Bluegrass: a Primer

Titling this blog Banjo52 might imply more knowledge of bluegrass and other roots  music than I actually have. On the other hand, I love a lot of it, and Karin at altadenahiker.blogspot.com has just reminded me that there might be folks out there who could use an injection of mountain music but don’t know where to begin. So here’s my ounce of contribution toward a beginning dose of bluegrass. 

My list and links are tilted toward artists who are not so nasal or shrill that they’d put off the new or casual listener. If you google a few of these folks, you’ll also see and hear that bluegrass is a specific kind of country music. While there’s some overlap with Nashville, as well as blues and folk music (especially Scots-Irish), bluegrass is its own critter.

The traditional band includes acoustic guitar, banjo, bass, fiddle, and often mandolin and dobro.  Drums? Piano? Brass?  Never, as far as I know, but “Fusion” is one of the F-words of contemporary culture . . . .  Fusion is also the reason I haven't included Steve Martin or Bela Fleck; they are supremely talented banjoists, but their musical adventurism usually takes them beyond bluegrass, at least in my loosely defined terms. 

Ralph Stanley and Bill Monroe go back to the 1940s or earlier, so they have some of that shrillness, but it’s still good stuff.

Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs began to make inroads into the folk music of the 1960s, and Alison Krause and Emmylou Harris have completed that trend.  Also try the inimitable Doc Watson. I can’t imagine his offending anyone, and newcomers might embrace his mellow voice and soft brilliance on guitar.  If someone objects to his lullaby (next to last in the following lists), keep it to yourself. 

The first three below are older artists, followed by a few notable younger performers (though only Chris Thile is anything like a kid—well, Gillian Welch might not have any gray hair yet). 

Mother Maybelle Carter  (or, the Carter Family)

June Carter Cash    (Maybelle’s daughter, Johnny Cash’s wife)

Jim and Jesse

Tony Rice

Gillian Welch

Iris DeMenthe

Chris Thile  

Black Diamond (West Virginia)

Tom Adams

Norman Blake

Leo Kottke

Too Much of a Good Thing? 

Also, you could google any of the names John Hartford mentions in this link in addition to hearing a somewhat homogenized version of a classic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iy_CZDtIuz0

Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, Ricky Skaggs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKjnMMMYE-c 

Doc Watson and Chris Thile

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_w6IBbwWxc

June Carter Cash 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eydz4l07jl8

Doc Watson, a lullaby     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYSIFzSX7E0

Sleepy Man Banjo Boys (even kids do it): 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXcRI0BdioE

I hope this info, fundamental as it is, starts a stampede.  If you do some wandering on YouTube, please permit yourself some extra pleasure by looking entering “clog dancing” in the search bar. 

Music: Bill's Seafood; Crooked Still, "Look On And Cry"

 Crooked Still - Look On And Cry - YouTube

I wish Aoife O'Donovan's voice (or just her microphone) were bigger, but I find the banjo and cello combo in the video completely new and amazing, even though I'm something of a stick-in-the-mud who, in his ignorance, is suspicious of any kind of fusion. Even the lightning banjo work of the beloved Steve Martin is too . . .  intellectual? . . .  for me.


The photos show a senior trio at Bill's Seafood in Westbrook, Connecticut a few weeks ago. You stumble into a place, hoping the food's edible and the service compassionate. On top of that you get first-rate live music to boot. For lunch!

Except for the servers, don't expect to find teenyboppers at Bill's . . . .

Pancho and Lefty

Pancho and Lefty

In the afterglow of four good versions of “Make Me a Pallet” (see my previous post), I was browsing YouTube music clips and came across “Pancho and Lefty,” Townes Van Zandt’s masterpiece on betrayal within a brotherhood. I probably hadn't heard it for twenty years.

Here's the famed recording by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard:

YouTube - "Pancho and Lefty" - Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard

Here's a less known version by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings:

YouTube - Gillian Welch and David Rawlings - Pancho and Lefty (09-27-1997)

 Pancho “Wore his gun outside his pants/For all the honest world to feel.”  Don’t we all wish we could wear our guns outside our pants?  What do uyou think punkers’ purple hair is about?  In the sixties, I knew plenty of hippies who were Republicans-in-waiting. Wait. That's a digression.

Pancho and Lefty

Lefty was (apparently) the sidekick, and the two rode “free and clean” for awhile, in what seemed an eternal road trip. But soon enough, the idyll grows hard, and “you wear your skin like iron./Your breath's as hard as kerosene.”

For reasons that aren’t clear—chronic fear of the long arm of the law? living hand-to-mouth too long?—Lefty betrays Pancho. In exchange for “bread” and an escape to Ohio, he informs on Pancho. 
Then comes Van Zandt’s editorial, which is problematic. Shall we pray for Lefty, the narc, the Judas? Van Zandt asks us to:

“The desert's quiet and Cleveland's cold
So the story ends we're told.

“Pancho needs your prayers it's true,
But save a few for Lefty too—
He only did what he had to do
And now he's growing old . . .”

Lefty can’t sing all night the way he used to because of dust in his mouth—is it just Mexican dust or the dust of Pancho’s mortality as well. Although Lefty (note that left in Latin is “sinistra,” the root for “sinister”) was able to reach Ohio with the payoff, who wants to live out his senior years in Cleveland? So maybe the gods have given sinister Lefty his due.

Pancho and Lefty

 But he’s also just another old fart, alone with his sins, living in literal and metaphorical coldness. Surely that elicits sympathy. And let’s not forget that Pancho was, after all, a bandit, the thief we all fear in our cities these days (or the thieves in our bank offices and Congress). Pancho is thug, menace, bully,  anarchist.

Yet we all love an outlaw, the antihero we’d all be if we had any guts, any character. Geoffrey Dahmer was a grotesque exception; most renegades are like Jesse James; they steal from the rich and give to the poor. And in that story, we all have our hands out . . . .

Pancho and Lefty

Should we agree with Van Zandt that life in a cheap hotel in Cleveland is ample punishment for Lefty, and we should save a prayer for him?  Did he only do “what he had to do?” Who or what coerced him? Is it enough that, in his old age, he’s wracked with guilt, huddled up against one blizzard after another?

When I paraphrase the lines and the narrative, I hear myself winking. But I really think there’s a moral, or simply human, complexity in the tale of Pancho and Lefty. If your friend is a crook, whom you aid and abet, what are you? But if you betray the same friend, especially for some filthy lucre, for thirty pieces of silver . . . what are you?


By the way, three minutes of scouting internet commentary makes clear that the song is not about Pancho Villa, but two generic outlaws roaming free and easy.  Van Zandt has a very charming story about two cops who stopped his car for going 67 in Texas. He thinks of them as Pancho and Lefty.  If you poke around, you can find that television interview, but you’ll need patience to sit through the composer’s halting speech.

Pancho and Lefty

If you know as little as I did about Townes Van Zandt’s life, I encourage you to check out Wikipedia’s version of his biography. It feels accurate, some of its details are gripping, most of them sad, and it goes to aspects of creativity we’ve looked at here before.

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