Bluegrass Music Downtown!

Can you believe it? A Bluegrass music festival right here in downtown Jacksonville. In Hemming Plaza. I am going to ignore the obvious cheap shots about the heat, the humidity and the homeless and focus on what I love – Bluegrass Music.

Bluegrass Music. Pure. Clean. No electric instruments. No drums. One of the things I love most about Bluegrass is truly a mystery. It is a percussive music – but has no percussion instruments. The effect is created by skillful interplay between an acoustic upright bass fiddle giving a heavy down beat, and the mandolin (or whatever other instrument is not involved in a melody, harmony, solo, or any other maneuver that prohibits it from answering the bass) on the off-beat. The result is a sound very like a snare drum. This bass line and percussive timing lays the foundation to begin building the rhythms and melodies that are Bluegrass music.

Right on top of this bass-percussive effect comes the big, rumbly, rhythm sound of the dreadnaught guitar. This does two things. It reinforces the bass/percussion effect, by playing the alternating bass notes of the chord, while the strum of the chord provides the rhythm. Lester Flatt and a few other greats managed to do this flawlessly with a thumb pick and finger pick. The rest of us rely on a heavy flat pick. No matter the method, all of bluegrass music has come to rely on what is known today as the “Lester Flatt G-run.” There are also other runs, or transitions, that the guitar player uses to get from one chord to another. These will often suggest or echo the melody and reinforce the tempo. They will lead, or sometimes push, and are not superfluous decorations, but rather are the very nature of bluegrass guitar.

Bill Monroe, the undisputed founder of the genre, played the mandolin. He wove the tapestry of bluegrass music around his style of mandolin playing. The punch and the drive from his mandolin pushed all the other instruments to be what they are today in a typical bluegrass ensemble. That strong punch comes on the offbeat, creating the aforementioned percussive effect. Then out of the blue (grass) comes the tremolo driven melody that Monroe used to create his solos (we call them breaks in Bluegrass music.) But just as the great one developed his style, other artists picked up and started their own styles.

Then we have the heart of bluegrass music, the five-string banjo. In a 1960 interview with NBC News, Lester Flatt said, “If it don’t have a five-string banjo in it, it ain’t bluegrass.” What Bluegrass music did was take the banjo out of its role as a rhythm instrument and make it a lead instrument. Earl Scruggs did this by developing a system of three finger rolls that when executed upon the chord patterns of a song result in a barrage of notes from which the listener’s ear forms a melody. Using thumb and finger picks, Earl managed to get volume and brightness out of the banjo that had never before been anticipated. The Scruggs influence and innovation on the banjo cannot be overstated. But it was only the beginning. Not too long after Earl, other artists of the five-string banjo came along and the chains were off and the banjo would never be the same.

The fiddle, or fiddles if you are lucky, is another traditional instrument that figures big in bluegrass. Like the guitar, the fiddle is ubiquitous in the music world. How it is played in the bluegrass style is what matters. The average bluegrass fiddler draws influences from old-time music with the shuffles and bowing patterns. But also from classical structure in terms of stating a melody and answering it with a variation. And also from jazz when it states the melody, then a variation, then an improvisational rendition. And it draws from traditional country with long bow, whole-note melody lines. Listen to Paul Warren’s fiddle break on “Shucking the Corn.” It is certainly not the melody that Earl plays on the banjo. But it is so perfect, it could not be anything else. Words cannot help us here. Go listen to it. Sometimes you hit the jackpot and get a band with twin fiddles playing harmony. The only rule is that they can never be playing the same note at the same time!

The resonator guitar, which is often called a Dobro, (which leads to lawyers fidgeting because the D-word is a trade name, like Frigidaire or Kleenex,) is the latecomer to the genre. You find it in a lot of Bluegrass bands, and indeed when Flatt and Scruggs broke away from Monroe to form the Foggy Mountain Boys, they used the Resonator Guitar to distinguish their sound. And Josh Graves created the form of bluegrass dobro that we know today. The resonator guitar, like its kin the banjo, continues to plow virgin ground.

But my favorite thing about Bluegrass Music? The singing. The harmonies. The most important instrument in a Bluegrass Band? The voice-box. Duet harmonies, like Jim and Jesse. Three-part arrangements like the old Carter Family. Not Bluegrass, but certainly a part of the DNA. Quartets like the old gospel harmonies of Flatt and Scruggs. Or find the Country Gentlemen singing East Virginia Blues. Look at your arms. Those are goose-bumps. Don’t be embarrassed.

These are the reasons that I love bluegrass music. I would put your average Bluegrass Band on the same level as any chamber orchestra group in terms of musical skill. Maybe they can’t read the standard notation, but they know what each instrument does, and how the music should sound, and they deliver it. And to think all this will be right downtown in Hemming Plaza. I will dearly miss the campground jam sessions that usually go along with bluegrass festivals. But I will be proud to see and hear Bluegrass music right in downtown Jacksonville. Saturday, July 21st. I’ll be there listening to Bluegrass music!