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Double Bass Question for the Talkbass.com owners

#41
Uncletoad said:
Hey now. It ain't country if you ain't fightin and drinkin.

Now get on with it.
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Damn TOWED, bluegrass ain't country and country ain't bluegrass. Country is coming more out of the blues tradition and bluegrass more out of the Elizabethan ballad tradition.

A favorite thing I heard on WFUV a few years back, they were doing a segment on Appalachian death/murder ballads (of which TOM DOOLEY may be the most widely recognized) which teh DJ kept referring to as "snuffgrass".
 
#44
Ed Fuqua said:
Damn TOWED, bluegrass ain't country and country ain't bluegrass. Country is coming more out of the blues tradition and bluegrass more out of the Elizabethan ballad tradition.

A favorite thing I heard on WFUV a few years back, they were doing a segment on Appalachian death/murder ballads (of which TOM DOOLEY may be the most widely recognized) which teh DJ kept referring to as "snuffgrass".
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Now the Tom Dooley (correct spelling Dula) saga took place about 2 humps over fom me along the Wilkes/Caldwell/Watauga county lines. I've played music in the field next to where Laura Foster (the victim) is buried.

In a review of a Del McCoury CD release a few years back, bluegrass was called "the white man's blues." Monroe was greatly influenced by Arnold Shultz, a black man who played blues-styled guitar and fiddle. Monroe and others claimed had Shultz been recorded those other noted blues guitarists would pale in comparison. I'm no expert though, but I'd say Monroe lived to hear him live and then heard the other blues recordings of the early 20th century.

Current country is coming from a toilet tradition.
 
#45
Wasn't there one a them Alan Lomax types that did a comparative analysis of Appalachian music and postulated (and supported pretty well) its link to English and Welsh folk music, Elizabethan ballads etc.?

Oh yeah, Link Removed.

So maybe the bluegrass thing is a melding of Appalachian music and blues?
 
#46
Ramjet said:
Current country is coming from a toilet tradition.
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Yep. What a mess.


Red Bumpkin said:
Thum's fighten words....

or alternately

everybody's gotta believe in something. I believe I'll have another drink...
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"yer walkin on the fightin side of me"

"I think I'll just sit here and drank"

Neither sentiment from the Hag has any bluegrass content....move along now move along.
 
#47
Ed Fuqua said:
So maybe the bluegrass thing is a melding of Appalachian music and blues?
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I would say that it's pretty much that exactly. For that improvisational factor, I think you've got to give a little nod to jazz, too. Sometimes I think of bluegrass as the bebop of country.

Take an act like the Louvin Brothers -- they're not straight down any alley at all, but are rolling in all of them (not much improv there, however.) Their tunes and performances are much beloved by bluegrass types; they played to country audiences on a country circuit; they sang that beautiful close harmony they learned in church, and which has so much high lonesome in it; and they did some tunes like "Knoxville Girl", a murder ballad transposed almost directly from old English tradition to Appalachia. The Louvins are standing at a southern crossroads where all that stuff mixes together somewhat.

Invalid Link Removed on Sugar Hill is a great collection of tunes that shows all these influences, blues, narrative lyrics, straight up Monroe-style bluegrass, and especially the stuff Ed called "snuffgrass". I've always called that genre "country macabre".
 
#48
Maybe more than bluegrass tunes about murder and such, I like a nice ghost song. My favorite is Don Humphries' "Eli Renfroe", which you can hear on Del McCoury's Link Removed. When I sing it, I change the first lyrics a tiny little bit. With that tiny little alteration, the song starts:

Eli Renfroe killed his wife with a long sharp Bowie knife.
He cut her up and he laid her in the ground.

Suffice it to say that old Eli goes a-haunting when the moon is just right. The music and performances give it the appropriate chill, too.
 
#50
Damon Rondeau said:
For that improvisational factor, I think you've got to give a little nod to jazz, too. Sometimes I think of bluegrass as the bebop of country.
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I'm not sure I'm with you on that. Maybe out of the blues, but I just don't hear the same "harmonic framework of the composer is just a suggestion" kind of approach, most of the folks I've heard (with the exception of more contemporary players) hew pretty much to playing exactly that chord exactly evry time in every chorus and I don't hear much conversational back and forth. Call and response, yeah, but always directly in context. The thing about jazz improv to me, besides the 3 over 2 African diaspora thang, is the malleability of the harmonic structure.
 
#52
Ed Fuqua said:
I'm not sure I'm with you on that. Maybe out of the blues, but I just don't hear the same "harmonic framework of the composer is just a suggestion" kind of approach, most of the folks I've heard (with the exception of more contemporary players) hew pretty much to playing exactly that chord exactly evry time in every chorus and I don't hear much conversational back and forth. Call and response, yeah, but always directly in context. The thing about jazz improv to me, besides the 3 over 2 African diaspora thang, is the malleability of the harmonic structure.
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OK, blues, sure. I was thinking only of the step-up-and-take-a-solo angle. There's not much soloing to speak of in a Jimmy Rodgers tune, for example, but 15 or so years later you've got Bill Monroe featuring instrumental solos as a significant feature of his new music. I think Bill really brought that to country music and that's one of the things that distinguishes the bluegrass stream from mainstream country. Question is, where did that instrumentalist, admiring-of-the-virtuoso stream come from, then? I say the influence is from the other dominant pop music of the time (i.e., not country music): swing jazz.

An afterthought: 'Course, all that old Celtic music and Appalachian music had a bunch of instrumental canoodling and such. Best not to go too far with the jazz thing. Point is, Bill was screwing around with forms and stuff in the mid-40's and probably the whole of American music got in his ears one way or the other...
 
#53
Ed Fuqua said:
Maybe MISS OTIS REGRETS is a bluegrass tune?
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Could be, given the right treatment by the right artist. Del McCoury has been one to cross pollenate genres, draggng this song and then that song from varying sources and bringing them to the bluegrass community. Have you heard the englishman Richard Thompson's song "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" by Del McCoury? I've also heard him cover Frank Sinatra.

If I could put a finger on it (and I know I can't) I'd say bluegrass is blues, celtic, swing, jazz, Elizabethian and many of the songs were kept as oral vehicles to share stories amongst a poorly educated society (which included most all people centuries ago). Many of them could neither read or write, but they could tell a story that had been put to music.

One major difference between jazz and bluegrass is the focus of the song. At times, the lyrics are just something to fill the gaps between breaks, but then sometimes the music backs way off so that the story shines through and is the complete focus of the presentation. Improv connects bluegrass & jazz, but it's much more controlled in the bluegrass category.

I'm not going to say what is and what ain't bluegrass, because there's enough to go around to please everybody, whether they hold onto traditional dressings (Monroe with Flatt & Scruggs) or progressive (Chris Thiele).

Funny how this thread seems to be changing, ain't it?
 
#55
Damon Rondeau said:
An afterthought: 'Course, all that old Celtic music and Appalachian music had a bunch of instrumental canoodling and such. Best not to go too far with the jazz thing. Point is, Bill was screwing around with forms and stuff in the mid-40's and probably the whole of American music got in his ears one way or the other...
Click to expand...

If you want to get into Bill Monroe's head get a copy and read this.

I've been through it about 6 times now and I'll read it again.
 
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#58
...please allow one from 'that other place' to defend 'The Ed'.

To those who take exception to Mr. Fuqua's treatment...quiesce your scat.
Even we trailertrash over on the BG side acknowledge the amazing worth of Fred Euchre...and we can't even spell his damned name without Vanna White's help.

He cares, he helps, he keeps the hoi polloi in line.
Once you understand that, you'll see that, ultimately, we're all bozos on this bass playing bus...hence his puckish pointedness.

He also knows s**t from Shinola.




So there.




Aaah, crap...time for me to go. The last bus to The Other Side is about to leave, and fIeLdY is driving...
 
#60
I hear a lot of Javanese Gamelan music in Bluegrass, particularly from the Borobudur period, ca. 800 A.D., twinged with a hint of Papua rainforest tradition.

:)

I ain't no scholar but I've played jazz for years and just recently started getting back into bluegrass (last 2 or 3 years)... and from my jazz perspective I have secretly also thought of it as "the jazz of country music"... strictly in the sense of instrumentals, fast showy solos, generally skilled players.... but I won't go any further than that. It's folk music after all, and jazz ain't. Jazz is the jazz of jazz. It's the original melting pot of music. And wasn't the word jazz once synonymous with feces, or something to that effect?
 

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