Archive for October, 2009
What Defines Bluegrass?
For many years I have used the term bluegrass to describe music when I really didn’t know what the exact definition was. Bluegrass originated during the 1940′s in the US and is actually of sub-genre of country music. Many countries have influenced the bluegrass sound, including places as diverse as Ireland and West Africa.
Bluegrass has a distinct string sound, as its most common instruments are the fiddle, banjo, mandolin and acoustic guitar. During the music, each instrument will take a term improvising or soloing while the others play the accompaniment. While bluegrass may not have a large mainstream following today, many of the world’s biggest bands will dabble in the genre. The most notable recent addition to mainstream bluegrass was with the soundtrack to the Coen Brothers movie Brother Where Art Thou.
Considered one of the pioneers in bluegrass banjo picking, J.D. Crowe first came to prominence as a member of Jimmy Martin’s Sunny Mountain Boys. His personal twist on the three-finger style of Earl Scruggs during the 1950s helped define the traditional bluegrass canon on over thirty recordings with Martin. The 1960s saw the formation of Crowe’s own band, The Kentucky Mountain Boys (with whom Doyle Lawson made his recording debut); by the early 1970s The Kentucky Mountain Boys had morphed into The New South and with a stellar lineup including Tony Rice, Ricky Skaggs, and Jerry Douglas. Crowe artfully blended traditional bluegrass with material from such diverse sources as Fats Domino, Gordon Lightfoot, and Gram Parsons.
Born in Lexington, Kentucky on August 27, 1937, Crowe began picking the banjo at age 13. He continues to tour and record to this day with the current edition of The New South. His contribution to bluegrass music has been recognized by Gibson Musical Instruments with a signature-model Gibson banjo, the “Black Jack”, named after one of his original banjo tunes. Crowe also has his own model of the increasingly popular Blue Chip thumbpick, and has left his mark on the world of banjo bridges with his preferred slightly-wider string spacing, now known as “Crowe spacing” and offered as an option by most bridge makers.
That’s a frequent question, and not one with a single answer since the banjo is actually a family of instruments. The five-string banjo was the original, featuring a gourd body (later modified into a drum) and a short drone string. It was brought to what is now the United States by African slaves. The finger-picked five-string banjo enjoyed immense popularity in the nineteenth century, finding acceptance in the parlors of the urban middle class. It was used to play material from the classical repertoire, and rural musicians of the southeast adapted it to the Irish-style music they enjoyed.
Shortly after the turn of the century, the prominence of new music forms such as ragtime and syncopated dances, like the tango, led to the creation of the four-string , or plectrum, banjo. The sharp, percussive sound of the instrument was preserved but the quirky short drone string was eliminated. That made the instrument more user-friendly for musicians who preferred to strum chords with a flat pick, or plectrum. The next step was the tenor banjo, with a shorter scale and tuned in fifths to make it more familiar to players of other popular instruments such as the mandolin. Banjo bands were all the rage by the 1920s and other variations included the mandolin-banjo, the guitar-banjo, and the uke-banjo, but the tenor banjo was by far the most popular, leaving its original five-string cousin to be regarded as a quaint relic. Four-string banjos remain popular in traditional Dixieland jazz as well as Irish music, but the five-string was revived in the years following World War II with the arrival of Earl Scruggs and a new musical style-bluegrass.
There are two distinct types of dulcimers in existence, but only one of them has a distinctly American history and sound. The hammered dulcimer is popular in many corners of the world including China, Southwest Asia and Central Europe. It’s seen somewhat of a revival in the domestic folk music scene in recent years. Unlike its worldly counterpart, the Appalachian dulcimer played a large part in the development of American roots music.
The instrument is picked in the manner of a guitar rather than hit with metal mallets like a hammered dulcimer. There may be as many as 12 dulcimer strings on a given instrument, and they are played in a variety of manners. Most players lay the dulcimer flat on their lap or place them on a table. One hand takes care of the fretwork while the other stays occupied with strumming.