As for the poor banjo, its noisy jangle became the punchline to a thousand jokes.īooks and films have only reinforced the stereotype. Bluegrass was written off as hillbilly music. Within 10 years, Elvis was rock’n’rolling, and the arrival of electric instruments made the acoustic string band sound old-fashioned overnight. The ultimate gatekeeper … Bill Monroe’s trademark mutter was: ‘That ain’t no part of nothing.’ Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamyīut bluegrass music’s popularity was brief and doomed. Monroe’s invention inspired new acts – Flatt & Scruggs, the Stanley Brothers, Reno and Smiley, Jim & Jesse – that copied his sound. No one had ever heard its like before, and audiences couldn’t get enough. It was fast, uncompromising, virtuosic: country music turned up to 11. With Scruggs’ banjo at the centre, Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys took the melancholy modes of Appalachian mountain music and combined them with the rattling energy of the modern industrial age. It was the first time he’d met a musician who could keep up with him, who played with the speed and aggression he heard in his own head. Monroe, now leader of his own band, hired him on the spot. By the time he met Bill Monroe, in the 1940s, he had created his unique style of banjo playing. As their audiences shuffled in from their long shifts, nostalgia gave even the gruelling poverty back home a rose-tinted glow.Įarl Scruggs’ parents were farmers in North Carolina teenage Earl’s only options were working in a cotton mill, or war in Europe. A keening for home flowed through their instruments as they sang of the mothers and sweethearts they’d left behind, of their little cabin home on the hill. When they weren’t cleaning oil barrels they made extra cash entertaining their fellow migrant workers with mountain ballads and fiddle-and-banjo tunes passed down through generations of Scots-Irish settlers in the Appalachians. The three brothers had played music together as boys, and their skills proved popular. So Bill took the road through Indiana and joined his older brothers Birch and Charlie at an oil refinery on the shores of Lake Michigan, outside Chicago. But these were the depression years, and there was no work in the south for young men. Uncle Pen was a fiddle player who made a living playing at local square dances, with Bill by his side on mandolin and guitar. Since his parents died, he had lived in a two-room log cabin in the woods with his uncle. She called the thousands of people who follow her blog or who visit the many backyard chicken Internet forums she posts on, “My best friends I've never met.In 1929, Bill Monroe left his home in Kentucky and headed north: he was 17 years old, and an orphan. Scheuer's sense of what worked and what didn't. Readers' responses to the blog guided Ms. I want to write well enough to show how absolutely amazing these creatures are.” She described her approach: “I'm teaching myself to write. Scheuer, the “Scratch and Peck” blog, which she still writes, was a developmental stage of the book. With Lucy and her chicken friends, she said, “I had a story that had to be written. “I have a drawer full of children's book stories that were never (fully) written because I didn't feel passionately about them.” Scheuer has illustrated a dozen or so children's books, primarily in the American Girl series, and continues to illustrate the American Girl Magazine contest page, she said she's always wanted to write, too.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |