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

[Bradford Trainham <bradford.trainham@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

When I've been in an environment that suggested
Bluegrass/any-and-all-other fast-played
generic-English-Irish-Amero-folk, I think of myself... with the
harmonica... as the pretender to the fiddle. 
You can do lots of bends, but somehow, they seem boorish with the
purer forms of bluegrass where the emphasis is on quickly executed
elegant lines of notes that don't hang around very long before the
next one is heard. 
I first got comfortable with the idea of playing harmonica in that
setting after listening to (and enjoying) a double-live album we had
by the Seldom Seen. 
Somehow after that, it just seemed possible and I was invited back as
often as I'd come. 
Brad Trainham
On Tue, 07 Aug 2007 12:38:59 -0700, you wrote:

>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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