off in a predictable direction, giving the people what they wanted—lots of gospel numbers and a few traditional songs, nothing that was likely to jar his audiences...
...It is easy these days to hear what the Monroe Brothers were like then...
...Artis' takes an historical approach, whereas Price's book tends to be a quick survey of what's going on in bluegrass today...
...The nicest tracks on the record feature a sweet-singing blind guitar virtuoso named Doc Watson, a performer no less difficult to fix than the members of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in their way...
...The sound was that of an old-time string band, but Monroe added a bass for rhythm, and he urged the members into a hard-driving, hell-for-leather style that could be called country jazz...
...He has often jammed with string bands and appeared at bluegrass festivals, and for a long period he was the warm-up act for Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys...
...Although bluegrass thus began as a bastard form, lately there has been a great deal of talk about authenticity among its adherents...
...There's not much to pick from between the two, though...
...Some "hippies" have elicited bitter remarks, too...
...Most of the time they can get away with it because they play so well...
...He is welcome in any camp he chances to visit...
...The break took place in 1939...
...Yet the two felt most at home with spirited traditional songs like "Darlin' Corey" and "Nine-Pound Hammer...
...The title of the album, Feast Here Tonight (RCA AXM2-5510), is appropriate: 32 of the 60 numbers the Monroe Brothers recorded between 1936-38 are included, and the music is remarkably listenable...
...With the help of Johnny Cash's mother-in-law, the legendary Maybelle Carter, they rounded up the greatest constellation of guest-stars that Nashville has seen assembled on any single record date—people like Roy Acuff, Merle Travis, Jimmy Martin, Earl Scruggs, and Mother Maybelle herself...
...Doc currently has a new album out, backed up by his son and a few young musicians, a two-record set called Memories (United Artists UA-LA423-H2...
...Bluegrass is directly descended from the reels and schottisches performed by the string bands of Ap-palachia since the 18th century...
...That "something" and that "new style" was bluegrass, and these old Depression recordings bear the same relationship to bluegrass, as it developed in the '40s, as the old Scott Joplin piano rolls do to the jazz played by Louis Armstrong and King Oliver in the '20s...
...A case of sibling rivalry was needed to set Bill Monroe free from his brother...
...And the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, as hard to classify as any group in popular music today...
...still, I will always feel grateful to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band for their magnificent three-record album of a few years back, Will the Circle Be Unbroken (United Artists UAS 9801...
...The next was surely his recently deceased brother, Charlie, with whom Monroe first performed professionally—not in Kentucky, but in the Chicago area where the brothers had gone in 1929...
...It quickly became apparent that nobody—not even the host, Bill Cullen—knew who he was or what he did...
...In all, there are 22 tracks on the album, each one a delight...
...This anecdote was cribbed from Bluegrass by Bob Artis (Hawthorn, 182 pp., $8.95), one of two new books on the subject...
...Earl Scruggs, still the banjo wizard of "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," was read out of church by the purists when the band he formed with his sons and some of their young buddies, the Earl Scruggs Revue, began featuring electrically amplified instruments and playing on rock programs...
...It plays the usual string band instruments, but seems willing and able to try any style or genre from ordinary country to '50s rock...
...It is corny and dated, certainly, sounding like another world, a simpler, sweeter America that we have only heard about, never experienced...
...Nonetheless, it suggests something taking shape, a new style seeking expression...
...I'm talking about bands like The Dillards, which began with rock and gradually went bluegrass, building a following through the old Glen Campbell TV show...
...But mostly he goes his own way, accompanied (literally) by his son, Merle...
...Yet the music's giant, Bill Monroe, a combination Charlie Parker and Elvis Presley to his fans, is utterly unknown to millions of his countrymen...
...Soon they were touring all points south and had developed a following, especially in Kentucky, the Carolinas and Tennessee...
...They do all those songs about mother, and trains and that little old cabin in the pines, but they have also been known to attempt numbers God never intended to be played in the bluegrass manner, such as "Green-sleeves," and the old Ted Weems rhumba numba, "Heartaches...
...They range from traditional Carolina banjo numbers that Doc picks on an old-time unfretted banjo like the one his father gave him when Doc was a boy, to country standards from the '30s, '40s and '50s...
...But is it bluegrass...
...Then there are the practitioners of so-called "progressive bluegrass," who transgress (according to the purists) in the matter of material...
...In an easy, personal and informal way, Doc recalls a few experiences and a lot of songs...
...He learned all his mother and a musical uncle could teach him, then went to study with the best musician in Ohio county, a black guitarist and fiddler named Arnold Schulz...
...Their style was unusual...
...Bluegrass—that lovely, intricate cacaphony of fiddle, guitar, mandolin, dobro, and banjo—is music with a tradition, one that should be allowed to stretch and grow to accommodate real quality, no matter what the source...
...Somehow he managed it, weaving around his brother Charlie's guitar chords in intricate, bluesy patterns that, at their best, had speed and energy, and the improvisional feeling of jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt...
...They worked in an oil refinery in Whiting, Indiana, and played in the Windy City on weekends until 1934, when a radio station in Gary, Indiana, hired them at a salary of $11 per week...
...Taken together, what these albums—by the Monroe Brothers, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Doc Watson—give is a sense of continuity...
...There may be a reason for putting the old Everly Brothers hit of the title on the same record with "Hey, Good Lookin'" and that convincingly ersatz folk song, "The Battle of New Orleans"—but "Malaguena" as a banjo solo...
...Their relationship to black music became even plainer as the style developed, and as brilliant instrumentalists like Lester Flatt, on guitar, and Earl Scruggs...
...He named his group the Blue Grass Boys, by the way, thereby fixing the name for a whole brand of music...
...He first became more widely known, though, with the folk music renaissance of the early '60s...
...Born in 1911 in rural Kentucky, the youngest of eight children, Bill Monroe grew up cross-eyed, unhappy and withdrawn, interested in little else but music...
...Play 30 seconds of practically anything from a Bill Monroe album, and you will be told, "That's hillbilly music...
...The best are two groups from Washington, D.C., the Country Gentlemen and the Seldom Scene...
...The title offers an idea of its style and format...
...The Monroe Brothers, as their act was known, did their share of the standard tunes, with Charlie wailing the melody soulfully and Bill harmonizing in his near-falsetto tenor...
...and a reggae "Joshua Come Home...
...He sings country & western, folk, black and white blues, proving to anybody who needs it pointed out that American music is a single idiom...
...Bill Monroe, in particular, gave the numbers a driving, jazzy feeling...
...Both tell the same story of the music's development, however, and both trace it back to the same source —Bill Monroe...
...Bill's new group, on the other hand, struck out into new territory...
...Doc, like the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, plays some material of questionable pedigree, yet nobody questions his purity...
Vol. 58 • October 1975 • No. 21
