Last Thursday there was another picking party at the house of some friends. Now, I especially enjoy playing music with folks, so I went over to their house all ready to go. In contrast to the regular crowd, the pickers seemed sparse at first. Cousin David the banjo player would have been there, but he was playing a music job that night a couple of hours away. Linda the bass player had to go a few hours south on family business. Wayne the fiddler didn’t make it for some other reason. Various other banjo players and fiddlers and lead guitar players also did not show up. I chatted with the folks while I got my mandolin out and tuned it, but by 7:30, when it was obvious that all the pickers had arrived, it was an interesting assortment: Carol on bass; Wade, Bob, Gerald, Tim, and David, all playing guitar; and me. We had ten or fifteen listeners too, but I’ll talk mostly about those five guitar players.
Now, some mandolin players might not like playing much if they had no other lead instruments present and FIVE guitar pickers, none of whom played a lot of lead, especially if (as in this case) I had only picked with a couple of them before. But I grew up picking at parties where there might be 5 or 6 guitar players and maybe (or maybe not) some other instruments, and so I had a good time. And the guitar pickers helped.
They said, “Pick one,” so I started out with “Down Yonder”, a tune most folks around here know. Then Gerald sang “I Wonder Where you are Tonight,” and I followed it with “Head Over Heels.” This goes back to something I wrote a few weeks back. If, in this case, you’re a mandolin player with no other lead instruments, then KEEP IT SIMPLE. This is not the time to show off your new Vernon Derrick licks from a Jimmy Martin instrumental, or that dazzling thing you just learned from Chris Thile. [Editor's note: I like how Red is trying to appeal to our younger audience.] [Side note: Do we even have a younger audience?] It’s not the time to play your favorite original tune from your new CD. This is the time to play something EVERYBODY KNOWS, and to make it easy for them to play it along with you.
And the guitar players knew how to pick. Nobody played loudly, and they stayed in pretty good time. Carol was playing solid bass and I discovered on the first number that if I locked in the mandolin chop with her bass fiddle’s rhythm, all the guitar players stayed with us. So the rhythm didn’t have problems the way it might have, and the session sounded good. Four of the guitar players sang, and we played a whole bunch of 3-chord bluegrass sings, things everybody knew. Then one of the listeners requested “Lorena”, an unusual but really pretty slow song from 1853. You don’t hear it much in bluegrass.
I happened to know the song, but I was at a loss as to what to do. “Lorena” has some unusual chords in it—it’s not the kind of thing you can often bring out in a jam session. I could have led the whole group through it on guitar, but I wasn’t playing guitar. And I wasn’t going to add a sixth guitar to the jam, either. So I took a chance. I suspected that this particular group could play the song, if they had a few clues beforehand. I ran through the chords so that everybody could get through the hard part (E-minor, B7, E-minor, D), and just kicked the song off on mandolin and started to sing. And everybody played it fine. I went through a couple of verses and an extra chorus, and we all made it sound good. The listeners liked it a lot. Then it started getting late, so we did a few more and finished up with “Down the Road.”
So if you’re fortunate enough to be in a group who can play well together, it doesn’t matter if they don’t have all the usual bluegrass instruments. Who needs a banjo? (Just kidding.) [Editor's note: you better be just kidding!!] People who are polite and know how to jam can play bluegrass fine, even if the instruments are just a mandolin, five guitars, and a bass. What matters (as so often in music) is not the instrument you’re playing, but HOW YOU PLAY IT!