Tag Archives: bluegrass

The Bluegrass Revival: What Americana Music Can Learn

A while back I wrote a column titled “The Aging of the Americana Music Audience,” and expressed concern that as baby boomers get older there may not be a younger crowd to replace them. This topic has been on my mind for years, as I have witnessed it firsthand time and time again at concerts, festivals, and clubs. After seeing 26-year-old award-winning singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist Molly Tuttle play to a crowd largely comprised of folks who could be her grandparents, and also noting that the current Americana Music Association airplay chart lacked diversity in both age and various sub-genres of roots music, I received a lot of feedback. While No Depression has eliminated the ability to post comments, my own Americana and Roots Music Daily page on Facebook lit up with feedback:

Kathy Sands-Boehmer, who has contributed articles on this site and is a concert presenter from the Boston area, shared her insight: “We find the same thing to be true. It doesn’t matter what the age of the artist is … those who support the music are on the more ‘mature’ side. Haven’t been able to crack this nut.”

A folk music fan from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, commented, “I always wonder about the future of these shows in 10 years. Same is true for the local jazz shows I attend. Everyone at these shows appears older than me and I’m in my 60s. Finding the key to attracting a young audience for folk and jazz shows is something that needs to be solved or there won’t be anyone left to attend them.”

And an observation from someone who attended the same Molly Tuttle show I did with a completely different experience: “I am 65 years old. I was at the back of the space and there were younger people and those of all ages. I came to see a guitar slinger (IBMA Guitar Player of the Year for the past two years) and what I saw was a singer-songwriter. This might have a greater appeal to a younger audience but not for me. I was at MerleFest a few weeks previous, and she was one of the main acts I was interested in seeing and she played about the same show. Also, I’m too old for the Mercury Lounge, where you have to stand for the entire time packed like sardines.”

There was a strong consensus that it wasn’t a lack of interest keeping younger people away, but competition from other entertainment options. Gaming, sports, Netflix, cable television, and high ticket prices were cited. Devon Léger, owner of the music marketing company Hearth Music and another No Depression contributor, shared some statistics from Billboard magazine showing that concert attendance is generally growing, including among millennials, but it doesn’t drill down on genres or the type of venues.

Two weeks after my column, Emma John at The Guardian published a story that caught my attention. Titled “Plucked from Obscurity: Why Bluegrass is Making a Comeback,” she gives a deep dive on the genre’s history, politics, geography, cultural aspects, and a change in the audience. The latter gives me hope, and might be applied to the entire Americana genre. She writes:

“Perhaps it’s an issue of geographical constraints — bluegrass’s popularity remains concentrated in a small portion of the southern Appalachian mountains, where the state lines of Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee converge. More likely it has simply been considered unworthy of notice: low art, uncomfortably associated with white redneck culture.

Something is changing, though. Acoustic music, live and unfiltered, is in vogue. America’s hipster generation, in its continual search for authenticity, is chasing roots music back to the country’s earliest string bands, and their sound is being replicated in trendy bars in New York, Los Angeles, and London.”

She also acknowledges both Rhiannon Giddens’ efforts in reclaiming the music’s African-American roots and the work of Bluegrass Pride, a Bay Area group advocating for gays and women “in a musical community that is still overwhelmingly white and male.” John goes further, citing the current crop of performers’ ages and backgrounds that are reaching out and opening up to a new audience:

“A progressive, metropolitan scene is, arguably, securing the music’s future. From the highly trained brilliance of Ivy League graduates such as Brittany Haas to the rollicking rock of stadium-fillers Greensky Bluegrass and Trampled by Turtles, their genre-bending efforts are reaching audiences younger and many hundreds of times larger than anything the traditionalists can hope for.”

A suggestion I’d make to the Americana Music Association is to follow the path of the International Bluegrass Music Association when it comes to youth programs. Their outreach to schools, low-cost membership to those under 17, and the Kids on Bluegrass annual showcases not only have made a difference, but also are replicated by dozens of regional bluegrass organizations. In fact, the abovementioned Brittany Haas was only 8 years old when she became a student of Molly Tuttle’s father, Jack. He is highly active in teaching both kids and adults, and is known as the “Dean of Bay Area Bluegrass.” (More about Jack and the entire Tuttle family here.)

Meanwhile, back on my Facebook page, the responses to John’s article came fast and furious. Here were the first two comments:

“Plucked from obscurity? Bluegrass never went anywhere! Hillbilly music? Hell yes! All you gear heads and technophiles need to pay attention. This is a pure form of American music that does not rely on electronics!”

“Having been a long-time bluegrass fan for 60 years, I’m not a big fan of the new style of bluegrass by these younger bands. They seem to think more is better and try to throw in every note and chord known to man. The old timers knew better. I accepted when Seldom Scene came around and changed the style of bluegrass but I don’t know about this new high tech stuff.”

Yikes. So I guess that there is a group of bluegrass fans who aren’t appreciative of the “youngsters” coming up, nor what they bring to the genre. But there is a crack in the sky and I loved reading these counterpoints that came from three of my page’s followers:

“I was thinking about all of this since you posted that last piece about Molly Tuttle. I went to Winter Wondergrass in Lake Tahoe last March. The crowd was overwhelmingly young, people in their 20s/30s. I was kind of surprised by that, but it seemed like a good sign.”

“Just saw Steep Canyon Rangers, originally a modern version of a classic bluegrass band, formed in a college dorm in North Carolina. Now, nineteen years later, they are a big festival band that has held on to a younger crowd by evolving into prog-grass and now jamgrass rock (rock-based drummer with big sound). Most songs are 6-8 minutes with some vocals at beginning and end and a lot of wild jamming in between.”

“One reason for the changes by younger bands may have to do with trying to stay relevant (i.e., marketable) in a time when so many interesting styles of music are available to consumers for dirt cheap. In addition, they probably grew up playing or listening to rock and other types of music when they were teens and may have a hard time playing bluegrass night after night in the traditional way. They need to stay challenged and to experiment.”

Please forgive me if you think that I’m sounding the alarm on a problem that doesn’t exist, but with age comes a tiny bit of wisdom and a whole lot of experience. Musical genres wax and wane in popularity, and sometimes they just simply fade away into obscurity. While American roots music is growing in popularity, it needs new blood on the stage and in the seats in order to thrive and not just survive. At the heart will be a concerted outreach, and we really need people and organizations to drive it.

This was originally posted as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression:The Journal of Roots Music’s website.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

Molly Tuttle: From Her Tweens to Her Twenties

The Tuttles With AJ Lee

Considering that she is only a quarter-century old and just released her first solo album, one might suggest I could be jumping the gun on writing a retrospective of Molly Tuttle’s musical career and highlights. And had she not grown up in the era of the magical time machine also known as YouTube, we might have thought she just landed under a Nashville cabbage patch one day and — poof — a star was born. But this young woman began playing guitar at the age of eight, recorded her first album of duets with her dad at 13, and has won more awards than the number of ants on a Tennessee anthill.

Molly, Michael, and Sullivan Tuttle’s bluegrass version of “El Cumbanchero” was uploaded in 2006 and has been viewed more than 1,750,000 times. And just to see what four additional years of practice and growing up can do to one’s musical skill sets, here is their 2010 version, with Molly moving from guitar to banjo:

Jack Tuttle is a distinguished bluegrass musician, teacher, author, and historian, and he came from a musical family in rural Illinois where he first learned to play guitar at age 5. Migrating to California, he began developing a complete lesson program for fiddle, banjo, mandolin, and guitar and has taught thousands of kids and adults since 1979 from his home base at Gryphon Stringed Instruments in Palo Alto. Known as the “Dean of Bay Area Bluegrass,” he taught his own three children how to play and through the years they’ve been highly active on the festival circuit and at music camps, through the California Bluegrass Association (CBA), Northern California Bluegrass Society (NCBS), and the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA).

For those of us guitar players who’ve been around a while and think we might be pretty proficient, watching Molly Tuttle’s right hand technique is a jaw-dropping experience. It seems to be a hybrid of Merle Travis’ style combined with clawhammer banjo, and the result is stunning. When you add in her abilities as a cross-picking, lightning-fast flatpicker, it’s no surprise that in 2017, Tuttle was named the IBMA’s Guitar Player of the Year, an honor that was repeated the following year. She also won this year’s Americana Music Association’s Instrumentalist of the Year award. In addition to her fretwork virtuosity, she’s an exceptional banjo player, singer, and songwriter. Here’s one she wrote back in her teens.

The first album Tuttle recorded was in 2006, a duet project with her dad titled The Old Apple Tree. Around that time, the IBMA began a program for pickers between ages 4 and 17 called Kids on Bluegrass. Held during the annual World of Bluegrass festival, the kids get to meet up with others for the chance to play and perform together. Tuttle was one of many talented participants, as were Sierra Hull, Sarah Jarosz, Alex Hargreaves, Molly Cherryholmes, and another Californian, a bit younger than Tuttle, named AJ Lee. Here’s Lee, Tuttle, and Angelica Grim with Luke Abbott in 2009 at the Brown Barn Bluegrass Festival in San Martin, California:

Like Tuttle, Lee began studying and performing bluegrass at a very young age. She was about 10 or 11 and attending a CBA event when Jack Tuttle introduced himself to her father, Rodney, and shared that he was working with groups of kids and wondered if Lee might want to join in. That was the genesis of The Tuttles with AJ Lee, featuring Jack on bass and occasional vocals, with the three Tuttle kids and Lee taking the spotlight. Here they are in 2010 at the Strawberry Music Festival at Camp Mather, California. Molly Tuttle is 17 here.

The group released their first self-titled album in 2010, followed by a second release titled Endless Oceans. Lee, whom I’ve written about before, is now 21, plays in the band Blue Summit that also features Sullivan Tuttle on guitar, and has won the Best Female Vocalist award from the Northern California Bluegrass Society seven times. Her mom, Betsy, has told me that “what AJ learned mostly from her work with the Tuttle family was humility among greatness and the ability to play with intent.” While Lee was poised to make the move to Nashville, as Molly Tuttle has done, a year ago, she’s backed off for now, telling me not too long ago that her “heart is in California.”

In 2012, Molly Tuttle had a huge year when she was awarded merit scholarships to the Berklee College of Music in Boston for music and composition as well as the Foundation for Bluegrass Music’s first Hazel Dickens Memorial Scholarship. She won the Chris Austin Songwriting Contest at MerleFest and received both Female Vocalist and Guitar Player awards from the Northern California Bluegrass Society. (The Tuttles with AJ Lee took home the NCBS’s Bluegrass Band award that year.)

In October of that year, she and her father participated in a duet contest on Prairie Home Companion and won second place. In an article for Bluegrass Today, she wrote:

“I have been listening to Prairie Home Companion since I was a kid, so it was a dream come true to play on the show. I loved seeing how it all comes together. Everyone who worked on the show was so professional, but also really friendly and nice. After the show Garrison invited us all to his house for a party, which was wonderful with lots of good food and people. He led a jam around the piano and asked if I would like to sing a Hazel Dickens song with him, so we sang ‘Won’t You Come and Sing for Me.’ All in all it was such an honor to be on the show and one of the best weekends of my life!”

Over on the Tuttles with AJ Lee website, on the front page it says “We don’t really play together as a band anymore but most of us still do still play music a lot. Thank you for being so supportive of our music over the years. Please keep in touch with us and we hope to see you some time at a show or festival.”

Molly Tuttle is on tour supporting When You’re Ready — you can check the dates on her site. This is the link to AJ and Sully’s Blue Summit site, and if you’d like to learn more about Jack Tuttle and perhaps want to take some lessons, just click on his name. I’ll close this one out with one of Molly’s signature concert tunes, the Townes Van Zandt cover she’s been doing for years. This video is from the family band’s Freight and Salvage gig in Berkeley in 2014 and it’s a barn burner. Great music from fine folks.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

The Americana-ization of Bob Weir

Bob Weir met Jerry Garcia at Dana Morgan’s Music Store in Palo Alto, early in 1963. Before the Beatles came along and influenced them into forming an electric rock band, the pair’s group was known as Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. Bringing in elements of country, folk, bluegrass, and blues, they plugged in, added some folks, became the Grateful Dead and … y’all know the rest.

When I first saw the Dead, it was in a small college gymnasium. The New Riders of the Purple Sage, with Jerry Garcia sitting in on pedal steel, opened the show, and much of the material that the Dead performed that night came from Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty. Five years later, I watched Old and In the Way take the stage with Garcia, David Grisman, Peter Rowan, Vassar Clements, and John Kahn. They delivered a stellar set of traditional bluegrass.

As the Dead greatly expanded their music vocabulary through the years, my personal interest in them went from attending dozens and dozens of their concerts throughout the ’70s, to finally drifting away. Honestly, I just got bored with the scene rather than the music. Nonetheless, it’s always surprised me that so many fans of traditional music — as well as writers, reviewers, and even publications such as (the previous incarnation of) No Depression — never seemed to be able to draw the distinction between their jam band rock-ola experience and the fact that the Dead’s origins were grounded in American roots music.

To put it bluntly, I believe the Grateful Dead were doing Americana music long before a bunch of people came together in the late 1990s and actually decided to call it Americana.

Which brings me to Bob Weir.

In August, it was announced that in support of his new solo album Blue Mountain, Weir would be in Nashville during the Americana Music Festival and Conference to take part in a workshop where he’ll play songs from the album. Producer Josh Kaufman will be on hand and Buddy Miller will moderate a Q&A. Here’s a little of what to expect:

Whether it was hocus, pocus, magic, or an outstanding lobbying effort from his record label, publicist, and management team, the week after that event was scheduled came big news that Weir will receive the Lifetime Achievement: Performer award at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium on September 21. Whatever the circumstances surrounding Weir being selected, this recognition is more than well-deserved.

As far as I can find, there’s never been any acknowledgment of the Dead’s contribution to the genre from the AMA. Its members have earned some accolades from the association — Jerry Garcia was given the President’s Award in 2008, and Dead lyricist Robert Hunter got the Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting in 2013 — but the band itself has never actually been named. Feels to me like there’s an opportunity there in the future to do the Dead right.

While it’s impossible to separate the man from the Dead, there is a documentary by Mike Fleiss titled The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir, which is a great starting point. Available on Netflix for the past year, it offers a detailed oral history with great archival footage and music. But it was the intimate and loving look at Weir’s life today as both husband and father that filled my heart … a true lifetime achievement on its own.

https://youtu.be/HRuaRcqvnzc

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression:: The Journal of Roots Music’s website.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com

Bringing Mountain Music to the City

Let me tell you about the night my fingers snapped off and fell onto a beer-stained wood floor.

A tremendous rainstorm had its way with the sky as I moved across the Hudson River. I pulled up to a roadhouse about ten miles north of Manhattan. Juggling my guitar case and an umbrella, I brushed past the determined smokers huddled outside by the front door, walked down the length of the bar to a small alcove in the back, and nodded to a couple of folks I recognized. For a few months I’d heard talk about a bluegrass jam in the neighborhood, and this was my first chance to check it out.

Despite having been a finger-style player for over 50 years, with an interest in all sorts of old-time and roots music, I’d never attempted to do any serious flatpickin’ before. Still, I figured it couldn’t be all that hard. Three or four chords, a good capo, and a Fender 451 medium pick would do the trick, right? And after all, this is New York, not the hills of Kentucky. I’d step up, dazzle, and shred.

Right. Can you see where this train wreck is headed?

Tara Linhardt is an award-winning multi-instrumentalist from rural Taylorstown, Virginia, who moved here less than a year ago and has already earned recognition in the relatively small but highly talented New York bluegrass scene. In addition to organizing the monthly jam that attracts a large and talented group of musicians, she also teaches mandolin and guitar, plays in several bands, is an excellent photographer, and has put together a number of festivals and events. She organized and broke the Guinness Book of Records for the world’s largest mandolin group. Tara & The Galax Fiddler’s Convention Mandolin Ensemble featured 389 mandolins that performed four tunes. Including this one:

She’s also a founding and managing member of The Mountain Music Project, which works to preserve, promote, and educate folks about traditional music throughout the world. That project focuses mostly on the Appalachian region of the United States and the traditional music of the Nepali Himalaya.

There’s a film documentary about the project that’s been released on DVD, and a collaborative album that, along with Linhardt, features other American musicians like Sammy Shelor, Tim O’Brien, Curtis Burch, Mark Schatz, Abigail Washburn, Danny Knicely, and Tony Trischka.

That rainy night jam, which I thought would be a piece of cake, ended up serving me a big slice of humble pie.

The 15 musicians who stood in the circle were by and large regulars on the festival and jam circuit, professional performers, parking lot pickers, and other assorted but exceptional players. From the opening notes, which seemed to be going at about 220 beats per minute, it took every ounce of energy in my body to keep up.

I kept my eyes glued to the left hand of singer/guitarist Christian Apuzzo, whom I had met previously when his band opened for Billy Strings and Don Julin. I could strum the chords but felt like I was on a roller coaster with no brakes. My mouth was hanging open most of the time in awe of the musicianship. I thought I did pretty well until about an hour and 45 minutes into it, when Linhardt looked over at me and yelled, “You’re behind the beat … step to the back.” Now I didn’t take that as being mean spiritied at all, but instructive. This jam is a welcoming and friendly place for all players.

Nevertheless, given how easy I expected this to be…cue instant exhalation and deflation.

Two songs later, I called it quits. My fingers were as crispy as fried clams.

I wasn’t quite finished foolin’ around with this bluegrass excursion yet, though. I showed up two weeks later for another shot. This time I swapped the jumbo cutaway for my more traditional dreadnought, put on heavier strings, and grabbed a handful of Dunlop 1.14 mm picks.

I still couldn’t last more than a couple of hours. I apparently, desperately need to lock myself in a room with Tony Rice videos, but as long as Lindhart keeps the door open I’m going to try to walk through it again. Because while it’s great to write about music, it’s even better to make it.

Matheus Verardino, who played harmonica in that first video, and the aforementioned Christian Apuzzo are members of Cole Quest and the City Pickers. They have a new album that’s currently being mixed. And it might be of interest to know that Cole ‘Quest’ Rotante sings and plays Dobro. His mom’s name is Nora and his uncle is Arlo. You can figure out that lineage. I like this band.

Linhardt has been touring this year with Shyam Nepali of the Mountain Music Project. At this year’s Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival, they played with percussionist Raj Kapoor, Apuzzo (this dude is everywhere), and violinist extraordinaire and fellow jammer Mary Simpson, who was a founding member of Whiskey Rebellion and now tours with Yanni.

Photo of Lunchmeat Larry by Tara.

This was originally published at No Depression dot com, as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column.

Five Strings Down in Rockville: The Patuxent Banjo Project

Hats off to the astute reader who will glance at the headline, look at the accompanying picture, and come to the conclusion that the writer is confusing his stringband string-ology. He is not. The man in the hat is Tom Mindte — a bluegrass musician and the founder/owner of Patuxent Music, home to both a record label and studio. Ignore for a moment the mandolin he’s holding, because last year his label released a sweet collection of banjo-based performances that I keep coming back to like a bowl of peanuts on a bar.

Produced by Mark Delaney and Randy Barrett, both noted players in their own right, The Patuxent Banjo Project brings together 40 regional players from the Baltimore-Washington corridor, an area rich in bluegrass history and tradition.

Rockville is the county seat and home to over 60,000 people. It has the state’s largest Chinese population and is the area’s center for Jewish culture and religion. I’ll also mention that the town has two women’s flat track roller derby teams: the Black-Eyed Suzies and the Rock Villains.

More to the point, back in the mid-1940s, the entire area became a destination for the rural folks who lived in the Appalachian and Piedmont regions of the Virginias, Carolinas, and Tennessee. Attracted by job opportunities, the people brought the music from the hills with them.

Country music historian Ivan Tribes has written detailed notes for the banjo project, attesting to how the “barroom bluegrass” scene came about, and citing the ease of travel north to Philadelphia and south to Richmond to play at country music parks, festivals, and quite a number of bars and venues. Tribes notes key players such as “Buzz Busby, Benny and Vallie Cain, Bill Harrell, and Earl Taylor. Others,” he writes, “were known by collective names such as the Bluegrass Champs, Rocky Mountain Boys, Shady Valley Boys, Pike County Boys, and — perhaps best known of all from 1957 forward — the Country Gentlemen.”

In a 2010 article by Geoffrey Himes in the Baltimore City Paper, Mindte spoke about the bluegrass scene back in the ’60s and ’70s, and the clubs where the music went down:

These were tough places full of tough people. I remember going to those bluegrass bars in East Baltimore–the Sandpiper Inn, Club Ranchero, Cub Hill Inn, the 79 Club. When you walked in the door, you walked onto a floor of sticky beer and into a cloud of cigarette smoke. I thought it was great–this was how it was supposed to be. Bluegrass wasn’t meant to be sterile and healthy. It was meant for working-class, beer-and-shot joints.

Patuxent Music began back in 1995 when Mindte recorded fiddler Joe Meadows, who worked with the Stanley Brothers and Bill Monroe, and brought the record out himself the following year. Next up was a blues record in the Piedmont style and his catalog soon expanded to include jazz, old time, swing, and country. With string bands being his primary interest, he has focused both on musicians with long careers, such as members of the Stoneman family and Frank Wakefield, as well as the younger players. Nate Leath from Old School Freight Train has released a number of albums on Patuxent; his Rockville Pike album features a 16-year-old Sarah Jarosz and 14-year-old Tatiana Hargreaves.

The Patuxent Banjo Project, which led me down this path of discovery, is a two-disc set with 40 tracks and a 40-page booklet. Some of the Baltimore/Washington musicians you might already know include Bill Emerson, Eddie Adcock, Walt Hensley, Chris Warner, Tom Adams, Dick Smith, Keith Arneson, Murphy Henry, Kevin Church, Roni Stoneman, and Mike Munford. Richard Thompson (not that one, the other one) from Bluegrass Today breaks down what you can expect to hear.

Not only are there variations of three-finger banjo playing, old-time, there are two banjo/fiddle duets, a classical piece and a couple of twin banjo numbers, one of which features cello-banjo. All of which adds up to a major audio documentation of a versatile instrument.

Back on Father’s Day in 2013, I bought a five string banjo in Beacon, New York, the home of Pete Seeger. It seemed like the right thing to do, given his recent passing earlier that year. I got it from David Bernz, who produced of some of Pete’s last albums and who also runs Main Street Music with his son. Trying to teach myself how to either clawhammer or three-finger roll the darn thing was useless, and I’ve since settled on a two-finger early fingerstyle method from the 19th century. Most of the time it hangs on my wall, but The Patuxent Banjo Project has been inspiring me to try a little harder. More importantly, it’s carrying on an American roots music tradition to a new generation of players. Five strings down in Rockville. Hallelujah.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Roots Music Journal.

Photo by Michael G. Stewart