 t
is my distinct impression that only a very few National Review
readers have ever attended a bluegrass festival. (A bluegrass festival
is a multi-day event centered around the performance of bluegrass
music, which is an amalgam of several musical forms including mountain
and country. It is played on acoustic instruments, usually guitars,
banjos, mandolins, and bass fiddles Ed.) Yet I also sense a yearning
to better know the wider world, so herewith a highly filtered report
from the Graves Mountain Festival, which transpired last week near
Syria, Va., in the Eastern foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The official
festival began Thursday, so I arrived Tuesday morning to make sure
the essentials fingers, tent, liver were warmed up by opening
day. While a hermit by nature, I had met a group of friends at the
festival two years earlier who had kindly taken me in. The two principals
Kevin, a banjo player and guitarist, and Kathie, who plays bass
and can sing the angels down from heaven arrived Monday to set
up camp, the centerpiece of which is a carport-sized canopy sheltering
chairs, tables, lanterns, coolers, boxes full of paper plates, pans,
potatoes, condiments, and headache remedies. The airspace, meanwhile,
was alive with various insects, vapors, and perhaps unseen angels
and demons. This would be home until Sunday morning.
Living in a
home without walls is a departure from the norm. There is a certain
openness about it. This provides many benefits. Heating and air-conditioning
costs are quite low, while people watching is quite easy. One afternoon
a car with New York plates happened by, in whose front seat rode
an old Richmond picking friend who is now a public defender in Brooklyn.
This was a pleasant surprise, even if he owed me no money.
Another time,
two drunks staggered in, one falling into the lap of Kevin's son,
whom he offered five dollars to drive him to his camp. Problem was,
he had no idea where his camp happened to be. This was much more
amusing than watching television, though after a while one wished
it possible to hit the clicker and make this fellow disappear. Similarly,
the occasional dog wandered in, as did friends and strangers, especially
when the skies darkened and the picking began in earnest.
I am a mid-range
player, having come to this type of music from classical guitar
plucking a few years ago. Luckily, about 90 percent of the tunes
are based on a three-chord structure, which eases the learning process.
Questions can and have been raised about the wisdom of plunking
down a couple of grand for a guitar to play three chords on, but
I figure $633.33 a chord isn't all that bad. By comparison, my elder
son is going to study jazz guitar at Berklee in the fall, which
will cost about thirty grand per year, after which he be able to
earn just enough to stay off the welfare rolls, if he never sleeps.
By comparison, bluegrass is a bargain.
Kathie and
Kevin are highly accomplished musicians, as were several other visitors
and guests who joined us as the week progressed. Bluegrass, in the
right hands, allows for a great deal of improvisation, and Kevin
mixes modes, tempos, and voicings like a card shark shuffling his
deck on payday. Kathie easily walked her bass through the jazz classic,
The Way You Look Tonight, which she hadn't known beforehand,
and which I sang with all the beauty of a frog who had just had
its throat slit with a butter knife.
As is well
known, the most captivating instrument is the human voice at least
when the bad ones have been weeded out and when Kathie sings,
crowds gather. Indeed, some passersby stop so abruptly their shoes
screech. Though typically modest, I made a point of letting people
know that I was with her. This came as little surprise to many,
since I was holding her coat.
There's more
to these festivals than picking, it should be pointed out. There
is a staggering amount of alcohol consumed. One need not look far
to observe beer being drunk with breakfast, and indeed before breakfast,
and sometimes instead of breakfast. We kept some wine around our
camp, for medicinal purposes, and stayed quite healthy. On two nights,
a beast known thereabouts as the Wild Turkey stormed the camp. One
does not wish to give away too many details, other than to say that
Kathie ended up in the creek. Twice. The morning after one Turkey
visitation, survivors were seen searching for their revolvers, which
mercifully had been confiscated by the chaplain.
There were
drunks on the roads, drunks in the meadows, drunks in the trees.
Across the way, a fellow who fell asleep in the front seat of his
pickup truck was awakened Sunday morning by loud snoring. He thought
it was his own until he noticed the snoring continued after he opened
his eyes. Looking into the back of the truck's cab, he discovered
a stranger, who had apparently crawled sometime before dawn. "Hey
buddy," he said, "you gotta quit that snoring." All
told, a very measured response.
We went home
low on sleep but high on memories and perhaps a few lingering
vapors as well. Once inside the familiar walls, the old world closed
in. The television told of a horrible suicide bombing in Israel.
Bills glared from the kitchen table. The computer and its dull shackle
summoned one back to the study. I'm thinking the Bedouins may be
onto something.
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