A Few Thoughts on Bach, Bluegrass Music and Life as Art

God gives us his creation to enjoy. It all points to him indeed. I suppose that nothing so grieves the Lord, but also causes him to laugh in derision, than humans staring the beauty and infinite ordered complexity of the world in the face, and seeing not a trace of any divine handiwork. The very existence of harmony, like art, language, or love or justice or compassion, is more than a four-part ode to divine intentionality in creation. 

There's an old debate in Christian ethics about whether God gives us creation to enjoy in and of itself, or whether the enjoyment of such created things is somehow beneath God's intention for the Christian. It's part of the age old debate within (and without) Christianity over the relationship of spirit and matter (taken over from the fundamental and perduring questions posed and answered by Plato). In the classical struggles with the Reformed, Lutherans "rejected such strict delineation between the spiritual and the material in worship; it smacked too much of the old body-soul dualism of classical philosophy that had found its way into medieval theology." (Bodo Nischan)  Nischan was discussing the Reformed penchant to eliminate art from worship (including crucifixes, statues, altar paintings, organs, orchestral musics, etc. etc.). The penchant stemmed, in my opinion, from a truncated view of Christ's incarnation (denial of the communication of attributes; that is, what can be said of either the human or the divine nature of Christ, can be said of the divine/human person of Christ). The Reformed (as also Lutheran pietists!) also tended to eliminate art from life - but that cannot be done. Life is art. Life produces art. Life distorts art, indeed, but the shear divine joy of creation bubbles and fizzes in the human soul, waiting to be un-capped, sometimes not waiting but blowing the cork in a champagne shower of delightful sight, sound, emotion and shear joy.

Bach ranted regularly against the "beer fiddlers" (the unofficial musicians who played for

 wedding dances and parties, and often picked off the already slim pickin's for performing; See Wolff's delightful tour-de-force biography). But Baroque can not break the necessity of simpler and less well educated folks from expressing the joys and travails of life in genres close 

to the hearth and their hearts. Bach's certainly that too - despite the most complex fugue, or the high brow if immensely popular "Brandenburg Concertos." The three full church year cycles of cantatas we have are the most moving conjunction of text and tune in all of Christian history, nay, human history. One must enjoy the "Coffee Cantata" or the "Tobacco Cantata" to see playful side of Bach. Music was home in high mass at St. Thomas's and at in every other room of Bach's home, adjacent on the square. Still the "beer fiddlers" remain, thank God.

My great uncle Howard was a Missouri fiddler. Played barn dances. Which brings me to Bluegrass. Bluegrass music is a glorious confluence. Bill Monroe (1911-1996) came up with the name, and the genre. Most of us "trad-grass" enthusiasts believe the genre was perfected the moment Earl Scruggs replaced String Bean as banjo player for Monroe on the Grand Old Opry. String played old "frailing" style banjo. The band was weary of the banjo because String tended to pull them of the beat. "Scruggs Style" banjo - fabulous syncopation, perfectly placed notes, dancing around the melody, falling like an avalanche of sound, each phrase tickling the ear, jumping to the lone mike in the center of the band, striking the musical phrase, up the neck and down, nailing it hard, and then stepping back in the background

to dance low while the fiddle played high, throwing in a frill here and there in those split seconds between the words, each pause, reminding the hearer that those five strings were still there, and would burst into sonic sound-ful ecstasy any delightful second - was born in 1945 - and here to stay. 

Yes, the gestation and birthing had been long. Slaves had brought a gourd instrument from West Africa to America. A stick attached to a gourd, with skin stretched over a flattened hole cut in the side. It's a great irony that this instrument - so popularly associated with 'Southern White Trash,' and all the most negative stereotypes that carries for many black Americans, the banjo is THE African American instrument. "I want to remind black people that the banjo came from Africa, to let them know it's not just an instrument for white bluegrass pickers."

(Trance Encounter: A visit with hypnotic bluesman Otis Taylor, in The Fretboard Journal; Winter 2009, p. 45ff.). The horrid pain of the grossest injustice and racism produced a sound that has been the epitome of joy - that's the cruciform connection in bluegrass. Scruggs settled on a Gibson Mastertone Banjo - pre-WWII instruments are the creme-de-la-creme to this day, for one reason: these instruments have the potential, in the right hands, to have that exploding, deep, clear, ringing "Scruggs sound."

The fiddle was there all along, right from the beginning. The fiddle alone carried many a barn dance. Those beer fiddlers came to America from England first, carrying Scottish tunes and Irish jigs, and folk song after folk song. Fiddles pressed into the forests of Appalachia. Thomas Jefferson was a fiddler. One of the soldiers on the Lewis and Clark Expedition brought his fiddle along, the source of great entertainment, joy and diplomatic ice breaking with many a nervous tribe. "Ancient sounds" Monroe called them. He trained his fiddlers to play a longer bow. There's plenty of "sawing" in hot bluegrass numbers, but bluegrass fiddle tends to be le

ss hectic than old time fiddling.

Monroe's choice to play the mandolin was odd. His brothers were playing the other

instruments and it was the only one left to him. He was a big man, with a lazy eye (which brought no end of harassment) playing a small and odd instrument - his only option. He overcompensated for his feelings of inferiority and insult his entire life. But he took this instrument, past its heyday in the mid thirties when Monroe was starting to play professionally, and was on the way to making it a delightfully expressive, chop-chord vocal/instrumental backup, and hot lead instrument. There's no Sam Bush, no Ricky Skaggs, without Monroe. His choice of a Gibson F-5 is the bluegrass standard to this day. I don't think there's another design, another set of shapes so marvelously made by hands. Orville Gibson was a (while he lived little appreciated) Kalamazoo genius. The F-5 (perfected by Lloyd Loar and his Gibson staff) is THE Strad of American instruments. 

The ballads from the old country, along with their tunes, flowed and morphed, moving incrementally but moving, like the heavy fog in mountain hollows. Monroe reached back into those ballads he'd grown up with in Kentucky, and he wrote many a new one. Hundreds of songs were forged from life's travails - travails as often as not self inflicted - in a life of tawdry philandering (despite the strictures of his Methodist religion) which lasted virtually to his "Last Days on Earth." The blues find blue notes also in bluegrass. Perhaps - it strikes me now - "Bluegrass" is itself a double entendre. I'd seen Monroe twice. The first time was I believe early spring 1980, at Iowa State in Ames. I'd driven alone from Sioux City and stayed with my

 Iowa State brother (I was a senior in high school). Even my older brother, whose ear found delight in the popular rock music of the day (as did and do I), was mesmerized by Monroe's performance, and I think rather surprised by his own delight. I remembered Monroe calling out for requests - hearing a half dozen - and saying, "Rawhide will be the next tune," then breaking into a seamless montage of all the songs called out, band literally not missing a beat. Butch Robins was the banjoist (former Newgrass Revivalist and insufficiently heralded banjo innovator). I saw Monroe again at a very small venue in Ft. Wayne around 1990. I was in graduate school at the seminary working as grad assistant to the systematics department. He played some dive on the near South side, barely 50 people in attendance. The show was magic. I was in the first or second row. I broke out laughing when he commenced his trade mark jig and then he immediately stiffened up back at the mike for a mandolin lead, just a hint of a smile on his 80-yr-old face. But I recall an overweight blond (former) bombshell who appeared to me to have been drinking, stepping up to sing a couple of numbers, at Monroe's request and to his high praise.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.......  "This ain't Bluegrass," I thought. Or was it? "Can't You Hear Me Callin': The Life of Bill Monroe Father of Bluegrass" (Richard D. Smith) years later confirmed my suspicions in spades. Yes, unfortunately, it was[n't].

Oh well... Bluegrass is life. It's diverse, from the mind-blowing "new grass" of now long defunct "New Grass Revival," to Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys; from Allison Krauss to Jim and Jesse. Bluegrass is for me joy. Some lyrics are wistful and meaningless, others profound, "high and lonesome," and even filled with a theology of the cross (Krauss's Banjo player Ron Block is a serious Christian - though Reformed - and has written a number of powerful songs on suffering and faith). Many tunes showcase instrumentation that strikes like apparent random lightning, but betrays a divine intention in creation, in the endlessly creative human mind, in the mind's communication with the fingers, the body the soul, the emotions. The vocal harmonies manage - most often laboring under "gospel music" bereft of the gosp

el - on occasion to give profound insight into the human condition, and - albeit even more rarely - gospel direction to Jesus, "The blood of My Savior."

Perhaps I love bluegrass so, because it's a glimpse of life crammed into a two minute, thirty second burst of sound. It's full of contradictions, sorrow, dissonances, instruments with sordid history, very often quite honest about life, and once in a while, Jesus breaks through. It's sort of a Two Kingdom/First Article/Second Article of the Creed kind of thing for me... Bluegrass is joy midst all life's blessings and travails, a great first article gift. 

Some time soon I'll write about coming to the realization that Jesus virtually HAD to be a carpenter - a conviction I arrived at by building mandolins. But that's for another vacation day...

Matt H.