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

[Ken Deifik <kenneth.d@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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.