Tramping to Czechgrass

...Czech musician Marko Cermâk, who was active in the tramp scene, became so excited that he built his own long-necked, five-string banj...

...The Tramp Movement remained strong under the Communists, despite periodic attempts by the authorities to regulate it or stamp it out...

...The Orange Blossom Special" became "Oranzovy Exprès," "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" became "Vlak Pulnocni," and "I've Been Working on the Railroad" became "Pracoval Jsem na Trati...

...At dusk, participants held a ritual ceremony to light the bonfire, and then the singing began...

...Still, when performing in public they had to sing in Czech, and censors scrutinized the lyrics...

...Most of them had lilting melodies with a regular beat—real "campfire songs...

...Performers persuaded the censors to let them play bluegrass, folk and country music by convincing them this was the music of the "oppressed" American proletariat...

...I don't speak Czech, but the gritty passion of singer/songwriter Robert Krestan's vocals, and the resonance of the sung Czech language, meld with the band's virtuoso instrumentais in a way I find quite thrilling...

...In fact, a large number of American folk songs have come to be considered traditional Czech tramp songs—or are actually believed to be Czech creations that were taken to America...

...This is precisely why I like its music so much...

...You have 10,000 tramping songs, you know," Lilly told me...

...Lilly described how, when she was 15, she and her sister were arrested while on a tramping jaunt in Slovakia and accused of spreading American ideology...

...I first heard them a year or so ago when I bounced around the Czech Republic following the crowded summer festival circuit...

...Founded in 1991 by Malina, Krestan and other Czech acoustic music veterans, Druhâ Trâva uses American roots music as a launching pad for a synthesis of jazz, pop, folk, and even classical motifs...

...Bluegrass has been popular here for decades...

...It came from books—Jack London, John Steinbeck—the romance of the Wild West, Alaska and so on...

...I was a teenager, 12 or 13 years old, when I first heard these songs, sung in Czech by Czech groups...

...It was the music of our youth, of our heart " But, he added, their sensibilities were honed too by rock'n'roll, world music, their own Czech heritage, and other influences—"bluegrass music wasn't enough for us...

...In other words, they've made it their own, which is wonderful...

...Lilly's friends copied and recopied her tapes and passed them around from player to player, like secret, even subversive, messages from across the global divide...

...Tramping grew out of the Boy Scouts and was particularly influenced by the backto-nature Woodcraft Indian Movement founded in 1902 by the Canadian author and naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton...

...As soon as Seeger touched the strings, Lilly said, "I knew that this was the strange instrument I liked so much from the hillbilly music...

...Its virtuoso musicians satisfy the most hardcore fans with scorching versions of traditional bluegrass standards, but as the band's name—"Second Grass"—implies, it reaches far beyond the classic bluegrass genre for inspiration...

...Ruth Ellen Gruber is a regular NL contributor...

...The one I attended was held to celebrate the 45th anniversary of a tramp club near Brno that Lilly had belonged to as a teenager...

...They were harshly interrogated, and friends of theirs were sent to prison...

...Called "Wayfaring Sfrangers," it was issued in 1989, just before the revolution, when censorship had eased to some extent...

...During that homecoming trip, she said, "I hitchhiked toward the Oslavka River, and the people in the car that stopped for me were listening to a bluegrass tape...

...So, after 12 years, I listened to my own tape...

...They beat me until the blood flowed," she told me...

...I have played their CDs over and over—and new technology has even allowed me to quantify the obsession...

...It was a concert by Pete Seeger, the second of two he performed in Czechoslovakia following a tour of the Soviet Union...

...Lilly's involvement with the music began, as it did for many other Czech fans and musicians, in the so-called Tramp Movement, a uniquely Czech outdoors and music subculture that originated in the 1920s and is still going fairly strong...

...They called this "going to America," and many romanticized the American West, drawing inspiration from Western movies and novels...

...I asked the people where they got it, and they told me that a friend of their friend had gotten it from his friend...

...The band members couldn't "squash" everything they wanted to convey into the tight format of traditional bluegrass, he said...

...I could have gone on singing for three days without stopping...

...Indeed, in the darkest years of Communist rule singing American-style music often became an oblique way of expressing protest against the regime...

...and Czech bluegrass musicians win international prizes...

...The American banjoist Tony Trischka, who toured Czechoslovakia in 1988, was featured as a guest...

...Lilly and others have told me how they would listen to "hillbilly music" on the "forbidden but beloved" American Armed Forces Radio, beamed from West Germany across the Iron Curtain, and try to figure out what instrument made the distinctive, ringing sound so different from that of the guitars, mandolins and tenor banjos common in Czechoslovakia...

...The term derives from "potlatch," a ceremony among native cultures in the Pacific Northwest at which hosts give away their possessions to their guests...

...The country's annual Banjo Jamboree, held in the central Bohemian town of Caslav, is reckoned to be the oldest bluegrass event in Europe...

...As night fell, the entire group joined in, singing song after song after song, straight through until daybreak...

...Most recordings from that period are no longer available, but by chance I found an old Poutnici LP in the used record bin of a music store in the little Bohemian town of Kutnâ Hora...

...They were cheered by the crowd and presented with wooden plaques bearing painted images of Indian, trapper or woodland scenes...

...The cover of its information booklet features drawings of totem poles surrounding a sepia photograph of a group of young men strumming guitars, seated in the woods outside a log cabin that has "Hudson' spelled out above its door...

...Starting in 1975, she made tapes of bluegrass music from American LPs and sent them to her friends in Czechoslovakia...

...This spring I accompanied Lilly to a "tramp potlach"—an all night sing-athon held around a blazing bonfire and well lubricated with freely flowing beer...

...People couldn't travel, but they thought about it and they tried to live their dreams.' Tramp songs, meanwhile, evolved from the informal stuff of campfire camaraderie into a full-blown genre of Czech popular music, merging local folk traditions with American folk songs, country music, cowboy songs, jazz, and pop...

...At one point an astonishing 67 Czech banjo players took the stage in an apparently successful attempt to set a global record for the number of banjo pickers playing in unison...

...Czech artisans produce banjos and mandolins used by American and other performers...

...People couldn't travel, so they took the romance and made it at home," Lilly told me...

...In the liner notes, Trischka describes Poutnici exactly the way I would describe Druhâ Trâva...

...I knew exactly what the next song would be, because long ago I had put this tape together for a Czech friend...

...An American reviewer once said his voice embodied the "power and beauty of a thick slice of unvarnished oak...

...Although he often sings cover songs in the original English, he is famous among Czechs for his own poetic, and at times provocative, lyrics...

...But they never did, despite vexation on the part of Communist police and state security...

...They have a unique sound," he says, "Czcchgrass instead of Kentucky bluegrass...

...At the edge of the clearing, four totem poles built by members stood amid a tall pine forest, and a small tepee was set up next to a log cabin very similar to the one pictured on the tramp music CD information booklet...

...According to the count feature of my recently purchased iPod, I have heard some of Druhâ Trâva's songs two dozen times or more since I loaded them into the device earlier this summer, yet, amazingly, so far I haven't OD'd...

...Her newest book is Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe...

...The group's publicist in the United States, where it tours every year (this year from September 20 through October 29) calls it "new acoustic music with bluegrass influences...

...The band's banjo player, Lubos Malina, and its Dobro (or resonator guitar) player, Lubos Novotny, also received the latest of their many Czech honors...

...But Druhâ Tràva rejects this approach...

...Druhâ Trâva means "Second Grass," and the group is billed as a bluegrass band...

...Czech tramps often dressed in cowboy hats and bandannas, gave their campsites American names and decorated them with totem poles as well as other hybrid American Indian symbols and imagery...

...In this way the Greenhorns and similar groups brought such songs firmly into the local musical tradition and fostered the total assimilation of many of them...

...In 1964, Lilly was present at a seminal performance that electrified tramp music fans and changed the face of the Czech acoustic music scene...

...Bands were also forbidden to have English names, so the Greenhorns had to change themselves into the "Zelenaci," and a fellow group, the Rangers, became "Plavci...

...Cermâk went on to become one of Czechoslovakia's first banjo virtuosi, the father of fivestring banjo playing in the country— godfather in effect to the 67 banjo pickers who set the record for unison playing in Caslav...

...I only realized this was American music much after the time I first heard it," Lubos Malina, Druhâ Trâva's awardwinning banjo player, told me when I caught up with the band for several concerts this summer...

...Many Czech musicians so exalt the American identity of bluegrass that they meticulously attempt to recreate the exact sound of American Appalachia...

...For the most part they were urbanités who took a train out of big cities on Fridays and spent their weekends "living free"—hiking, canoeing, sitting around campfires strumming guitars and singing, and sleeping under the stars...

...A recent CD compilation of tramp songs originally recorded between 1920 and 1939 features performances by groups with names like Settlers Club, Camp Boys and Westmen...

...The dominant official opinion always was that tramps were relics of capitalist society and, as such, shall be given no rest until they would disappear from the face of the better Socialist world," wrote Pavel Hubka, an amateur historian of tramping...

...We gathered around a 5'-high bonfire in a lush meadow clearing on the Bubrova River that had served for decades as the club's regular campsite...

...The early Czech tramps were not American-style hobos...

...They became extremely influential by playing Czech language versions of American folk songs, copying arrangements they heard on American Armed Forces Radio...

...As it turned out, she said, "Pete sang a lot of songs we knew from tramp music, so I realized they must be American originals, not just tramp songs...

...We grew up on simple music, bluegrass music, simple old country music, acoustic country music," explains Krestan, a striking man with shadowed eyes, grizzled cheeks and a wild shock of gray hair...

...Every group has their own songs, and we have some very good songwriters...

...In the process, it transforms a quintessential American idiom into a richly textured, highly personal statement that defies genre definitions...

...Lilly was not able to return to Czechoslovakia until 1987, but when she did she found poignant evidence of how widespread her influence had become...

...Former members had come from as far away as Canada to mark the occasion...

...Before the 1989 Velvet Revolution, he and Malina were part of a band called Poutnici (Pilgrims), and some of his songs achieved the status of counterculture anthems...

...There must have been a dozen people with guitars and other instruments, and, as far as I could tell, no song was ever sung twice...

...I had never seen a living American before, and at school we learnedthe worst things about the'American imperialists,'" Lilly recalled...

...At first, individuals stepped forward to sing favorite songs...

...Now in her early 60s, Lilly left Czechoslovakia after the Soviet-led invasion in 1968 and has lived in Switzerland more or less since then...

...The little CzechRepublicshowedthe whole world that it has the highest concentration of bluegrass bands on earth," said Lilly Pavlak, a Brno-born fan who for over 30 years has been instrumental in promoting the music here and abroad...

...There must have been 300 people present, most of them appearing to be in their 50s or 60s and dressed in the green army-style garments that have replaced cowboy gear as typical tramp attire...

...Some people even believed that they ate little children...

...It was very familiar to me...

...According to legend, his performances in Prague and Brno marked the first time after World War II that a five-string banjo was seen and heard live in Czechoslovakia...

...The quality was terrible, but it was bluegrass, and I was home again...

...There are scores of Czech bluegrass groups...

...Krestan's raw vocals and original songs are the most important part of the mix...

...Cermâk also founded one of Czechoslovakia's first American-style country and bluegrass groups, the Greenhorns...

...You cannot count the music...

...by study ing photographs taken of Seeger at the Prague concert that were blown up to life-size...

...At the time it was difficult, if not impossible, to obtain original American recordings...

...Together they performed two classic works, "Cripple Creek" and "Foggy Mountain Breakdown...

...That assimilation was intensified by the 1968 invasion, when official censorship made much of America's cultural production taboo...

...At its 33rd edition this past June, Druhâ Trâva was named 2005 Band of the Year, and for the umpteenth time Krestan was chosen Male Singer of the Year...

...Instead, they opted to use bluegrass instruments to play whatever sort of music fit their taste...

...In fact, it is the foremost band on the flourishing Czech bluegrass scene...

...Clearly aimed at a foreign audience, the liner notes are in English and all the songs are performed in English, too, including several of Krestan's own powerful compositions...

...What further struck those who attended Seeger's concerts was the appearance and sound of his long-necked, five-string banjo...

...That was the defining moment notjust for me, but forthe entire bluegrass movement that followed...