Springfield Exit - That was Then - Right Now is More Important

Springfield Exit - an official photo
David Lay  -  Marshall Wilborn  -  David McLaughlin  -  Linda Lay  -  Tom Adams

13 March 2015

      I laughingly told a friend once that if I'm going to call myself a writer then I should be able to accept a self-imposed challenge of being able to write the most beautiful thing I could write. How easily this comes to mind - there's that reminder to myself again! - especially after I found this photo on Linda Lay's Facebook Page of the members of Springfield Exit posing in front of  barn and the Blue Ridge. The photographer had spatially positioned everyone just right, exemplifying the incredibly well-documented individual talents of each member of this bluegrass band. Individual talent is an awfully nice thing to possess. But seriously genuine bluegrass music requires a commitment to the group effort as much as a string quartet attempting to perform Vivaldi. If you think I make too much of this, go back in your memory to the last time you heard a truly bad bluegrass band. I've heard some so bad that they had nothing to offer the audience except to parody the form - dress funny, assume a funny name (it usually includes the word "Pickers") - fill half the show-time with corn-pone jokes and how much they bicker with the wife. Yawn. Ed's leaving. Another evening of wasted time and money. For all the kind words written about Hee Haw and "O Brother Where Art Thou" those two entities had a negative downside to the popularity re-bound of bluegrass. It's the natural outcome of focusing on the superficial and not researching the prime sources. Springfield Exit is everything right about any justification for sustaining bluegrass music as an ensconced American music idiom.

     The first time I heard Linda Lay sing some years ago I was stopped dead in my tracks. It wasn't so much that she possesses a beautiful voice (she does!) but it was what she could do with that God-given talent to win an immediate audience. There was no necessity for embellishment; no need to milk a line or a note for audience sympathy. None of this screaming "hot dog" stuff  I've seen on American Idol. Anybody can get on a stage in front of a television camera and scream one note for a couple of minutes and call that entertainment. No. I saw and heard Linda Lay capture an audience on a hot summer day, basically out in an open field with a lousy sound system, and she invited a couple hundred people to sink into silence while she performed under the most grueling of  venue standards. Let the American Idol Screamers indulge in their wishful thinking about what constitutes actual talent. There is no better barometer than to have a few people turn to me on my left and right and ask me, "Who IS that singing?" This to me is the true test of good entertainment. It's the difference between good bluegrass and something that's trying to pass as bluegrass. I have a shared addiction with a few million other citizens both here in the U.S. and abroad. It's called the Bluegrass Sickness. Just when you think you've heard the best you're led down a road to something that sounds even better. You choose your favorites and you keep coming back to them because they've stood the test of time and you enjoy listening to them over and over again. Each of us has a different opinion of what that certain something is, that keeps drawing us back to our personal music addictions. There is no easier way to explain it.

      Last summer I was at a concert (right here in Vienna, Virginia). The band was Seldom Scene. Of course they're great. Of course they're good. And they bring with them that link to the history of bluegrass, especially if you enjoyed them back in the Old Days of the Washington, D.C. bluegrass scene. The D.C. scene has unfortunately faded, and you can analyze the reasons why till the cows come home. What struck me on this particular evening was the immense crowd shouting out requests for favorite Seldom Scene numbers from a list of long-play albums that I had in my own collection. I started counting the titles of the songs people were shouting. I counted 23 songs that were so entrenched in people's memories that they wouldn't let the band leave the stage until they were all performed. It got humorous but it was an homage to the collection of work the original Seldom Scene had established. 

      The biographies of the individual members of Springfield Exit are legendary, too. They've each paid their dues and are nationally recognized for who they are, the bands they've been members of, and the body of work they've established through recording and performing. I'm an unabashed fan. I'm also pretty lucky to know that they've been appearing monthly in the Grand Ballroom of the George Washington Hotel in nearby Winchester, Virginia and most months of the year, when I'm desperate for a bluegrass fix, I can drive 60 miles west and see them. They continue to pack in a monthly audience, especially after the release of their latest CD. You have one more opportunity to see them in the Grand Ballroom in April before the summer season of traveling begins. My advice? Don't hesitate. The monthly concerts are usually on the Third Thursday of the month, but April's concert will be on April 9th.

   Springfield Exit's latest CD.