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Bluegrass--A Distinctly American Brand of Music
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12172 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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2 / 1987 |
1,446 Words |
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Richard Spottswood
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It is difficult to determine whether bluegrass is something relatively new or simply a modern extension of the music made in southern rural America during the last three centuries. Certainly, the music that coalesced around Bill Monroe on radio's Grand Ole Opry four decades ago was perceived as novel and exciting by radio listeners and audiences who attended the live Opry shows in Nashville's old Ryman Auditorium.
Young Bill learned music on a mandolin, an instrument few thought of as more than a toy. An uncle, Pendleton Vandiver, was an accomplished fiddler who helped raise bill. Bill in turn listened closely to his Uncle Pen's western Kentucky old-time dance tunes and created ways to reproduce them on his mandolin. By 1935 Bill and his older brother Charlie - who played guitar - had formed a popular duet and gathered a large following. Their unique vocal harmony and ambitious instrumental techniques were successfully promoted on radio broadcasts in the Carolinas; the broadcasts in turn helped them fill the schoolhouse auditoriums wherever they performed. After the brothers' partnership dissolved in 1938, Bill assembled a band he called the Blue Grass Boys, which began working the Grand Ole Opry in 1939 and has been featured there ever since.
Though today most of us consider the five-string banjo the primary ingredient of bluegrass, Bill Monroe didn't use the instrument in his band for several years. When Early Scruggs joined in 1945, he brought a way of playing the banjo that was every bit as radical as the sound Monroe was getting from his mandolin. Replacing the older mountain claw-hammer or drop thumb styles, Scruggs played the strings with his thumb, index finger, and second finger in rotation succession. The technique was called the three-finger roll and gave the banjo a new melodic freedom as well as a raggy, syncopated thrust. Scruggs was given the ultimate accolade by early Opry announcers as "the boy that makes the banjo talk," and it soon became a toss-up whether Scruggs' banjo or his leader's mandolin caused the most excitement.
In reality, the whole became greater than the sum of the parts. Floridian Chubby Wise played a tasteful jazz-influenced fiddle, Howard Watts the string bass, and Lester Flatt the guitar. Each brought something unique to the Blue Grass Boys' instrumental sound. Chubby's style was less showy than Scruggs' or Monroe's, but he could create skilled improvisations on melodies that in effect became new melodies themselves. Watts was called "Cedric Rainwater" on stage, functioning both as comic and musician. His instrument had a long tradition in jazz but was still relatively new to country string bands. Emphasizing the first and third measures of the beat, Monroe chopped the mandolin on the second and fourth, leaving the others room to syncopate their contributions freely as they took turns moving from melody to supplementing the basic rhythm. Lester Flatt's guitar would have had to supply both the pulse and the lower harmonies in an earlier bass-less group. As it worked out, he became free to fill in the middle chords and create novelties like his famous octave "G run" with which he often embellished the end of the phrase.
Pitch and speed were also elements of the Monroe bluegrass formula. Even the early Monroe Brothers' records show a deliberate retuning of the instruments to place the voices closer to the top of their ranges. Coupled with moderate to extreme increases in tempo, the higher pitches even made old folk songs seem fresh and exciting.
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