AN EVENING AT HOME WITH SCOTT FREEMAN'S BLUERIDGE FAR AWAY

scott freeman and willard gayheart

Another day of rest during which I refused to hear radio news or pay attention to internet news. Let it rest. I'm listening to Scott Freeman, mandolin, and Scott Manring, guitar, pick Sweet Georgia Brown. Manring's guitar is his own, a sound he created with his ear, something like a jazz guitar, strumming slow, high-pitched chords with Freeman's fast-paced mandolin picking. Then there is Willard Gayheart singing Don't You Dare Love Anyone But Me, Dori Freeman singing harmony with grandpa. Next, Willard solos a recent composition of his own, Turn Toward The Light. The song has depth and visual presence like all Willard's songs. He tends to write a short story in a song, like Ern and Zorie's Sneakin Bitin Dog, The Shootin, Robin D. In Turn Toward the Light, Willard records this song the first time. He has sung it getting to know it at the Friday night shows at Woodlawn  several times. It is a good worded song and has a nice flow in his singing of it. It has a beautiful feeling. It rings the wind chime of the heart.

dori freeman and her henderson guitar

Dori singing Twilight Time flows nicely with Scott's music. This song is associated with a music quite different from bluegrass or mountain music, generally. The music on the cd collection has the effect on the listener it has on stage. Dori in her early twenties onstage with a bluegrass band behind her starts singing a 40s style ballroom orchestra song. It works. It's right. A few songs later she covers Hank Williams' Cold Cold Heart. She makes it her own. At the Wayne Henderson fest one of the bands played it while Willard and I were talking. Our eyes met and he said it wasn't even close to what Dori does with the song. Not to inform me, but to speak out loud what we mutually agreed in our eye contact was so obvious there was no question. Hearing Willard and Dori singing Don't You Dare Love Anyone But Me, I recall seeing the joy it gives Willard to be singing and recording with his grandbaby. And Dori loves singing with Willard as much as he enjoys singing with her.

scott freeman fiddler

 

 

This collection of songs, Blueridge Far Away, is a sample of a Friday night in Woodlawn at The Fiddle & Plow show that Scott and Willard put on with special guest musicians every week from among some of the more interesting musicians of the Central Blue Ridge. Butch Robins plays the bluegrass banjo with his rolls from note to note making a flow line; Steve Lewis picks his guitar and banjo like an inspired wild man; Scott Manring makes electric jazz guitar sounds with his acoustic. David Johnson glides over ice on his Dobro, and Scott Freeman picks the mandolin free as a swallow flying in circles over a mountain lake, Willard and Dori pick rhythm guitar, and Scott plays fiddle. An instrumental amounts to a dynamo by musicians who complement each other racing side by side at 140mph. After four years of hearing these people make music almost every week, I know their sounds well enough that I know who is picking what on every song. I like that. Especially with these musicians. It is the sound, the vibration, the whatever, that is in Scott's and Willard's music that draws me to it. I've listened to a lot of music closely, and by this time in the life after hearing music of a wide variety, the sound of Scott and Willard's music is just right for what I like music to be.

willard and his new henderson guitar

For one thing, I regard both Scott and Willard artists. Dori is an artist. All these musicians are artists. Scott, Willard and Dori write songs and perform them with musical authority. All these musicians have what it takes to play in bands that travel in buses all the time, but prefer to live at home and have a life. Scott's musicianship, his picking articulation is clear and he gives his notes a ring. He finds the life in every note. He never strikes a dead note. Scott's singing is remarkable too. So is Willard's. They sing their own sound in the mountain tradition. Both have a musical affection for Western Swing. Both grew up listening to it at home. Willard's bluegrass band, the Highlanders, played Take Me Back To Tulsa and some others equally well. They have the spirit of the music in them. Scott is a good singer with a voice that he uses to deliver the words as articulately as he picks the mandolin strings. Dori's singing is clear and articulate. David Johnson's Dobro projects curls of cigarette smoke in the air. Willard's singing has the same quality of clarity and articulation. All three of them have the quality of singing from the heart. I can tell, because the heart is where I feel them.

scott freeman, willard gayheart, mike gayheart

Scott started this album, Blueridge Far Away, the same way I would start a radio show when featuring a musician or a band for the day's show. I'd start with an instrumental that gave examples of how everybody in the band could pick. From there, it's whatever comes next. Sweet Georgia Brown starts the album and lets the listener know these are musicians that deserve attention. The picking itself pulls my ear into the album from the start. Then, once he has the listener's attention, he turns it over to Willard to sing a couple songs. I felt like it was Scott's way of featuring Willard's incredible singing. Willard sings in the mountain tradition of drawing attention to the song, not the singer. His voice, like Scott's, pulls no attention to itself, no see-how-good-I-can-sing flourishes. The point for both of them is to deliver the song from the heart with their voices, all attention on the song. Scott's mandolin playing is an objet d'art itself. Banjo throughout that is a good part of the music but not dominant like top 40 bluegrass. Scott is a master musician with mandolin and fiddle, that includes vocals. You can hear music by him and everyone mentioned here by writing any one of their names in the search box at YouTube.

dori freeman and willard gayheart

The album is self-produced and recorded by GROUNDHOG SHUFFLE RECORDS, 2906 Cranberry Road, Woodlawn VA 24381. I've listened to this album like watching a movie; sit back and let it run from start to finish. It holds my attention as well as a movie. It's so much better than the news, I wonder why I'm slow to shift my attention away from the news. Steve Lewis picking guitar strings and banjo strings, Scott Freeman playing fiddle and mandolin. I missed Woodlawn last Friday night. Playing this cd brings Friday night at Woodlawn into my living room. This is the very music we hear on Fridays. I don't even tell anybody about it anymore. Too many times I've heard how do you get there? where is it? when is it? how much is it? and that's the end of it. Turns out when the subject comes up it amounts to an oral exam I'm given to no purpose, but filling up the silence with noise. I don't want too many people there anyway. It holds up to 50, though it's usually around 20 in the audience. When Wayne Henderson is there, it jumps up to 50, and I stay home. It's all people we never see otherwise, Easter Christians, who come out for THE BEST, the celebrity. And that's a good thing. It keeps them paying attention to mountain music, believing somebody is best. Everybody has their own reasons. In mountain music I stay away from calling any musician or band the best. It's like Billy the Kid, there's always a faster gun in the West. Or like 2-Pac in da Hood.  

willard gayheart laughing

 

 

 

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BLUEGRASS EXPLOSION

sandy mason and willard gayheart

There must have been a glow in last night's sky over Woodlawn, Virginia, above Willard Gayheart's frame shop, The Front Porch. For two hours the god of music was present. Awesome is the most overused word since Wow in the Sixties, yet it's still a valid word with its own meaning, appropriate to this moment. Maybe better would be the old-time meaning of the word awful. Today it means terrible, of negative interest. In the old-time way it meant full of awe, something so awe-inspiring it's awful. It's still used in that meaning, like, "the music last night got to me something awful." We say, "an awful lot all the time." The word now has two opposite meanings according to use. I'll just say it was awful, but that sounds too much like offal, and it weren't none of that. Awesome is the word. It was the cd release party for Scott Freeman and Edwin Lacy's new album, 2 CHAIRS NO WAITING. It's a fiddle and banjo album like no other. You can hear some or all of the tunes at the label's website http://www.mountainroadsrecordings.com and cds can be ordered through the website. All the cds from Mountain Roads Recordings at Bristol, Tennessee, are present moment mountain music good as it gets.

I arrived a little bit early, and even early the parking area looked like a used car lot. Inside, Willard had to bring up more folding chairs. The place was packed with people anticipating some awesome music. A happy spirit was in the air running through everybody, a friendly atmosphere to step into. I knew about half the people. It's a place where you can speak to somebody you've never met and they don't look at you like you're trying to sell them a grave plot on the moon. Right away I saw Willard was not busy for a few seconds. I went straight to him wanting to show the picture in the digital camera of the new painting of Scott and Edwin. Willard and I are artist friends who share insights with each other. I crack up when I think of the time Willard told me he's not really an artist. Willard is one of the greatest artists I know, right there with his musical partner, Scott Freeman. My artist friends are almost all musicians. Willard makes a beautiful pencil drawing and he plays rhythm guitar with a reputation for keeping perfect rhythm such that the other musicians don't have to think about the rhythm themselves. As a bluegrass singer, Willard has a lifetime of stage experience. He can sing the same song folk style or bluegrass and they're equally beautiful. He writes a good song too. Willard is every bit as satisfying to my ear musically as Doc Watson, and I look way up to Doc Watson. I say Doc here to give you an idea of the measure of my respect for Willard's musical artistry.

When the seven-piece bluegrass chamber orchestra indicated they were ready, everybody sat down in a hurry and all attention went to the band. It was the Siamese Cousins + 5 or Skeeter and the Skidmarks +3. Everybody who played a part on the project was in the band, minus Dori. I didn't get to talk with Scott but a minute when the show was over, and he was in that place musicians are still in for quite awhile after jamming all-out for two hours. I didn't ask about Dori. I'd heard something about she went to Nashville a week or so ago. I took her absence to affirm it, though still not knowing. She has a man in her life now who appears to be the one she's been waiting for without knowing who or if. She has two songs on the project that deserve mention, Gold Watch And Chain she sings just right, and a Gordon Lightfoot song, The Way I Feel. I've been hearing Dori develop her singing voice for the stage the last three years. My thinking is if she has her eye on making a shot for it in Nashville, now is the time. She has a charisma onstage something on the order of Sade's, subtle and smooth without being too smooth.

The band started off with an explosion. Lonesome Road Blues, the first song on the album, blew the roof off the place in the first ten seconds. And the roof never came back, the reason I suspected the sky lit up over Woodlawn. Butch Robins kicked it off, a really good punt, with his bluegrass banjo. Scott Freeman tore up his mandolin and left it in shreds. Steve Lewis came in with his guitar and did some unbelieveable pickin. Brandon Davis played lead guitar too, immediately commanding respect for the music he could get out of that wooden box. Edwin Lacy cut completely loose on his old-time banjo, left mind somewhere else and let the music guide his hands without any mental interference. Willard kept the rhythm going with Sandy Mason on the bass. Sandy sang Dixie Darlin, a song I love to hear her sing. They rocked our world from the first note to the last. They finished after two hours with a request for Orange Blossom Special. In bluegrass it is one of the tunes they call "war horses" in classical music, tunes audiences love to hear and bands get tired of playing. Rocky Top is another. And Duelling Banjos. They didn't pay that any mind. They got it going so hot that people jumped to their feet clapping. Scott played the train on the fiddle and Steve was right there with him doing all he could to destroy every string on his guitar. I love it when the two of them get together like that. It seems like there is no limit to how far they can go.

Scott is such a master mandolin picker that when I hear a mandolin in a Nashville bluegrass band, I hear it in relation to Scott's sound. I've heard several his equal, but none better. Over the last decade, Scott, Steve and Willard caught my ear when Alternate Roots was a band. I freely call Alternate Roots my favorite band for life. When they disbanded I grieved for six months the same as if a really close friend had died. Steve Lewis and Scott pick together such that you know they have the time of their lives doing things with the strings they can't do with anybody else or very few, intuitionally. It's dynamic every time they get together. Scott and Edwin too. Scott and Butch Robins too. Seven master musicians on the stage, people who play incredibly well together. I say the god of music was there last night, because every one of the musicians had a spirit about them, individually and together, everybody lit up in joy. The second song they played after clearing the roof out of the way was Hang Me, a Skeeter and the Skidmarks favorite. It cranked the music up to the next level. And they kept it there througout. Even the ballads had the joyous energy. After Hang Me was Billy In The Lowground, and it was on from there. Steve likes to call it Goat In The Swamp.

At intermission after the first hour when everyone in the audience stood up and turned around, I saw joy beaming out of everybody's face. I knew I was lit up the same. It was a joyous air in the place. Different ones I see there every week, we'd look at each other big-eyed and make a short statement about the music we were experiencing. The music at the Fiddle and Plow show is always worth driving an hour each way for. I could buy a cd with what it costs in gas, and it's better than buying a cd, because I'm hearing my favorite musicians playing twice as long as a cd. Live. In Concert. Last night was special. One Skeeter and the Skidmarks show a couple years ago reached into that place of a joyous musical experience for band and audience together. All the shows are extra good, but these two stand out in my memory for the joy energy in the music. They know how to let the music breathe and they know how to let it run wild. Everything I've said here sounds like overstatement, but it all is understatement. And for any of the ones in the band who might see this, I don't want to give them the big head. I can't reach with words the place their music took me to. On the way home, I stopped to see some friends. I tried to tell them something about it, but all I could do was emote: awesome, amazing, fabulous, unbelieveable, totally incredible, over the top. It degenerated into babble fast, because I was unable to do anything but blabber. So I shut up after hearing myself fumble for words I couldn't find, enough that I was boring myself. This morning I woke up singing Edwin Lacy's Little Black Pony, a song with a story as good-worded as Catfish John.

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BUTCH ROBINS AND EDWIN LACY PICK @ THE FRONT PORCH

     butch robins

     edwin lacy and willard gayheart

Butch Robins played bluegrass banjo Friday night at the Fiddle and Plow show in Woodlawn. Edwin Lacy was there with his open-back banjo playing it clawhammer style. Willard Gayheart played rhythm guitar and Marvin Cockerham, of the Highlanders, played bass. A couple hours of music that reached the ideal of music from the start. Robins is perhaps best known as a banjo picker with Bill Monroe, who lasted probably longer than anybody with Monroe who was ever in his band. Monroe was known as about the most difficult man on earth, confirmed by Robins in his tales of Bill Monroe, evidenced by the continuous turnover of band members. This turned out to be a good thing, however. For Robins' generation of bluegrass pickers, having been a Bluegrass Boy was the best credentials a bluegrass musician could have. Monroe served bluegrass of the future with his ill nature.


Robins talked between songs about Monroe, experiences in the band. He could imitate Monroe's talking so well it was like listening to Monroe himself. He called Monroe, "the old man." And he was when Robins knew him. I felt like it was with respect Robins called him the old man. A parental respect and respect for his experience. I had the impression that it was not a matter of whether or not you liked Bill Monroe. Few were able. But respect overrode feelings. When it comes to a banjo, Butch Robins can pick. Edwin Lacy accompanying him clawhammer made some interesting sound not heard very much, bluegrass and old-time banjos playing together, something like two guitars would play together. They took requests from the audience, which turned out to be all Bill Monroe songs. He played mostly instrumentals. Willard sang a few. First request was for Uncle Pen and nobody knew all the words. All knew some of the words, so they played it through putting in the words they could remember. It was a casual show, the relaxed showmanship working best with a small audience of twenty. I can't say I could pick one or two of the tunes they played for my favorite. Like a good album that you like from start to finish, their music was totally satisfactory to my ears, such that no one tune stood out from the others, because it was all so good it couldn't get better.


The pictures above are not from last night's show. My computer is so full of pictures it won't take any more. My job now is to start putting them on dvd disks and get them out of the computer to make more room. Cheaper than buying a new computer. That would be like trading in your car for a new one because the ash tray was full. The picture of Robins came from his show October 1, 2010. The picture of Lacy was from his show the 29th of January, 2011. I continually feel awe that I have this privilege of knowing about the Front Porch Gallery, Willard, The Fiddle and Plow, Scott Freeman, Edwin, all the people connected with this weekly series of some of the best music in SW Virginia and NW North Carolina, musicians who live inside a couple hours driving time. In these later years in my life, I'm finding myself discovering the world I live in almost like the first time. Perhaps first time with new realization. The new realization may be putting away my mind of everyday familiarity unto boring where I pay less attention. Now, I can be driving down the highway, day or night, looking at my familiar world and say to myself, This is my world. Meaning: Thank God I'm not in some city. And Thank God, literally, for this particular spot on the earth to be my world, the place I call home.


Hearing musicians, who, like Robins, have picked for 50 years, or any number of advanced years, the music is truly from musicians, people who make music and make music only. In the old-time way, music lovers watched young musicians come along, have their favorites they hope to one day see winning fiddlers conventions, paying close attention to see who is coming into the fold next. One thing they know is not to get emotionally invested in one's success, when the kid might go to prison at age 16 for doing something stupid. From a lifetime of experience, the old people knew that anything can happen to anybody along the way. Somebody who was a great fiddler at 20 might be dead before 30, or quit playing, or lost interest in it. One banjo picker here in high school picked with a friend who played mandolin. They were coming along good. The mandolin player died in a car crash. The banjo picker has not been able to play a banjo since then. His family and friends try to encourage him to pick again, but he can't do it. He's tried a few times to see if it might take, but it didn't. This is a fluid world, not a gear-grinding world.


In the old culture where people paid attention to the world they lived in, instead of the television and other tech distractions, they knew that the future is uncertain for everyone, young fiddlers included. The musicians on the stage last night are like salmon that made it upstream, past bears catching them, fish hooks catching them. Like Mamie White said, of Boone County, West Virginia, Only the strong survive. Lots of white in the hair on stage told that these guys are the survivors, musicians who have not died young or quit or become disabled in any of many possibilities. All are musicians serious enough about their art form to master one instrument or more. Everybody on the stage I'd call a master of his instrument without hesitation. I closed my eyes several times during the music to hear it without visual distraction, like on the ideal sound system. That was when I really marvelled hearing their music. I could see in my mind's eye who was making what sounds, hearing it raw, fresh from the source, banjo picking, guitar picking, bass picking that wove together into foot-tapping good vibrations. Like Zen art, the complexities in their picking sounded effortless. I like to watch them play, to see what they are doing to make the sounds they make, the music.


Earlier, after writing the second paragraph I went to YouTube and watched Rage Against The Machine do Testify live in LA. Tom Morello's guitar I respect for musicianship to the same degree as the musicians last night. It puts me out there in orbit by myself as not many people are able to make the conceptual leap from pile-driving rock to masterful bluegrass picking. I don't see it a leap. It's the same to me. From old-time to the Carter Family and Jimmy Rodgers came country music. From country music came bluegrass. From bluegrass and country came rock and roll mixed with blues. The blues came from old-time, took it's own route to "cross-over" in the likeness of Chuck Berry. I see amazing progression in the evolution of pop music that parallels our evolving way of life. Old-time music changed over time. It was a pop music of the time before electricity. It changed as life in the mountains changed. It started with a fiddle. Then the banjo came in from black musicians. The guitar came in later. And the bass after the guitar. First time I heard old-time was in 1977, after I'd been listening to punk a couple years. There it was: acoustic punk. Where rock is now has evolved from fiddle and banjo tunes. In present day pop culture, it's like the Rolling Stones say, "It's the singer, not the song." In the old-time way, it was the song, not the singer. Both are valid in their own times. I love both in a way that they are not both, but the same. I can groove to the Jim Carroll Band the same as to Bill Monroe. That's something else I'm grateful for, to be able to appreciate the whole spectrum of music as music.

Butch Robins website: www.butchrobins.com



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BUTCH ROBINS AT THE FRONT PORCH GALLERY

l to r: Scott Freeman, Butch Robins, Willard Gayheart



The show tonight at the Front Porch Gallery included Butch Robins, who played banjo with Bill Monroe for some years, and he said a year and a half with NuGrass Revival playing bass. He has played with rock bands and several bluegrass bands. He's a good talker too. He talked a good bit about Bill Monroe, the evolution of bluegrass from beginning to present, Lulu Belle and Scotty, informative, interesting tales he told of the music from the inside. When I was in the store, sometimes somebody would ask me how to tell bluegrass from old-time. I'd say that bluegrass was jazzed old-time. Robins explained that Bill Monroe was in Chicago working in his early years and discovered jazz there. I recorded some of his talking and will post maybe 2 on YouTube with the music. He held my interest as much talking as he did making music.



There were 17 people tonight, about half a dozen new ones, everybody happy with the music. I've found my way to make the videos and get pictures without bothering anyone. I sit in the back and use the zoom, holding the camera steady as possible, yet sometimes it drifts. I think of Andy Warhol's film Lonesome Cowboys where the camera drifted quite a bit. Like there will be 2 guys talking and the camera drifts to the horse's bridle. Warhol's films were early YouTube movies using errors with the camera as a style. I like that style, so I do it too. I've come to find the perfectly still camera boring visually. I like the wiggle of hand-held and the occasional drift. For a long time I thought I wanted to get the perfect picture. Now I want the imperfect picture. I'm finding life in the flaws, the same as in our individual character. We're such far from perfect beings that it seems to me presumptuous to pursue perfection. Even spiritual perfection, whatever that is. It comes by grace only, so it's not something to strive toward.



Robins is a banjo picker who has a gift with the instrument and understands it inside out. Willard and Scott gave him such good accompaniment he spoke a bit of how good it feels to be making music with musicians who make it easy for him. He said Willard's rhythm was flawless. Scott's too. Scott played fiddle a few times and mandolin mostly. He played fiddle with Uncle Pen. It's a weekly amazement to me that I'm so privileged to have this music to hear weekly. Butch Robins is way high up in the bluegrass banjo world. He's part of bluegrass history and he knows bluegrass history. He makes it interesting to listen to. Everything he says is loaded with information, always information you want to hear. When he gets to editorializing he's good too. I couldn't say I enjoyed his banjo more than his talk or his talk more than the banjo. They seemed about even where holding my interest was concerned.



I've looked at a couple of the videos since coming home. They remind me of his fluid playing. Perhaps that's what I noticed most in his style of playing, it's fluid, flowing nature. He explained some of his discoveries of the nature of music itself. It actually sounded to my ear like he can play bluegrass, old-time, country, nugrass, rock with a feeling that whatever the form of music it's music itself he's playing. It gives his sound a kind of transcendental quality. It's not mystical in any way, but more like the varieties of music he knows well inform whatever form it is he's playing at the moment. If he only played bluegrass he would not have the dimension, the scope he has when he plays bluegrass. Scott Freeman's mandolin and fiddle playing have that dimension of freedom to draw from whatever other music he wishes when he's playing. With Willard's steady rhythm going, they made good music tonight, mostly bluegrassing old-time tunes to the satisfaction of everyone present.