It was a magical night and a year in the making. The Rams Head On Stage concert venue on West Street in Annapolis was recently brimming with hot licks and high-lonesome harmonies— sold out for the 20th anniversary of the Good Deale Bluegrass Band. Tim and Savannah Finch were back. Forced to cancel their annual appearance at the same venue the year before when Savannah was sidelined for health reasons, their performance this night was in several ways a gift and a triumph.
The group, now known as “Tim and Savannah Finch with the Eastman String Band,” includes Tim (a sales rep for the Eastman company of fine stringed-instrument crafters) on vocals, mandolin, and banjo, Savannah on vocals and guitar, fiddling “Baltimore Jonny” Glik, Danny Stewart on stand-up bass, and a blazing young guitar picker named Chris Luquette, who often plays with the Eastman String Band. Tonight, the crowd was told, Luquette had just traveled from the Grammy Awards program in New York to be there for this special show. Also appearing with the anniversary band was dobroist Alex Sens, capably filling in but certainly not replacing the late, great, former Good Deale Bluegrass member Mike Auldridge, who, The New York Times wrote in a tribute, lent “fresh elegance” to the dobro.
Joining the lineup for the second set were long-time Good Deale friends and bluegrass greats Dudley Connell and Sally Love Connell and 2013 International Bluegrass Music Association Instrumental Performer and Banjo Player of the Year, Mike Munford. After masterful renditions, especially of the Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs classic “Some Old Day” and a rousing instrumental “Alabama Jubilee,” everyone in the house agreed that bluegrass music in this town has lost none of its luster. But are these still glory days, or is general interest in bluegrass fading?
Where Did Bluegrass Come From?
The bona-fide home of bluegrass is still up for debate, now 90-odd years hence. Whether it was at a rural square-dance hall in Indiana that led to performances broadcast over the entire eastern half the country on WLS radio’s “National Barn Dance” in Chicago, or the back room of some fledgling record company among those setting up shop in Nashville, bluegrass was little more than just a product label at the time. To borrow from the lyrics of a hit song released in 1982 by the popular country band Alabama, “mountain music” was “like grandma and grandpa used to play.” As it turns out, Alabama might have been onto something there.
According to Bluegrass: A History, an authoritative, exhaustive volume acclaimed by aficionados and written in 1985 by Neil V. Rosenberg, what eventually became known as bluegrass actually did start before anyone ever performed it for money. Rosenberg, himself “a semiprofessional bluegrass musician” and at the time a professor of folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland (St. Johns), Canada, writes that immigrants who settled in the Appalachian hills and the eastern piedmont of this country principally played music they’d imported from home—known derisively as “hillbilly” by outsiders—for their own entertainment.
The Del McCoury Band at a recent performance. Creative Commons License.
Blue Grass Becomes Bluegrass
As those immigrants started migrating to higher population centers during the Great Depression to find work, and after radio and recorded music became more accessible, a mandolin player and entrepreneur named Bill Monroe formed a band in Indiana he called “The Blue Grass Boys.” It wasn’t long before the name stuck. Over the years, a total of 143 blue grass boys have been on the Monroe payroll at one time or another.
“Like all myths,” Rosenberg laments, “those of country music are based on truth but not necessarily the whole literal truth. Bill Monroe was and is the central figure in bluegrass, but he and his music were molded by culture and circumstance.” The combination of unamplified and unaltered guitar, mandolin, banjo, fiddle (don’t call it a violin), and later bass fiddle—at a higher “dupal-meter” tempo and accompanied by separate high-octave vocal harmonies—became its own style. And it has risen and fallen with commercial music’s fickle definitions of quality and popularity.
Television networks were responsible early on for spreading some of the bluegrass gospel. The Dillards made their debut appearance in 1963 as the Darling family “boys” in the 1960s series The Andy Griffith Show, and Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs (both former Blue Grass Boys) guest-starred on The Beverly Hillbillies from 1963–68. In 1969, the country-music variety show Hee-Haw (cohosted by Roy Clark, who grew up in the Washington, D.C., area) became one of the most popular series in TV history.
A Big Revival
In an interview for the February 1988 Country Journal, blind-from-birth old-time guitar virtuoso Doc Watson recalled: “It seems like there have been revivals in this kind of music all along, a recurring thing. There was a lull in it at the end of the ’60s, and then all at once in the ’70s it began to grow again...The ‘Circle Album,’ they call it...got us heard in a lot of audiences where we never would have been heard otherwise.”
What Watson was referring to, of course, was the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s 1972 ensemble of picking and strumming legends gathered together for the platinum-selling triple album Will the Circle Be Unbroken. That, along with the release the same year of the movie Deliverance, featuring the unlikely hit “Dueling Banjos,” and Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead sitting down on banjo to record—with fiddler Vassar Clements, mandolinist David Grisman, bassist John Kahn, and guitarist Peter “Panama Red” Rowan—for the release the following year of the classic old-timey album Old and in the Way helped bring on the resurgence that Watson was talking about.
Another spike of interest in the music came in 2000, this time a reintroduction of bluegrass pioneers Carter and Ralph Stanley to a whole new audience with the release of the Coen brothers’ film O Brother Where Art Though. One of its many memorable lines came when Tim Blake Nelson as character Delmarr O’Donnell says, “Hey mister! I don’t mean to be tellin’ tales out of school, but there’s a feller in there that’ll pay you ten dollars if you sing into his can.”
So, where has all this led? One of the hottest acts in live-performance music today is 27-year-old bluegrass jam guitar phenom William Apostol whose biggest influence, he says, is Doc Watson.If Apostol’s name doesn’t ring any bells, he’s been going by the stage name “Billy Strings,” coined by an aunt who early on recognized his stringed-instrument virtuosity.Most of the venue list for his tour this summer includes the words “SOLD OUT,” and he is a headliner for the more and more popular Delfest (an ode to festival founder Del McCoury), held Memorial Day weekend in Cumberland, Maryland.
Bluegrass phenom Billy Strings performs. His performance has sold out venues nationwide. Photo by Emily Butler.
The Nation’s Bluegrass Capital
The music has caught on nationwide, but nowhere was the appetite for it more voracious at one time than in the mid-Atlantic region. The Washington Post ran a story in March 1974 with the headline “D.C. Is Also Nation’s Bluegrass Capital.” In the early and mid-1970s, bluegrass music was definitely being reborn, if not reinvented altogether, right here in our neck o’ the woods.
Among a host of local musicians who’ve carried the bluegrass torch, most prominent in the Washington area have been The Country Gentlemen and The Seldom Scene; the lineups of both having changed considerably over the years, even though the product was essentially the same. Their stories and lineages are simply too long and complicated to include here, but suffice it to say, the “Scene” is still going strong with its current configuration, and a tribute band has taken on the responsibility of keeping the “Gentlemen” music alive.
Books Assess the Condition of Local Bluegrass
Doc Watson Sugar Grove, Doc Watson, 86 years old, performs in 2009, three years before his death. Creative Commons License.
In 2015, Jim Newby produced Bluegrass in Baltimore: The Hard-Drivin’ Sound and its Legacy, “detailing the struggles Appalachian musicians faced in a big city that viewed the music they made as ‘the poorest example of poor man’s music.’” Among the notable legends from Charm City included in the book are Del McCoury and the Stoney Mountain Boys, the first bluegrass band to perform at New York City’s Carnegie Hall.
A book released early this year and written by “American vernacular music scholar” Kip Lornell, Capital Bluegrass: Hillbilly Music Meets in Washington, recounts the history of this type of music in the nation’s capital and surrounding area. In it, he describes the present local outlook as “the chilling winds of change” that started brewing in the early 1990s when bluegrass music declined in stature and popularity and paints a gloomy picture for the future of this musical genre in the region.
Harking back to the Rams Head Good Deale Bluegrass anniversary show (which at press time was in the early stages of production for a new live album), it was obvious that audience members had more age and grey hair than a typical concert crowd would have. Which leads to the questions: Is this style of music in a downward spiral? Or is it healthier than ever? Hints of its enduring popularity are everywhere; Delfest in Cumberland; the Charm City Bluegrass Festival, now in its seventh year; and sold-out performances at venues region-wide. Just ask Tim and Savannah Finch.
Area Bluegrass Jams
The Metropolitan Kitchen and Lounge on West Street in Annapolis features a Bluegrass Jam on the first and third Tuesdays of every month from 7 to 10 p.m., hosted by Sarah Larsen and Danny Stewart, Jr., a stringed-instrument master and a musician first-class in the U.S. Navy’s Country Current band. The family-friendly event welcomes all ages and musical skills and attracts bluegrass enthusiasts from the entire mid-Atlantic region.
The monthly Bluegrass Jam at the Sandy Spring Museum on Route 108 in Sandy Spring, Maryland, is now in its third year. Held the last Sunday of the month (with the occasional exception), it draws pickers from Montgomery County and beyond, from players with considerable experience to beginners hoping to pick up pointers. The jam is led by Sandy Spring Museum board member Bruce Evans (who plays in the Brookeville-based band, The Fire Hazards) and Mary Burdette (assistant director of the Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival in Oak Hill, New York). To help pay museum staff and utilities, participants and listeners alike are encouraged to donate $5 each time they attend.
Eastman String Band performs a signature set at Rams Head On Stage. From left: Fiddling Jon Glick, Tim Finch, Savannah Finch, bassist Danny Stewart from the Navy’s “Country Current” band, and Grammy-nominated up-and-coming guitar “picker,” Chris Luquette. Photo by G. T. Keplinger.
Maryland Band Sampler
• Bluetrain Bluegrass—Baltimore
• Lonesome Fiddle Ramblers—Hagerstown
• Flatland Drive Band—Denton
• Free Range Bluegrass—Greensboro
• 15 Strings—Park Hall
• Across the Track—Aberdeen
• Backroad—Tacoma Park
• Smooth Kentucky—Towson
• Grand Old Ditch—Cumberland
• Blue Crab Crossing—Salisbury
• The Knuckle Dusters—Washington, D.C.
