Place says that Appalachian blues is distinct from Mississippi blues because it's more melodic. It's dominated by fingerstyle guitar, rather than the percussive playing of Delta blues, and is heavily influenced by ragtime.
"There was a lot of emphasis put on the instrumental dexterity and letting your guitar playing do your talking for you," Pearson says. "It's a little more of a back-porch style of singing."
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Poster for 2012 Kingman Island Festival.[/caption]*
"All Christmas music should be played so elegantly on violin." The Boston Globe
“One of the most important pieces of American music in many, many years, uniting the strains of classical music with American hill country music.” President Bill Clinton on O'Connor's composition "Appalachia Waltz"
“Mark is so facile with his instrument and so completely on top of it. He’s really one in a million.” James Taylor
I believe Appalachia had more jazz violin players than New York did in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. African American blues, spirituals and ragtime have roots in Appalachia of course going back even hundreds of years. More recently even pop icons and a guest on An Appalachian Christmas, James Taylor, has North Carolina ties as he lived there for some time. Appalachia gave birth to some of our best pop, rock, gospel and country styles. And of course there are symphony orchestras all over Appalachia and they embody the spirit of that region of the country too.
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I just got an email from Stuart Mason, the feller behind the blog FiddleFreak. He and a couple of buddies have a new album out.
Earl Scruggs in 2008. Image provided by James Bradbury.
Bill Monroe is called the father of bluegrass. There's no disputing that. He founded the style and fostered it during its early years, but he didn't shape it alone. Another man did just as much to define the fast playing, high energy sound that we know today. When Earl Scruggs hit the Nashville scene at age 21 with his earth shaking, three-finger banjo picking style--something that had never been heard before--he made bluegrass hot.
He premiered as a member of Bill Monroe's band on The Grand Old Opry in December 1945. In one electrifying performance, it was like he taught bluegrass to spin its tires, chase girls, and cuss all at once.
The show was broadcast on Nashville's WSM 650, which had nationwide reach. From the Arizona desert to deep Blue Ridge hollers, people put down their whittling and knitting, socks they were darning, their magazines and listened in awe. This upstart was doing ungodly things on the banjo, playing as many as eleven notes per second, just shredding his strings and whipping up applause from the audience in Ryman Auditorium.
Playing beside Monroe, the father of bluegrass, Scruggs suddenly looked like the genre's unruly uncle. He was showing his instrument how to do all kinds of crazy things.
This groundbreaking night launched a nearly seventy year career, which came to an end last Wednesday when Scruggs passed away in a Nashville hospital. I'm sure you read about it. Every daily newspaper in the country covered his death, but none have done a better job at covering his life than The Tennessean. It captured what other, bigger publications missed--the understated revolution that Scruggs led, not only in bluegrass, but in music at large. According to fellow bluegrass musician Marty Stuart, Scruggs melted walls between musical styles, but "he did it without saying three words."
The Tennessean elaborates -- "During the long-hair/short-hair skirmishes of the ’60s and ’70s, he simply showed up and played, with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and The Byrds. And when staunch fans of bluegrass — a genre that would not exist in a recognizable form without Mr. Scruggs’ banjo — railed against stylistic experimentation, Mr. Scruggs happily jammed away with sax player King Curtis, sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar, piano man Elton John and anyone else whose music he fancied."
Scruggs remained true to his bluegrass sound, but he knew that he could only expand his fan base by reaching beyond the Opry stage. Unlike many of his country music contemporaries, he played in places where he knew he'd find a new audience--college campuses, The Newport Jazz Festival, and even Carnegie Hall. It paid off. As the ambassador of bluegrass, he seeded interest in mountain music among urban sophisticates and roots reverent hippies.
Nashville wasn't always happy about this cross-pollinating. According to The Tennessean, when Scruggs was asked about playing with Baez, who was then viewed by many as "hyper-liberal and undesirable," he replied, "Well, I didn’t look at it from a political view. And I thought Joan Baez had one of the best voices of anybody I’d ever heard sing.”
Baez wasn't the only controversial woman in Scruggs' life. His wife and manager, Louise Scruggs, mixed things up too. She was Nashville's first female manager, and she was the one who pushed her husband to play outside traditional country venues. Acknowledging Louise's influence, Scruggs once said, “She advanced me, and...helped shape music up as a business, instead of just people out picking and grinning.”
Scruggs is also credited with bringing the banjo back from the brink of oblivion. It's tinny sound was considered old fashioned at best or, at worst, downright funny. By the 1940s, the banjo was more popular with comedy acts than serious musicians. Scruggs, of course, changed that. He was the instrument's first virtuoso, and he laid the groundwork for what is approaching a century of banjo experimentation.
“I had no connection to the South, to bluegrass music or to the banjo, but that sound just changed me," said Bella Fleck, who recently composed and performed a banjo concerto with a full orchestra. He first heard Scruggs play in the opening to the television show The Beverly Hillbillies, and says that Scruggs “took the banjo to where it became a major musical instrument in the world."
Scruggs' far reaching influence will be remembered by friends and fellow artists this afternoon during a Memorial Service at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium. Fittingly, this is the spot where he changed the face of music with his 1945 Opry performance. The service will even be broadcast on the same station that beamed that show into homes so many years ago--WSM 650.
If you can't get the station on your AM dial, you can always listen online. Tune in at 2:00 CDT to hear memories of Scruggs.
Though he was known for popular country on the radio, he played mostly southern gospel at Oak Ridge. The hymns were a hit with the transplants. Fowler was invited to play at the facility so often that he decided to adopt the secret city's name. Wally Fowler and the Georgia Clodhoppers became the Oak Ridge Quartet, and having found a new audience with gospel, the band began to focus more on old time religious tunes.
First, they cut ties with Fowler. I've not found much info explaining the reason for the split. Maybe Fowler thought it would be like the others--that he'd take some time off and return to lead the band down the road. What is clear is that he had amassed a personal debt with the band or with Gatlin individually. Whatever the case, he settled things by giving Gatlin rights to the Oak Ridge Quartet name.
"If you told any one of the four of us if we thought 30 years later we'd still be singing 'Elvira'...we wouldn't have believed it," Oak Ridge Boys bassist Richard Sterban recently told the Knoxville News Sentinel.
Carter and Ralph Stanley recorded in Ray Davis' basement[/caption]
The Smith's products are quirky, but they aren't just novelties. The instruments produce a beautiful, old-time mountain sound, and they are being road-tested by none other than country music star Brad Paisley. While Paisley hasn't officially endorsed the Panjo or Pandolin, Lanny says that he and his son provided several custom instruments for the musician's current tour.
Plus first dibs on sales, the latest stories, & heaps a'luvin from us.
