It'll Probably Sound Pretty Good On a Dobro

Joey Longwell - with Ernie Bradley and Grassy Ridge at a Lucketts performance

Leap-Day, 2012

This weekend we'll be celebrating Chopin's Birthday at the Embassy of Poland with a special recital and a feast prepared by the Embassy Chef. We've been attending this for a number of years now and look forward to it annually. The music is magnificent, the food is always marvelous, the Polish people are the most gracious on the planet and the tickets are cheap! Getting the tickets is the hard part, but we don't seem to have a problem. As always I amaze myself. I'm ravaged by a number of addictions of which I'm quite proud. I love Monsieur Chopin and Jimmy Martin, Puccini's not bad, either. I don't have to make any decisions on any of it. It's all of a certain value included in that great nebulous subject entitled "matter of tastes." What's pleasant to one person is disgusting to another. Politically, I've become a libertarian music lover if you really have to put a name on it. It wasn't always this way. At my age I've discarded a lot of what I used to listen to and appreciated, only to discover that there is so much more I need to learn about in all forms of music.

Let's get to the bluegrass. I've written before that it's something I used to listen to in my college days and then put away somewhere in my foggy days of yesteryear. A few years ago a chance meeting with Roger Green and the Annapolis Bluegrass Coalition got me back into it. It was a free, winter concert at our local community center here in town. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision to even go to the show in the first place. I walked out of the show with that feeling of having revisited a lot of child-hood memories of my old man listening to this hillbilly stuff on the radio and me and my siblings hating it. Rock and Roll was just entering the pop radio scene and the older folks hated it. A culture war was about to explode and we didn't know it. I went off to the military and still have memories of Country and Western music being called "Shit-Kicking Music!" The 60's were my formation years. College told me I had to appreciate music 'on a higher level' than what I had been accustomed to. Snobbery exists on every level of the human experience.

Marriage, work, raising a family, getting older changes everything. Try to tell that to the average young person. The more time I spend in my garden the more I appreciate that I'm getting older right along with all else in the universe. I went back to that music I once laughed at. There are a lot of generalizations written and espoused by people who write about, and scholarly study this peculiar American music form called bluegrass. I try not to be swayed by the general comments. I think most of them are wrong. The one piece of truth is this: it's something that will always stay the same but will also be constantly evolving. That truth I can easily appreciate. Davy Jones (of Monkees fame) died yesterday and no one noted how many Monkees hits were re-released by some very well-known bluegrass groups. Just another example of bluegrass music's ability to appreciate another form of music, grab it and run with it. It's hard to imagine any of today's pretty-boy Country and Western stars singing "Last Train to Clarksville" and getting away with it. But bluegrass? Yeah. It'll probably sound pretty good if the banjo, mandolin, guitar, and fiddle can get the beat coordinated. A good dobro player would have a blast with it.