Anyone like Bluegrass?

[Gee Whillickers]

Three brothers from New Jersey, not exactly a bluegrass hotbed.

Here's the Sleepy Man Banjo Boys

[Chris James]

Oh yeah, Gee, the New Jersey boy band is just awesome. At first I thought this was one of those things where the parents pushed their kids into it, but that just isn't true. If you look at the music on their albums some of the songs have a religious nature but then bluegrass has always been like that. Music from the American heartland.

Although they are serious musicians and practice at every opportunity they are having great fun. Watch this video, a really great song and it shows they are still just kids:

What do you think, Gee, there must be some Canadian bluegrass fans and some young bands who play the music. Just haven't found any yet. But I liked this song enough to purchase their album. At least someone takes them seriously, they have a gig at Carnegie Hall coming up:

http://www.sleepymanbanjoboys.com/

[Merkin]

Doesn't Canadian bluegrass feature the accordion?

[Chris James]

Don't know about that, James. I think they call that accordion stuff The Polka, not good for me, eh? But I know we discussed the accordion here before, and I think Cole is a real fan of that instrument.

[JamesSavik]

Bluegrass makes me want to run away. It's a little over exposed down South here and... the guys playing it are a whole lot older.

[Cole Parker]

Two big mistakes here: thinking I'd come within 100 yards of anyone even sporting an accordion, and that Canada has any blue grass; the entire country is covered in about a 4" thick sheet of ice.

C

[Gee Whillickers]

Oh yeah, Gee, the New Jersey boy band is just awesome. At first I thought this was one of those things where the parents pushed their kids into it, but that just isn't true. If you look at the music on their albums some of the songs have a religious nature but then bluegrass has always been like that. Music from the American heartland.

Although they are serious musicians and practice at every opportunity they are having great fun. Watch this video, a really great song and it shows they are still just kids:

What do you think, Gee, there must be some Canadian bluegrass fans and some young bands who play the music. Just haven't found any yet. But I liked this song enough to purchase their album. At least someone takes them seriously, they have a gig at Carnegie Hall coming up:

http://www.sleepymanbanjoboys.com/

Well, not exactly bluegrass, but here's a kid from my neck of the woods who plays drums. At eight years old he already has a bit of a name for himself.

He and his parents are big on supports and help for parents and kids of premature births. This lad was a preemie born at about 1 pound birth weight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-C3cXU8XbY

[Rigel]

The Sleepy Man Banjo Boys are very good. It helps that bluegrass is in large part about technique, where lots of practice and nimble fingers supplant the need for an emotional depth that would be difficult for youngsters to convey with any authenticity. They play a couple of speeds--fast and very fast. They don't do any singing that I've been able to hear on their website or YouTube--but given that their voices are either about to deal with the changes of puberty or have yet to get there, investment of effort in vocal arrangements would be short-term at best. (A cappella gospel numbers are a standard of many bluegrass bands, offering a change of texture and speed from the fast plucking of strings.)

Jonny, the youngest of the brothers, is an excellent Scruggs-style banjo player--his right hand knows how to pick, and his left hand does a good job using the tuning pegs (as well as fingerings) to change pitch (an Earl Scruggs invention). And the other brothers are accomplished musicians on their instruments, obvious when each takes a solo turn. If you listen to some of the older recordings (such as their earliest appearances on the Letterman show) as well as the most recent stuff, you can actually hear a development of talent. They were okay players when Tommy was nine, but they've gotten better as they've aged (a year or so).

Thanks for introducing me to this group. I'm a "folkie," and the Washington, DC area is a hotbed of bluegrass, but somehow I hadn't heard (or heard of) these guys before. Now I'm going to have to make sure they play in my area!

--Rigel

[Cole Parker]

The things I learn here! I had no idea the D.C. area was a hotbed of bluegrass enthusiasm. Amazing. I'd have thought the area would be a mecca of sophistication and cosmopolitan tastes. Live and learn.

C

[Rigel]

Washington DC was the big city on the way North for all the folks coming out of the mountains. Bill Monroe may have invented Bluegrass in Kentucky, when he took old-timey Appalachian music and sped up the tempo and focused attention on flashy technique. (The traditional mountain style would be to evoke modesty in the face of talent, even if it had to be an ingenuous acting performance.) Bluegrass went commercial in Nashville, thanks in large part to the Grand Old Opry, but it settled in the DC area, thanks to performance spaces like the Birchmere and organizations like CABOMA (Capital Area Bluegrass and Old-time Music Association).

Accordions were mentioned earlier in the thread. The old banjo tuning joke: What's perfect pitch? When you toss a banjo into the dumpster and it spears an accordion.

--Rigel

[Chris James]

Rigel, the Birchmere was a hang out of mine during the college days, as was the Cellar Door. Bluegrass comes in so many forms and sometimes the lines blur as younger musicians take on the older songs.

I recall back in the early 70's one of the local colleges in the D.C. area began holding outdoor concerts. The first few were rock oriented and had a modest attendance but then number three came along. For a change they booked in the Earl Scruggs Revue, featuring that famous bluegrass picker with his two sons, Gary and Randy, and several others in the band. 10,000 people showed up and swamped the campus so I guess bluegrass music was more popular than anyone thought.

It's always good to see traditions hold on and manifest themselves in what the Sleepy Man Banjo Boys are doing today. They do tend to race through a song, but that's Jonny pushing them along. As he grows older maybe he will slow down, worked for me

[Merkin]

Why does a mirror reverse right and left, but not up and down?

--from Rigel's signature line

I remember getting hot and heavy over this back in high school. Turns out that mirrors don't reverse, they reflect--meaning they give back directly what they get. You'd need a lens mounted in front of the mirror (but not in the path of the object being reflected) to get the image to "reverse." Conundrums like this are what turned me away from science toward the humanities.

A few years back I wrote this haiku about my experience with mirrors:

REFLECTION

mirror playing tricks:

pretends I am left-handed

pretends I am old

[Cole Parker]

Ah, but see, with science figuring it out, it wasn't a conundrum, but instead, a learning experience. Science takes the confusion out of things so they make sense if you go deep enough.

C

[Rigel]

Hint: My signature line sounds like a physics question (along the lines of angle of incidence equals angle of refraction, etc.), but it's actually a linguistics question, and the different modalities represented by the opposition pairs of right-left versus up-down.

--Rigel

[Gee Whillickers]

[Chris James]

Okay it isn't bluegrass, but these young men have an awesome talent:

More about them here: http://www.thebrewerboysmusic.com/#!about-us/c1qgf

Ahem, now that I think about it, I believe someone else here posted the link to these boys last year and that's where I became aware of them. Must be one of you So Cal people, just shows we all have good taste in music.