"Nope, Never Heard of Them" . . . (But I Know Them Now.)

      

Roger Eberlin, Tom Cook, Ray Horst, and John Hilton. (Ron McVey is out of camera range)

15 June 2014: Fathers' Day

     I don't know how I get myself in these fixes. Well, yeah, I do. I'm having too much fun in life. Last night I came home (again) from Jumbo Jimmy's Crab Shack in Port Deposit, Maryland. Fortunately, the weekend traffic on I-95 South was light and I could take my time composing my thoughts. On Saturday night Connie and I went out to (Rob Miller's Barn)  in Westminster, Maryland to see Fastest Grass Alive. I should have been working on a piece I'm writing for Marv Ashby and High Octane, but I was way behind. I'll get to the Marv Ashby piece sooner or later. Right now I'm having too much fun. It's nice to be on a roll of having fun with bluegrass. I put Rob's Barn in parenthesis because it's nearly a well-kept secret. Rob Miller and his Committee of volunteers have only recently established a nice web-site and other public connections so they can at least let the Traditional Bluegrass cognoscenti know how to get to this obscure location. Before a few months ago everything was being handled through a massive e-mail list, which is tedious and antiquated. Here's the well-kept secret: Rob's Barn is establishing an operating record of getting, lining up, acquiring, some of the best working bluegrass bands in Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. What I like about the place is, it's strictly for listening and enjoying the music and everyone who goes there is on the same page about that. It's also staying traditional bluegrass only - no funny stuff. The form will be honored and respected by the best traditional bluegrass players you'll find in Maryland and beyond.

     The Saturday night performance with Warren Blair, Kenny Blair, Steve Streett, Dave Robertson, and Scott Walker was so outstanding that I knew I would have to write it up eventually. Fastest Grass Alive has nearly a legendary reputation among those regularly working the Maryland bluegrass venues. But here I am in a jam. I still owe Marv Ashby some credit. So, being the hopeless addict I am, I got some sleep until 10:00 am on Father's day and then headed out to Jumbo Jimmy's to catch "Chestnut Ridge." For the past several days I've been checking every internet source and calling friends to see if I might find out anything I could on Chestnut Ridge. "Nope, never heard of them" was the response I was getting. There were lots of bands called Chestnut Ridge but none of them matched what I was looking for. Nothing on You Tube, either. Sometimes in my line of having fun I love the total crapshoot. Take the big chance and be totally disappointed or be pleasantly surprised. After all, isn't that what the entertainment business is all about? I had one connection: John Hilton, who plays banjo. It ends up I had been friends with him on Face Book all along and had never met him. I put two and two together. People castigate Face Book for it's superficiality. I would be dead in the water for bluegrass connections and band schedules if I weren't on it. I walked into Jumbo Jimmy's and a few minutes later John Hilton walked in the door. Bingo. We were finally introduced. And he's a good banjo-player by the way. That's the important part of the story. Pretty soon I got into a discussion with Leon Werkheiser and Jerry Riecke and when I inquired as to who these guys were, the full story came out. Chestnut Ridge used to play a lot at Jumbo Jimmy's but hadn't been there in a few years. Aha! There was another odd factor I have to mention: A lot of the usual crowd wasn't there (it was Fathers' Day) and the usual people at the usual tables had all been replaced with folks I didn't recognize! They were all friends, fans, and family of Chestnut Ridge. When a band from Pennsylvania playing in a place in Maryland can fill up a venue with its own crowd, you know you're in for a special treat; sort of like going to a Hillbilly Gypsies event, or watching Marv Ashby and High Octane cause a riot in a great venue like Goofy's up in Spring Grove, Pa.

     There was a major tectonic shift from getting a response of, "Nope never heard of them" to experiencing what the crowd experienced at Jumbo Jimmy's last Sunday when Chestnut Ridge started playing. This is not the greatest bluegrass band you've ever heard, but they're very entertaining and high energy, slowing down once in a while with really old Monroe and Stanley stuff, and some Jim and Jesse. Tom Cook on mandolin broke it all open with his take on Jimmy Martin material. All the vocal work was tight and excellent. I got the impression that a lot of the Chestnut Ridge personal style leaned toward creating an 'Old Barn Dance' atmosphere and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that after weeks and weeks of listening to murder ballads, hanging songs, and tunes about men ditching their philandering wives. I'm way behind and I may never catch up with the story about Marv Ashby and High Octane. I'm having too much fun. I never heard of Chestnut Ridge, but I'm happy to have made their acquaintance and I hope I see more of them around Maryland.

Chestnut Ridge:  Ray Horst, guitar - John Hilton, banjo - Roger Eberlin, bass - Tom Cook, mandolin - Ron McVey, fiddle.

No website available. Chestnut Ridge's members are mainly from the Lancaster, Pa. area and perform in that region. Several of the members are linked with other band configurations.   

Bluegrass in the Traditional Way - A Special Presentation

 The Rocks Bluegrass Factory Band at the Frederick Moose Lodge, June 7th, 2014

 "They say don't go/ On Wolverton Mountain/ If your lookin'/ For a wife.
'Cause Clifton Clowers/ Got a pretty young daughter/ But he's mighty handy
With a gun and a knife."  - Hit song by Claude King (1962)

7 June 2014: The Moose Lodge, Frederick, Maryland

     You know how it is. A song gets in your head and you can't remove it. This song actually has nothing to do with the show I saw last weekend at the Moose Lodge in Frederick - and it has everything to do with it. The newly formed Rocks Bluegrass Factory Band (Point of Rocks, Maryland) had aligned with the venerable Ernie Bradley and the Martin Brothers and Aspen Run for a full evening of exploration and show-casing of talents. At the center of the Rocks Bluegrass Factory effort is Joey Longwell, multi-instrumentalist and excellent baritone voice. Joey Longwell has been a long-standing member of the bluegrass scene up around Frederick County and some years ago he linked up with Gene Beachley through the Ernie Bradley connection. They played a lot around Lucketts, Martinsburg, and Hagerstown. Anybody who plays with Ernie Bradley is immediately connected to the A-List of  working bluegrassers in the Maryland and West Virginia Panhandles. There aren't many. You would expect the region to be rich in working bluegrass bands and musicians. It's not. The audiences and the interest have dwindled. Working musicians sit around and complain a lot that they can't get monetary support from working their craft. It's a unique dynamic because the region was once the hot bed spawning ground for the greats who established the genre. I still love to travel out in that direction and search out the gatherings and local jams where people are playing and dreaming about teaming up to make a few bucks playing music. There are numerous, marvelously talented bands out there on the edge of the mountains who never get beyond playing the church revival circuits and fruit stand openings, or an annual street carnival. They'll play for free or what's known as "the gate" because the local operators think they either don't need to be paid, or the band is doing a free favor for somebody, usually a relative.

     It's easy to sit by and do nothing. It's easy to accept 'the ways things are.' It takes a little bit more guts and chutzpah to take a step forward and try to change things. Way back in my university days when I should have been studying math and science, but really couldn't stand it because it bored me to death, I began researching the rise and spread of  commedia dell'arte from Italy to the rest of Europe in the 16th Century. Along with that arose a tradition of troubadours and Italian dance masters who had as much to do with the artistic explosion of  the Renaissance as any supposedly intellectual scholar of  the time. What these people had was mobility. From court to court and town square to town square. The mobility was either self-imposed or forced by a local court official or magistrate. Along with the legend of the vagabond life-style arose the wonderful purpose these vagabonds served as exchangers of  ideas, popular stories, and even local news sources. One can't even begin to contemplate the rise of opera, ballet, and what we often refer to as the "higher arts" without considering the early role played by traveling troupes, street musicians and actors, and other assorted entertainers. Once I left my studies and started a career in the historical travel business there was always a side-bar reason why I would leave "The Tour" and seek out the things that interested me the most; like local music for instance, or a local art scene. It didn't take me long to realize that every country in the world has some form of local music and usually that local music had something to do with the establishment of the local culture. I soon realized my university studies had been very myopic indeed. Carl Jung got it right. Deep in the human mental recesses are universal patterns that make us the homo sapiens we are. Subconscious human fears of survival or flight, fantasies of love and romance, and dealing with the loss of another human being. Whether it's the sappy love-songs of  Japanese Enka music or the insipid e-minor lullabies sung by every Vietnamese mother, we pass along our state of humanity on the great DNA chains of each culture and nationality. Nothing made me happier last year than to get an opportunity to travel to the Tatra Mountains in southern Poland and go through the CD stalls in Zakopane.

     I'm sitting at a bluegrass performance in the DC suburbs. Every table was taken and there were empty seats at mine, so a couple asked if they could share the table and I obliged. I introduced myself and then went back to listening to the music. That's what I want to do. I want to listen to the music and study what the musicians are doing. The man who sat down "Harrumphed" a lot. That was aggravating enough. But then he asked me if I knew anything about bluegrass. I asked him what he did for a living and he told me he taught music at a local university. I didn't know whether he wanted to know more about bluegrass, or whether he was trying to set me up for a game of 'dozens.' I said nothing to him. Better for him to try and make the first slice in this Duel of the Minds. He pedantically proceeded to give me (along with a lot of aggravating harrumphs) the stock Music Appreciation 101 (Freshman Level) lecture on how bluegrass came here to this region on the backs of Irish and Scotch settlers and all of today's bluegrass music has these Gaelic roots, and you can hear it in every bluegrass song. I listened to this drivel for a half-hour before I got up and left and told him to have a nice day. I never asked him where he taught or what he taught. I didn't want to know. I wanted to ask why then, did the same note structures, chord patterns, and lyric ideas show up in Japanese, Vietnamese, English, Filipino, and lo and behold, Polish Mountain Music?

     About two years ago Joey Longwell and Gene Beachley started posting home-made videos on You Tube. There is some wonderful stuff up on You Tube and then there is the inordinate amount of crap and trash. You know what I'm talking about. Joey posted his songs first and his solo work is good. Not exceptional, but very enjoyable. Then he invited Gene Beachley to add his high lonesome tenor and the videos became even more interesting. I watch a lot of You Tube stuff whenever I have to check out a band or musical act I'm unfamiliar with. I'll normally watch a minute of something and if I hate it, it immediately gets the delete button. Joey's little productions are interesting. And again, not exceptional, but promising in the simplicity of it. Just two guys, two guitars, and a microphone. Basic back-porch stuff.  Music I remember as a kid back in my neighborhood when some of the men would get together with their guitars and drink beer. Joey packs a wealth of old bluegrass standards. Gene Beachley is comfortable with the old honky-tonk, dance-hall tunes, the stuff of  drinking and she-done-me-wrong songs that you know will lead down the road to murder ballads. It's easy to laugh at it; make fun of it. The Professor probably would. It's a lot more complicated to observe it and try to put it into the universal totality of what it represents as art - traditional folk art and living and breathing art for the here and now of today.

     Don't go up on the mountain if you're looking for a wife. You might get your throat cut. There are still scary places up in the Appalachians and you can still lose your life through a bear-attack or snake-bite.  Not a good idea to go up there alone and spend any time unless you really know what you're doing, or if you've had sufficient survival training. The best bluegrass music reflects its primal and primitive beginnings. I seek out the local bands who have the ability to maintain that rough-edge while eliciting the proper response from its listeners. This is minimalist art and not easily accomplished. For an idea of what I'm talking about, take in a few appearances by the Hillbilly Gypsies or Marv Ashby and High Octane. You may not like this kind of music, but you cannot, not listen to it. It's as primitive as it gets. It's primitive on a grand scale. It's also no-joke intended, mountain music. Ernie Bradley and the Martin Brothers and Aspen Run all come out of a basically primitive musical style that we once jokingly referred to as hillbilly music. The years have passed since the 30's and 40's and popular tastes (and Musicology) have re-classified the various threads of the 'bluegrass genre.' Every bluegrass band or entertainer attempts to return to the primitive beginnings. Few succeed. I have my favorites. Everyone who follows bluegrass does. When I sense unnecessary embellishments it's time for me to head toward the nearest exit. When I see a whole crowd of people get up out of their chairs and start dancing, I need to stick around and watch and especially listen to a band closely.

     The "Bluegrass in the Traditional Way" evening of  hard-core bluegrass was a first-time event to introduce and showcase the talents that the Rocks Bluegrass Factory hopes to carry on into the future. It was a first step not without its rough edges, but rough edges are to be expected in any show-case endeavor. The Moose Lodge in Frederick provided an excellent playing space and spacious dance floor that got a lot of use once the Martin Brothers and Aspen Run hit the stage. The best part of the evening shined when it was just Joey Longwell and Gene Beachley up on stage. A naturally talented baritone and a naturally talented high tenor blending their voices in plaintive melodies. Joey added his dobro and gene his old Martin. Primitive. And it sounded just right.

The Rocks Bluegrass Factory Band:
Joey Longwell, guitar, dobro - Gene Beachley, guitar, lead vocals - Jaime Anderson, banjo - David Morris, bass.
Special Guests:  Ernie Bradley, The Martin Brothers and Aspen Run   

  

Stories

4 June 2014

     Last night in Saigon a baby boy was born. Yeah. So what, you say to yourself, babies are born every day all over the world. But it takes on another significance if you know the father and some of his story. The mother I have yet to meet, but I'm sure I will someday. I'm in and out of Viet Nam a lot. Bruce Luong came to this country like thousands of refugees and quickly adapted to an American way of life. He went back recently to Viet Nam to seek a wife and start a family and resume living in a mountainous portion of Tennessee. I came to know Bruce through bluegrass music and  through a mutual friend in Tennessee. But I had to think about how talking to Bruce or exchanging messages with him forever and again takes me right back to me plodding through the rice paddies of Quang Ngai Province in 1966. Check that year, Bruce - that's practically the Pleistocene Age! Young and stupid, I had no idea what life had in store for me after I got home. That I would meet the woman I've loved for 47 years, have a beautiful son who now has his own family. I hadn't a clue that the overseas deployment to Viet Nam would come back to both haunt me and gift me with a career avocation. I hated the war and what it did to our country. Read that statement again. This is the average American's take on the Viet Nam War. We conveniently push aside the cost to the Vietnamese. And it doesn't matter (except to those who will never change their attitude) which side of the political team the Vietnamese were on when Americans refer to the Vietnamese who fought in the war in Viet Nam. I've spent a life time trying to study the facts of what happened and I've been extremely fortunate to have been able to watch Viet Nam develop, in real time, on the ground, constantly,  since 1988.

     Another part of the story was born last night on a hot, muggy night in Saigon in District Five. You don't know where that is? I do. I could take you right to the main hospital and describe what the main gate looks like. I can envision the hundreds of family members milling about outside waiting for news of their loved ones and I can hear the cacophony of noise from the thousands of motorbikes on the street. Back here in the U.S. a young guy is waiting for news too, and through the modern miracle of communications, he receives news nearly immediately that he's a new father. My father and mother had to wait weeks just to know where I was and if I was still alive. We went three months one time without mail. But there I go again whining about a few discomforts. I came home in one piece, very lucky, and relatively healthy. It was soon after graduating from university that the stories I refused to pay any attention to before or during the war began having an effect on me. I was bombarded with them because of my commercial and business involvement in Viet Nam, my involvement with film makers, academics, and artists, and a whole parade of various interesting characters I met coming back and forth and in and out of Viet Nam and other countries in Asia. For any young person reading this (or any interested person, especially Mr. or Mrs. Average American,) who thinks the Vietnam War is ancient and lost history and therefore not worth a career or academic study, I have a message for you. The stories haven't been told yet. We haven't even grasped the beginning of it; what preceded and proceeded our involvement in, and departure from the country of Viet Nam in 1975. I smiled at the news of the birth and contemplated the Big Picture of what was going on. What a marvelous event. A new Vietnamese citizen gets to inherit the future - whatever that is, and whatever that means.

  Luong and Tran - Beautiful, new Parenthood.  (in Ha Noi.)