Read no. 8

Greetings!

This issue of Women in Bluegrass marks the completion of two full years of publication! Eight issues devoted solely to women in bluegrass, and we’ve barely scratched the surface. Thanks to all you subscribers and to all of you who have contributed articles and letters. Keep ’em coming. Some of you have asked how you can help. Tell other women about WIB and urge them to subscribe. Not just for the money (although that is helpful!) but for their input into the issues we raise here. And, above all, keep playing the bluegrass!

Tribute for Hazel in D.C.

One of the biggest events of my summer has been the Ralph Rinzler Memorial Concert honoring Hazel Dickens that was held in downtown Washington. D.C.. on July 6. I wish you all could have been there. It was a most extraordinary gathering of women in bluegrass. All of the music was superb—especially hearing Hazel sing “Don’t Put Her Down, You Helped Put Her There”—but one of the most emotionally moving events of the day for me was the all-star jam at the end. You know, most bluegrass all-star jams consist of men, men, and more men with the occasional “little lady” tucked away in the back. Not this time. On stage, front and center, bold and brassy, were Hazel Dickens, Alice Gerrard, Kate Brislin, Ginny Hawker, Kay Justice, Elaine Purkey, Lynn Morris. Laurie Lewis, Suzanne Thomas, and Mary Jo Leet, with a few miscellaneous guys (David McLaughlin, Barry Mitterhoff. Marshall Wilborn. Jody Stecher, Tom Adams...) as supporting players. I was ecstatic.

Another surprising turn of events was seeing many of these same guys walking around backstage holding babies and helping to look after young kids. I was purely amazed. These are bluegrass boys? Yes, indeed, and a nobler, sweeter breed they are. A tip of the Wibbie hat to Peter McLaughlin, Dudley Connell, and Barry Mitterhoff for helping to make Hazel’s tribute a family event, with emphasis on the word helping. What an inspiration. (And, yes, I certainly do know that women have been doing this same thing forever with no recognition but I still think we should salute the men who are helping change things for the better.) Yes, we’re learning...

Dead Mother Songs

And speaking of learning, inside you will find a slightly condensed version of a term paper I wrote about women in bluegrass for my Feminist Criticism and Theory class. There was so much to say about women in bluegrass from a theoretical point of view that I had a trouble finding a focus. It was when the phrase “dead mother songs” popped into my head that I knew I had my subject. Why are there so many “dead mother”songs in bluegrass? Where are the “dead father” songs? What is happening to bluegrass songs now that women can write songs for other women to sing?

I have always been interested in the question of why there were not more women in bluegrass. As a woman myself, I certainly knew we had the capability to play the instruments. I thought it might have something to do with the singing. Since women don’t sing in the same keys as men, I thought (and still think) that makes it harder for us to learn traditional bluegrass songs from the records. We end up learning the tenor, but not the lead, which puts us at a disadvantage in jam sessions. She who knows the words gets to do the singing. But it never occurred to me that, perhaps, many women had no interest in traditional bluegrass because so many of the songs were about dead women, murdered women, dead children, dead horses, or strictly male activities such as swinging a nine-pound hammer. I explore this idea thoroughly in my paper. Comments welcome.

—Murphy Henry

Raised to the Rhythm of the Road

by Susi Gott

Alice was raised to the rhythm of the road. By the time she was born, she already had seventy concerts to her name, having accompanied her mother on stage throughout her nine months in utero. (Did she have any choice?) In fact, the final two months were fairly calm, because mother fell from a balcony and broke her foot, and so had to cancel a few performances. (She needed her arms to hold her crutches and cradle her swollen belly.) However, at five weeks, Alice (now out in the air) found herself on the road again, and had her first contact with Babysitters, whom she learned to regard with great amusement, if a bit of disgust.

The first one was a young girl who smelled as if she hadn’t encountered a bathtub since she arrived in France. Of course, the infant smelled just the same upon recuperation, and mother had to give her several baths before the sweet baby skin was back to normal.

The experience was repeated several times with a variety of caretakers. The worst was a large lady with snaggle teeth who appeared to keep Alice backstage in a large auditorium. Alice took one look at her and began to scream. The acclimation time was short, as we (her parents) were scheduled to go on immediately, and I listened helplessly to my baby’s wails from my post behind the microphone, where I had to keep a smile on my face despite my panic.

Alice was breast-fed for the first year of her life, so we were obliged to find a different babysitter in each town, to keep her backstage. Between sets, I would rush to find her and give her her next meal so that she wouldn’t cry so lustily when I hit the stage again. I often fed her in the car at the last minute before arriving at a gig, which meant she frequently threw up on my stage clothes, and I had no time to change. I was also concerned with the fact that my milk would begin leaking if I didn’t finish the set in time for her next feeding.

On a typical dark night in the French Alps, I finished a festival set and ran through the thin mountain air up to the hotel room (there was no backstage) where the baby and sitter were waiting. I tore off my dress for the feeding, adrenaline still pumping from the stage and from the run, and fifteen minutes later, I was back playing the fiddle and trying to look composed while singing a ballad.

We’ve run the range of young babysitters who held our child as if she were a briefcase to a tall, incognito banjo player (male) who rocked her on his shoulder during a Harley-Davidson bikers’ festival in Alsace.

Alice’s second and third years provided yet other experiences as we left her in “garderies” (day-care centers) in every small town in France, while touring for the “Jeunesses Musicales de France.” These concerts were in the daytime (often two or three a day, and we played for 500 kids per concert), and by the time we picked Alice up, we were exhausted, to say the least, and not particularly ready to see another child, even our own. Alice went through days of 104° and 105° fevers with each tooth that came through. So at nights, we would pace the floor, rocking her to keep her from waking up the whole hotel, and in the morning, we would stuff her with aspirin and leave her at the next garderie while we went to play with heavy conscience.

The moments are not all bad. Alice's first song was “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” she can tell you that Bill Monroe is the Father of Bluegrass, and she is in love with Garth Brooks. At not yet four, she plays her own sixteenth-sized fiddle and has a good command of

the square dance shuffle and the “shave-and-a-hair-cut-two-bits.” Her parents are still recovering and cannot imagine what two children might do to their sanity! (Susi Gott, who was raised in Madison County, N.C., started playing fiddle seriously at age 12. She first focused on dance tunes, as her father was a caller, and then moved to bluegrass. From 1985-1987 she played fiddle with Eddie Adcock and Talk of the Town . She now lives in France and plays as a duo with her husband Christian Seguret. This summer they conducted their fifth European bluegrass workshop in Alsace. They also wrote the prize-winning song for the Chris Austin Songwriting Contest at this year's MerleFest.)

RAG, MAMA, RAG...

Conscious Choices

While reading the “Motherhood and Music” article in my WIB this morning, I was inspired to grab my cereal bowl and coffee and rush into the office to compose this letter. While I have been very interested in all the interviews with the women in bluegrass who have children and are trying to do it all, [the writer] struck a chord with me when she asked the question, “Have these women [the ones not having children] made this deliberate choice because they recognize the conflicts between music and motherhood?” I know I have and it hasn't always been easy. In fact, it can be stressful, and very painful. I suspect there are other women out there who have consciously not had children because of a career. People sometimes presume it is because we don’t want them—at all. This is not always the case. It is a sacrifice, just like the women who did have children and not a career but wanted a career. I would love to hear more from THEIR side. Well, there’s my two cents. Keep up the great work. I love getting WIB! —Missy Raines, White House, TN

(Any takers out there? Are there any wibbers who would be willing to tell us about the choices they made not to have children ? I know, in this day and age, that enormous cultural pressure is put on women to have children. That makes it a tough question to talk about. But Missy raises a good point. We'd love to hear from you.)

Three Genders?

I only discovered bluegrass music a year ago when I read that wonderful book by Mary Ann Taylor-Hall entitled Come and Go, Molly Snow. It got me started listening to bluegrass, and then I got so excited about the music that I just had to do it myself—so here I am at the age of 53 learning to play the mandolin.

One of the scenes I loved in the book was when Carrie first joins an all-male bluegrass band. You don’t have to be a musician to relate to that one. I have spent my career as a scientist trying to make it in a male-dominated profession, and when I read that passage I thought, “Yes, those are exactly the attitudes and behaviors I have been dealing with all these years!” I once heard a talk by Sheila Tobias, who had done a lot of research on how to encourage young women in math and science. She said that there are actually three genders in our society: male, female, and token female. The token females are the ones who have made it in the male world by being tough and look back on other females and say, “Oh, no. I’m not one of them.” It was a great shock to realize that I had become a token female. Then I realized that it was a very lonely place to be and also that it is very difficult to succeed professionally as a woman if you don’t have other women as role models. The male model is just not very easy to emulate. That is why publications such as this one are so important—like in your last issue when you quote Vicki Simmons as saying “I wanted to play so bad I’d do whatever it took to get them to play.” Learning about other women’s ambitions gives credibility to our own. —Joanne Sanders, Portland, OR

Gigging with Big Mon

I wonder who put that note on bgrassl about me playing with Bill Monroe in 1967? I missed it, since we don’t check the internet regularly. Well, now that the word’s out, I might as well elaborate on it.

Bill was supposed to come out here with his band, but the bus broke down, so he left most of the band with the bus, to catch up with him at the next gig, and flew out here with just his guitar player. The guitar player was Doug Green, who later became Ranger Doug of Riders in the Sky, and he had just joined Bill and didn’t know very much of his material.

The Seattle Folklore Society, which my husband Phil and I were very active in, was the sponsor of the Seattle concert; there was to be another concert in Centralia, about 50 miles south of Seattle, the night before. So when the word came just a couple of days before the concerts that Bill needed a backup band, there we were! Phil played bass, plus, we were playing at that time in a bluegrass band led by Paul Wiley, an excellent banjo player originally from Kentucky, who had sung and played all of Bill’s material for years. When we found out that we were to be Blue Grass Boys, I was petrified! I’d only been playing old-time and bluegrass fiddle for five years, and there was a lot of the material I did not know. So Paul, who played a bit of fiddle also, coached me on how to play the breaks to those songs right. Paul seemed very calm and collected, but his daughter let on that “Daddy is so excited!”

When the big day came. Bill and Doug showed up not long before we had to leave for Centralia. Eventually he had us bring out our instruments, and we ran through about two tunes, and Bill said “I guess we’re ready,” and we took off for the concert. So we basically played the concert unrehearsed. Bill simply assumed we would be able to play all of his stuff, and due to Paul’s coaching, we could! Bill was happy to be working with a Kentucky banjo player who knew a lot of the songs that Doug hadn’t learned yet. The Centralia concert was a dress rehearsal for the Seattle concert, which is where Bill made that comment about the “lady fiddler.” I went back and listened to the original tape, and the quote is accurate. Perhaps when Bill was told who his band was going to be, he was told that I was “National Ladies Champion.” More about that later. Now, as far as the competition aspect of bluegrass is concerned: Have you seen the interview with Bill that Alice (Foster) Gerrard did in 1969, reprinted in the May edition of Power Pickin published by the Colorado Bluegrass Society? It’s pretty interesting. One of the things Bill says is “You know, a lot of people thinks you work against each other. And in one sense of the word, you probably do, because if the fiddler’s playing a number and then the banjo comes in and he sells his chorus good, the fiddler knows that he’s up against it—he’s going to have to get to work. And the mandolin, he follows to his part as good as the banjo or better. And it’s just vice versa. If I’m playing and the banjo and fiddle comes in, of course, they get their chances. And that’s the way it’s kind of been.” So Bill obviously had a competitive ethic to his playing all along, not too different from what happens in Dixieland jazz. Some of the competitiveness could be interpreted as mutual inspiration rather than as trying to prove who’s best. I’m not sure if there’s anything innately male or macho about this. The obvious parallel in the animal kingdom is male elk locking horns and peacocks displaying their tail feathers to see who gets the females. But females can also be competitive—at least I was, back in the 1960s when I was seriously active in fiddle contests. It wasn’t hard to be the National Ladies Champion at Weiser, Idaho in 1966-67-68, because there weren’t many competent women fiddlers around the scene then. One of the interesting comments I heard was that the first time I played in a national contest, the judges thought I “played like a man.” I like to feel that I was an inspiration to some women by showing that they could compete against men and do well. The competition has gotten much stronger so that I haven’t won anything for years —so I don’t give a damn any more about winning or losing. But now there’s a generation of women involved in the contests who are extremely competitive— and are winning over much tougher competition than I ever faced. So far none of them has won the National—but there have been some pretty close seconds!

I guess some of this competitive thing has been with me since I was a kid. In grade school I was somewhat of a social misfit, so I compensated for it by being a “brain,” always doing well in class. In junior high school and high school in the ’50s, this meant social death, but the pattern was already fixed. I was also first chair violin in the school orchestra, although playing violin was definitely for squares. So it was important to me to be the best, even at something most of my peers shunned. It was a shock to me to arrive at college and not be the smartest any more! The fiddle contest thing that I got into a few years after I graduated was a revival of some pretty ingrained attitudes on my part.

Anyway, back to bluegrass. My husband and I have been in one bluegrass band or another since 1962. The first one played both old-time and bluegrass (we didn’t make a distinction back then), and was called the Turkey Pluckers. In 1965 we formed the Tall Timber Boys, which later became (for obvious reasons) the Tall Timber Gang and eventually just Tall Timber. This band survived, with various personnel changes, until about 1985. Then we formed the Friends of Sally Johnson, which transformed into our present band, Williams and Bray, with Phil on mandolin, banjo player Harley Bray (of the Bray Brothers) and his wife Shera on guitar, and usually with Nancy Katz (formerly of Ranch Romance) on bass. It’s a lot of fun playing in a band with another married couple—we figure we are politically correct for opposite ends of the political spectrum: we are properly liberated since the women outnumber the men, plus we represent family values for the more conservative audience.

If you want more information, opinions, or other guff from me, just let me know. —Vivian Williams, Seattle. WA

[Barry Brower put the mention of Vivian playing with Monroe on bgrassl. He also included this quote which Vivian says is accurate. Barry wrote: In one show, Vivian played an admirable version of "Gray Eagle." As the applause died down. Monroe said, “I have never heard a lady fiddler that could beat Vivian, and a lot of men fiddlers can’t beat her.” Vivian and Phil's Voyager Recordings has just released Fiddler, a CD of Vivian’s fiddling from the 1970s.]

—Murphy Henry

I’m Not About To Die: The Voices of Women in Bluegrass

“Dead mother” songs are rampant in the bluegrass repertoire. In fact, they have always been a part of the music. Bill Monroe established this tradition in 1946 in his definitive bluegrass recording session for Columbia Records when he sang a song he wrote entitled “Mother’s Only Sleeping:” “Mother’s not dead, she’s only a-sleeping, just

patiently waiting for Jesus to come.” That song was the template for the many “dead mother” songs that followed. [The August Bluegrass Unlimited indicates the song was actually written by the Spencer Brothers.]

Songs about murdered girls are also quite popular in bluegrass and are still found on current recordings by all-male bands. The Nashville Bluegrass Band’s “Blackbirds and the Crows,” written by Don Humphries, is at number eighteen on the Bluegrass Unlimited record chart and climbing. In this song, Eva is murdered by the narrator, her husband, because she was a “fast thing”—“while other girls were running wild, Eva flew.” Good reason for murder. Unleashed, the album on which this song appears, recently won a Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album. Susan Cook, in “Gender and Power in American Balladry,” tells us that there are so many of these “murdered-girl” songs in the American ballad tradition that “in folklore research they are designated as a distinct plot subcategory.” Some of these songs, such as “Pretty Polly” are quite gory: “He opened up her bosom, as white as any snow; he stabbed her to the heart and her blood did overflow.” “Knoxville Girl,” based on an English broadside from about 1700 is another. After picking up a big stick and knocking that “poor girl down,” the protagonist says, “I took her by her golden curls, I drug her round and round, throwing her into the river that flows through Knoxville town.” In today’s version, all this abuse was because she had a “roving eye.” In the original, the unmarried girl was pregnant by the killer-narrator. In many of the older “murdered-girl” songs, the perpetrator is punished, often by death. In “Blackbirds and the Crows,” the singer knows he will get away with his crime and smugly sings “no one knows who put her there but the blackbirds and the crows.”

There are also the “dead children” songs, no doubt a reflection of a historical time when many children did die. One of the most gruesome of these, written by Bill Monroe, is, of course, about a dead girl: “The Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake.”

I heard the screams of my little girl far away.

Hurry Daddy, there’s an awful, dreadful snake;

I ran as fast as I could.

Through the dark and weary wood,

But I reached our darling girl too late.

When girls are not being murdered, they are invisible in other ways. In “Footprints In The Snow,” another Monroe standard, the girl is visible to the listener only by her “footprints in the snow.” If that erasure weren’t enough, in the last verse we discover that even those footprints are only a memory in the mind of the (male) singer because “now she’s up in Heaven, she’s with the angel band.” Dead again. The notes to the 1992

Columbia reissue of this recording recognize in this category of song a “theme to which [Monroe] and many bluegrass artists would return, that of the dead sweetheart accessible only in dreams.”

To add insult to injury, even “Molly and Tenbrooks,” Monroe’s much-performed standard about an actual horse race between Molly and the “big bay horse” Tenbrooks, is not exempt from gender bias. Molly—the female—not only loses the race, in the last verse of the song she dies. In bluegrass, even the female horses die! Would the song have survived if Molly had won the race? Would the song have even been written if Molly had won? I seriously doubt it.

What is going on here? What is bluegrass music telling us? That men can only deal with women if they are dead? Is the music telling us, as Rosemary Agonito bluntly puts it in No More "Nice Girl," that “the only good woman is a ‘dead’ woman”? And where, one might ask, are the “dead father” songs? The phrase does not exist in the language of bluegrass, a telling fact. Or is this absence of women, as Adrienne Rich suggests, a demonstration of the fact that “an enormous potential counterforce is having to be restrained”? In the light of this revelation, is it any wonder that women have been slow to take up bluegrass music as a performing art? What do these male narratives have to do with our lives?

In Bufwack and Oermann’s Finding Her Voice: The Saga of Women in Country Music, bluegrass music is called “the most male-defined of all country’s styles.” Bluegrass historian Neil Rosenberg states “women...were practically unknown as bluegrass musicians prior to the beginning of the [1965] festival movement.” As a professional bluegrass banjo player, songwriter, and teacher for the past 22 years, I have often wondered, and even written about, why there are so few women in bluegrass. Now, as Susan McClary so aptly put it in Feminine Endings, I find myself asking “new kinds of questions about [bluegrass] music with the aid of feminist critical theory.” It was feminist critical theory that made me consciously aware of the invisibility of women in the traditional bluegrass canon. Having always written and performed my own songs because the traditional ones had little appeal, I didn’t realize their lack of appeal was because I was invisible.

One of the greatest dangers of this invisibility for women, especially for women songwriters, is that we often unknowingly reproduce this invisibility in our own songs. I—who have always prided myself on writing different songs, songs from a woman’s point of view—recently discovered this invisibility in one of my early songs, “The Band Played On.”

When I realized that I had unconsciously written a male-gendered song, I just shook my head and said “damn.” (Many of my other songs are rather gender-specific.) This song tells the story of a fire that occurs in a concert hall while a bluegrass band is playing. The band, under the calm direction of its leader, continues to play to help maintain order as the crowd exits. When everyone else is out, the band then runs for safety. Unfortunately, “the leader never made it; the building crashed around him, it was quickly that he died.” At the end of the song “he was buried in the mountains with his fiddle by his side.”

At no point in the song does the rhyme scheme or musical phrasing depend on masculine pronouns or words. The bandleader could just as easily have been a woman. But in 1977, when I wrote the song, it didn’t even occur to me to make the leader a woman. To this day, I still “see” that band on stage as all-male and that leader as a man. How powerful that song would have been if we could have “seen” a woman taking charge. (Even if she did follow the standard female bluegrass narrative and die at the end.) But back then, I could not conceive of this alternate plot, even though the original idea was based on a story I read in grammar school about a girl who played the piano while children exited a burning school. (She did not die.) The invisibility of women in the bluegrass canon hampers the very creative ability of song-writers to envision new plots. And at the historical moment when I was writing the song, there were few, if any, bluegrass bandleaders who were women.

Fortunately, things have changed. For the first time in the history of bluegrass, a few women are beginning to lead their own bands. As bandleaders, they now have the power to choose the songs that will be sung and recorded. These songs are often written by themselves or other women. In 1994, for the first time, the IBMA Song Of The Year Award went a woman songwriter, Kate Long, for her song “Who Will Watch The Homeplace,” sung by Laurie Lewis. This was also the first time that a woman artist had performed the Song Of The Year.

And while women’s songs are often based on traditional bluegrass themes, such as home, women are singing about them in new ways. Take for instance the “dead mother” song. Songwriter and performer Kathy Kallick, from California (where the bluegrass music scene has always been more accepting of women), has taken this extremely traditional genre of bluegrass song and turned it on its ear. I recognized this just the other day when I was riding down the road listening to Kathy and Laurie Lewis’s cassette, Together. with my newly critical feminist ear. Kathy and Laurie, who both lead their own bands, recorded and co-produced this collection of songs in 1991. As I was listening, I was at first very uncomfortable with the beginning of a particular number that Kathy was singing. The song started out, in typical “dead mother” fashion:

Don’t leave your little girl all alone,

Don’t leave your little girl without a home,

Mama don’t go, the cry was soft and low,

Don’t leave your little girl all alone.

As my mind shut down for the next two verses, I was vaguely aware of a little girl pleading with her sick mother not to die. Ho-hum. But then, something different happened in the last verse. Something totally unexpected:

When the Mama heard her daughter’s little plea,

Then her fever disappeared so magically,

Baby girl don’t cry, I’m not about to die.

Come and kiss your Mama, let me dry your eyes.

The mother lived! In bluegrass? I was flabbergasted. I was excited. Such visibility! Such voice! Such power! The mother is not only in control of her life, she is in control of this song. I was so moved by this empowering vision, that I listened to the song again and again. I then turned to the liner notes. Kathy’s comment was that “one of the great things about songwriting is that you have control over the outcome of events.” For a woman to seize this control takes not only courage, but also vision. Kathy had to “re-vision” this traditional format and say, no, the mother does not have to die. In doing this she presents us with, as Patricia Yeager says, “a release from a ‘tradition’ of female disempowerment.” And as Yeager also points out, women are “clearly in need of feisty...vocabularies of empowerment.” Kathy is breaking new ground for women. Women are not only invisible in the many varieties of death songs, they are also invisible in the great body of “regular” bluegrass songs that have for years constituted the bluegrass canon. Once again looking at Bill Monroe’s prototypical Columbia recordings 1945-1949, we find women depicted only as objects. They are not present, they are not real. Instead they are “sweethearts,” “my little angel,” “my rose of old Kentucky,” and the ubiquitous “little darling.” These “un-names” not only render women invisible, they also trivialize them, portray them as childlike, and de-sex them. There is no power in being a “little darling.” And there is nothing sexually threatening about a “little angel.” As bell hooks has said “only as subjects can we speak. As objects, we remain voiceless—our beings defined and interpreted by others.” She also says “speaking becomes both a way to engage in active self-transformation and a rite of passage where one moves from being object to subject.”

Singer-songwriter Hazel Dickens is one woman who has been engaged in this “rite of passage” from object to subject for many years. Finally her songs, many of which focus on the experiences of women, are starting to gain national recognition. “Mama’s Hand,” sung by Lynn Morris, who leads her own band, is presently in the number two slot on the Bluegrass Unlimited record chart. The album of the same name is at number one. “Mama’s Hand” is a very gendered description of leaving home, told from a young girl’s point of view. We haven't heard this story before in bluegrass. Sons leave home with regularity and without a backward glance. “I left my old home to ramble this country,” sings Carter Stanley. “My mother and dad said son, don’t go wrong.” Their songs are about coming back home or wanting to come back home. Daughters? Daughters are invisible. Hazel gives visibility to one daughter and her mother in her highly autobiographical “Mama’s Hand.”

I said goodbye to that plain little mining town,

With just a few old clothes that had made the rounds,

I knew I was leaving a lot of things that were good,

But I thought I’d make a break while I still could.

In this first verse we are reminded that leaving home is different for girls. If the girl does not get away now, she knows she may never be able to leave. Why? Because she will almost inevitably, in the culture of “that plain little mining town,” get married and have kids that will bind her to home, just as her mother was bound. As the young girl looks back “to wave once more,” she can see her mother “crying in the door.” The fact that her little girl is leaving is only one reason the mother is crying.

She was drifting back to another time,

When she was young and hoped to find

A better life than what her mama’s had been...

The mother is crying for her own lost chances, remembering her own youth and how she had once hoped to find “a better life than what her mama’s had been.” The mother in this song could not make the break; fortunately she is strong enough to help her daughter make her break.

This song is the exact opposite of the “dead mother” song. Yes, the daughter is leaving home but her mother is very much alive. (Contrast this story with Bill Monroe’s autobiographical “I’m On My Way Back To The Old Home” in which he leaves home because “Dad and Mother were called to heaven, I was left in this world all alone.”) The songwriter-daughter does not have to kill the mother in order to include her in the song. Nor does the daughter (the real Hazel) leave without making her mother’s hard work

and love visible to us. Even though this woman is being defined as “mother,” a part of her story is being told. As we have seen, many mothers in bluegrass songs are dead.

I thought of all the years she slaved,

I thought of all the love she gave the gave

To try and make this rundown shack a home,

A dream that really died before it was born,

But she pulled us through the hardest times

And made us hold our heads up high...

In the most powerful line of the song, the daughter says she is leaving with “only the love she gave me and pride in what I am.” And although it was “hard to let go of Mama’s hand,” the daughter does let go. What is not stated, but has to be understood, is that the mother also had to let go of the daughter’s hand. This song portrays a mother strong enough to let go of her daughter’s hand. In doing so, the song gives all women strength. Strength. Action. Visibility. Voice. These are the women’s stories that the men weren’t telling; that the men couldn’t tell. Yet if women are to have an interest and a voice in bluegrass these are the stories that must be told.

Another of bluegrass music’s most popular themes is that of the lonesome road. Again Bill Monroe set the pattern with two songs from his first Columbia sessions. In “Travelin’ That Lonesome Road” he sings “and now you’ve gone and left me here to travel this lonesome road.” (Note again the invisible woman.) In “It’s Mighty Dark To Travel,” the singer (Monroe) is once again “traveling down this lonesome highway, talking of my love that’s gone...” It’s the old, old male story of lost love and lonesome highways. Jack Kerouac wrote an entire novel, On The Road, about the subject. Adam could have probably sung it about Eve. Venise Berry has described the lonesome highway as “male terrain.” So far, women in bluegrass have not, to my knowledge, appropriated this “male terrain” as some of the women rappers have. Today, the literal “lonesome road” is not a safe place for a woman to be, especially a woman alone. We may not like the fact that lonesome roads are, in fact “male space,” we may want to “take back the night” and the road, but in this historical moment the lonesome road is not our space and this is not our song.

Hazel Carby says blues are the reflection of the black experience. Up until now, bluegrass has been the reflection of the white, Anglo-Saxon, male experience. Although women in bluegrass are no longer voiceless, there are many songs that they have not yet sung. The “rage of women against male infidelity and desertion” that Carby says black women have expressed in their blues has not found a voice in bluegrass. The rage of women against male violence has not been expressed. Women have not sung

about their women friends as men have sung about their male friends. Women have not sung about their female relatives as Bill Monroe did in “Uncle Pen.” Perhaps women in bluegrass do not yet have the what Carby calls the “assertive and demanding voices” of the women blues singers or even today’s rappers. But, one thing is certain. Women in bluegrass do have a voice.

I hope that this “moment of optimism” is not “short-lived,” as Carby says it was for the early women blues singers. I see no reason that it should be. Alison Krauss, who defiantly refers to much of her music as bluegrass, continues to be visible nationally. She won two Grammys this year to go with the four she won last year. (Admittedly, these were for her country music. But she still plays the bluegrass festivals and always includes some bluegrass in her road show.) Although not a songwriter herself, her prominence on the national scene is an inspiration to all women, especially the young. Lynn Morris, Kathy Kallick, Laurie Lewis, Claire Lynch, Rhonda Vincent, Suzanne and Evelyn Cox, and Alison Brown are all out there on the road and in the recording studio playing and writing bluegrass music. Their continued presence, in the face of enormous odds, is a constant reminder that the voices of women in bluegrass are being heard and we are not about to die.

Olympic Moments

by Nancy Pate

By the time this column goes to press, the Olympics will be over, and its moments of glory and agony will be the stuff of memories for athletes and spectators alike. And one Atlanta bluegrass band, Born G____, will have some thrilling moments of its own. The current members of Born G____ are Louisa Branscomb on mandolin, Jane Baxter on bass, Ricky Rakestraw on banjo, and myself, Nancy Pate, on guitar. None of us will ever know which one of the three publicity packages we sent to various organizations associated with the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games got us a gig playing in the athletes’ international village at Georgia Tech. By the time I’d read through 37 pages of contracts, instructions, directions, and liability disclaimers, I wasn’t sure the experience would be worth it. My Olympic spirit was already fluctuating according to the state of construction around Atlanta. But I signed and returned all the relevant papers, and on Sunday, July 14th, we unloaded our instruments at a service station two blocks from the gate to “Zone Purple” of the Olympic Village, as close as “civilian" traffic is allowed. We were in for a lot of walking and toting that afternoon.

At the gate, we surrendered our driver's licenses in exchange for day passes and put our instruments through X-rays. I wish I had a picture of my guitar under X-rays; it took

me the longest minute to recognize my tuners and the curl of my strap. We also met two of our guides for the afternoon. All three were so nice. They answered a multitude of questions, brought us cold drinks, carried instruments, showed us a few sights, and, finally, fed us, and all of it with a smile. All were unpaid volunteers. Like bluegrass musicians, they aren’t in it for the money.

We took a tram to another security checkpoint where the security guard asked, “What is bluegrass?” “Mountain music, roots music, country music without electricity...” We fumbled for words and left him still looking puzzled. Our guides then led us to the Cultural Pavilion, a big tent facing a sidewalk. A small strolling crowd of Americans, Chinese, Swedes, Koreans, and Czechs (to name a few) was enjoying an Atlanta-area band called Sounds of Kenya, playing African infused jazz. Close to a dozen people were on stage, so we were a little apprehensive about whether bluegrass would sound sparse to ears unfamiliar with even the word. But when our turn came, we were ready to pick.

Most of the athletes hadn’t arrived yet and wouldn’t be in until Wednesday. There wasn’t room for a crowd to gather anyway: just three picnic tables and a short expanse of grass between the stage and the sidewalk, and a few concrete park benches off to one side, although well-shaded and beautifully landscaped. The band was mainly there for atmosphere, I guess. But several of the athletes, coaches, and staff walking past would stop and listen for a few songs before moving on; a handful stayed for our whole set. Toward the end of the hour, as we were approaching heat stroke (ninety plus degrees and a huge row of spotlights above our heads), someone stepped up to the stage with a request for “Dueling Banjos.” Louisa was quick to point out that “Dueling Banjos” was featured in the movie Deliverance, which was filmed on the Ocoee River where the Olympic kayak races would soon be held. Perhaps no one in the audience had seen the movie, because no one looked the least bit concerned as Ricky and Louisa launched into the tune. We ended the set with “Georgia Rose,” combining a tribute to the father of bluegrass with a little plug for the host state.

The music really moved me; maybe it was Jane’s remark that we were playing at true world’s fair that had me feeling like an ambassador of bluegrass. By the end of the day, we had met a Korean field hockey player and had oohed and aahed over the enormous bruise under the ice pack on her leg. We had talked to the manager of Germany’s gymnastic teams, who asked if we were carrying a gun in the guitar case. We had found out that the assistant envoy (American) to the teams for the Czech Republic likes bluegrass.

What a thrill to be a small part of the truly Olympian effort that has been put forth to host the whole world. It certainly got me all pumped up to watch the games. How great! You get to make this music, and sometimes you get to make it in the coolest places.

Ratifications

By Casey Henry

Recently I played my first “real” gig entirely on banjo. I had previously played a couple of “not real” gigs: My dad and I were asked to come and play guitar and banjo at a party for some high muck-a-mucks to provide some atmosphere. No mikes or anything, we just stood there in the middle of the yard and played while watching some other hired people make apple butter. At my other “not real" gig, I was one half of a duo; my brother was the other. We played in front of the Winchester Courthouse for something the town put on. But I now refuse to associate with my brother, so that also slipped into the “not real” category. But this gig was as real as it gets.

We booked this gig as Red and Murphy and Their Excellent Children, but Murphy had a class that night, so we got Marshall Wilborn to play bass, and I ascended to banjo. Yip-pee! The gig was a party held in the middle of a convention for people who teach at and run private schools. We have played this party for four years in a row, and the pattern is always the same. At 6:00 people begin to arrive and start to drink. (I found it amusing that at such a nice party, held at a private school, they served Budweiser.) For the first set, the guests stand around and talk and pay no attention to the band. For the second set, they eat and talk and pay no attention to the band. By the third set, they have had enough to drink and have said all they have to say, so they dance. Two years ago, their dancing got a little dangerous. At our feet, there was a citronella candle in a small bucket which they had considerately provided to keep the bugs away. One man was dancing barefoot and was getting perilously close to the candle. I winced every time he got near it, imagining the howl of pain he would release when he set his foot in the flame and the inch of hot, liquid wax surrounding it. This was the same guy who asked Murphy if she would sing “Rocky Top.” She gave her standard answer, “Over my dead body.” He promptly flopped down “dead” and refused to get up. He apparently thought she had said “over your dead body,” which I am sure she would have said had she thought of it.

Anyway, this year was nowhere near that exciting. It had rained on and off the whole day, so we played under a sheltered part of the patio. Through all three sets, no one paid one bit of attention except for a couple of guys who sat there and sort of ogled. In the middle of a song I was singing in the second set, one of them actually walked right up beside me on stage and stood there smiling while the other guy took his picture. I

didn’t mind having my picture taken, but he could have at least waited until we were between songs.

After the second set, we got to eat, finally. We walked up to the table just as they were putting everything away. It always makes me feel bad to impose on people and make them bring stuff back out just for me. We got our food and walked back to our little covered area to eat. It was raining, so we sat on the ground and various pieces of the sound system to eat because the tables and chairs were wet.

We started the third set, playing to a few people standing up in groups conversing. They seemed to have no inclination to dance, which was too bad because it is always entertaining to watch. Halfway through the set, someone told us to take a break while they held a meeting inside. Good for us, too bad for them because we were going to leave at 9 o’clock, whether we had played the whole time or not. When the meeting ended, we had 10 minutes left. We gamely played to the 7 people who had come out and decided to listen. We ended with Chris singing “Deep River Blues” by request. And thus ended a very unexceptional gig—chapter 1,741 in the life of a bluegrass musician, as Red would say. The one interesting thing to come out of this gig is, unfortunately, not out of the ordinary. One member of our audience unwittingly summed up, in one sentence, the eternal course of events at all parties played by bluegrass bands: You can’t quit now—we just started listening!

WIBLETS...

Beth Weil posted this note to bgrassl which I am passing on because I thought you might be interested: “About 5 years ago, I was playing with the Good Ol’ Persons at the Shade Tree music store in Mission Viejo, California, when I had a stroke. It was on the night of June 28, 1991. If you saw that show and saw me have my stroke, I would like to hear from you because I am in the process of writing a book about it. Please contact me at BethSpoon@aol.com.’’

Photo credits: All uncredited photos (except for Susi Gott’s) were taken by Casey Henry at the tribute to Hazel in Washington, D.C., July 6.

Women in Bluegrass is a quarterly publication. Editor, Publisher, and HWICC, Murphy Henry.

Layout and Computer Consultant, Red Henry. Address all correspondence to: Women in Bluegrass, POB

2498, Winchester, VA 22604.

email: nmhenry@visualiink.com

website: http://www.visuallink.com/murphy