Re: [Harp-L] Harmonica in Bluegrass - Personal Experience



I moved to Nashville in '74 and started hanging out just about every night at the Station Inn, which at least then was the Vatican of Bluegrass purism. Frankly, I was a Bluegrass purist myself, with an excellent Bluegrass record collection. But I needed places to play harmonica and I loved playing with Bluegrass players in NYC, so I wound up sitting in there a whole lot.

The place was owned by the house band at that point, and they always invited me up to play a set with them. Even the serious purists were courteous, as this was the South, after all. My solos were received enthusiastically by the audience, or I wouldn't have been invited to sit in night after night. I had learned a million crowd-pleasing tricks over the years, and I used the ones that were appropriate to the setting, and people who were leaving often sat down and bought more beer during the last set when I played. (Lots of other harp players on this list could've done the same thing.) It mighta been the Vatican, but you still had to entertain people.

When Bill Monroe sat in I got to play sets with him, and he was always very kind to me. I got the feeling that he didn't exactly disapprove of experimentation, possibly because that's how he arrived at his mix in the first place. (He did say, not to me, that the only expendible instrument in a standard Bluegrass band was the banjo, which was only added to his own lineup because Earl Scruggs had invented a way to play that was both appropriate and exciting as hell.)

Most of the famous cats who sat in were very nice to me and treated me as an equal, and one told me he always looked forward to picking with me. That was Marty Stuart, then 15 years old and touring with Lester Flatt.

Most of the really great players liked hearing something different in the Bluegrass context. I really tried to play appropriately and to imagine what Bluegrass harmonica would sound like if it were legal. It was a few of the minor cats and a small portion of the audience that wanted to hear their music without any surprises. This was the South, after all.

I slowly came to realize that some people, including one of the band members, were really not happy that a harmonica was sitting in. I was kind of tired of that scene at that point, anyway, so I stopped showing up, grateful for the experience.

33 years ago all the Creators were still alive and quite active, and the minor cats had grown up living the music before it was even called Bluegrass, which was really only applied to entire genre in the late 50's or early 60's. I quite understood why people would want to limit the thing to the standard instruments and the 300 songs that were considered standard. The originals were still alive and frankly still on fire.

There was even something called The Book, of which there were only a few copies. Marty Stuart's dad Joe, who'd been a member of Monroe's band, supposedly had one of the copies. It contained every canonical song ALONG with all the sneaky little licks that HAD to be there in order for the song to be performed properly.

Well, I love that. It reminds me of the Japanese painting genre where the painter learned to execute a few compositions, and just made those over and over, imparting his own distinctive angle only in the subtlest way.

But while Bluegrass orthodoxy was a really beautiful thing back then, I think it's just reactionary BS now. Back then there was "Newgrass" which kind of bored me and seemed to lack the depth of the classical Bluegrass of just a few years before.

But now the originals are all dead or retired, and we have decades worth of post-Bluegrass music that has as great an emotional impact as anything from the classical period. Alison Krauss and Dan Crary come to mind.

The purists would say that there is no such thing as a real Bluegrass record with harmonica on it. Flatt and Scruggs refused to ever call their music Bluegrass, which they felt applied to Bill Monroe only. This was both out of a sense of respect and because it freed them to do things like hiring Charlie McCoy to play his beautiful licks on their records without people having a hissy fit. They finally broke up because Flatt, a very great musician, wanted to go back to what had become a very traditional approach, while Scruggs, a genius, couldn't have been more bored of that. They may have been sick of each other, too.

So I'd tell the original poster that instead of trying to copy what other harp players have tried to do in a bluegrass context, just LISTEN to the music and use the elements of your style that fit to it. There is no 'right' approach to bluegrass harp beyond playing entertainingly and with feeling and a respect for your fellow players and audience.





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