My eye falls on the fiddle player, he not just plays music, he is music and I become instantly a groupie. I keep it to myself. The next morning when I wait for my breakfast, he however grabs me and with T from Cold Country playing and singing, I learn my first basic steps of swing dancing. The next moment I recall is in the evening. There is a campfire, the stars are out and people are picking on their instruments. We sit together on a car hood and talk, only disrupted now and then by requests for more fiddle or mandolin tones. The moment is perfect. But this was all back then, when we all lived the good life up North in Alaska.
Now we are down South, me chasing the sun, he moving with his bluegrass band Bearfoot to the center of the country music world. And so it happens, our paths cross again. J invites me to stay over Christmas, promises to play as much mandolin for me as I can stand and submerges me in the world of Bluegrass in Nashville, Tennessee. When the music from Scots-Irish immigrants rolled down of the Appalachian mountains and combined with the African-American Jazz and Blues, Country music was born. With icons as Hank Williams and the Carter family, it became the music standard in the South. Bill Monroe is however the person we should talk about. Confined to the only instrument left in the family picking sessions the mandolin, he became the founding father of a sub genre called Bluegrass, after his first band, the Blue Grass Boys. And thats the genre we like.
The main distinguishes from Country music, besides its base around only acoustic string instruments, is that one or more instruments each takes its turn playing the melody and improvising around it, while the others perform accompaniment. While in Country music music all instruments play the melody together or one instrument carries the lead throughout while the others provide accompaniment.
After a romantic dinner for two, J brings me to the Doyle and Debbie show. We hit downtown, and it seems that each bar has at least one life band playing. We are both not impressed with the band we choose and after a beer we head home early. Who needs downtown if you can have bluegrass music right at home. T and A (who plays fiddle in both bands) invite us for Christmas dinner at their place. Of course it helps that they are picking all day around me, that I can see the process and help with recording a Christmas Carol, that they even have a present for me under the Christmas tree, that they cook a fabulous Christmas dinner. But there is something with these Alaskan people what just makes me feel home. I still can't put my finger down on what it is with Alaska, but I love it.
For 3 days J and me are hardly separated, more dinners, more coffee, more mandolin, more songs, more talking, more pictures, its just perfect. Then our paths and our lives split again, J heading for some gigs in Chicago, me continuing my travel south. Separated until our travel lives will bring us together again, for some more bluegrass and perfect moments. I hope its soon.
Dag,
Iris (Nashville, 27621 miles)
