Today we posted a new clip from our Picking Up The Pace: More Slow Jamming with Murphy and Casey DVD. Here ’tis. If, for some reason it doesn’t show up here, I pasted the link below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2qCCMUQTNY
I especially liked the comments. It’s always nice to know that someone thinks you’re a “hottie”.
Recently I was picking with some folks here in the local Winchester area. We were having a good time, but there was a discordant note. Or, actually, lots of them. And they were all coming from one player.
The trouble was that the banjo player played pretty loud lead all the time. He played during his own breaks, of course, but he also played during the vocals and during everybody else’s breaks on guitar, mandolin, or fiddle. He just played and played, without any regard for what anyone else was playing. And that’s impolite.
The reason it was impolite was that it covered up what everybody else was doing. (Well, OK, he didn’t cover up the mandolin. The mandolin I was playing—Randy Wood #3—can be heard in any situation.) But this banjo player showed that he was NOT listening to the group, and NOT paying attention to anyone but himself. So the music was not as good as it should have been, although I don’t expect that many others there realized the cause of it. After this banjo picker started playing I didn’t stay in that situation very long, but excused myself and went home. And for some reason nobody else wanted to keep playing, either. I didn’t blame them.
So—next time you’re in a jam session, if you play banjo (or anything else, for that matter) don’t YOU play loudly all the time. Realize that your picking affects other people besides yourself, and know when NOT to play!
All four Henry’s congregated in Nashville this weekend for Red’s birthday picking party at the World Famous Station Inn. Here are some pictures of us doing what we like to do best: pick!
The World Famous Station Inn
Red’s Birthday Cake
The picking gets started! L-R: Chris Henry, Red Henry, John Hedgecoth (Red’s uncle), Gary Hunt (back to camera)
Ralph Stanley Rules! L-R: Chris Henry, Murphy, Red
The Hicks Sisters, Murphy’s sibs: Laurie (peeking around guitar), Nancy, Argen, Murphy. Male persons: Mike Johnson (Argen’s hubby) on guitar, Cap Spence on banjo.
Huge picking circle. Too many to name!
Murphy hugging on Joe Forrester, one of her favorite people. Bob Forrester, Joe’s nephew, also one of Murphy’s favorite people, grinning like a possum up a gum stump. Joe played bass with Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys in 1945, when Earl was in the band. Bob is the son of Howdy and Billie (Sally Ann) Forrester, both of whom played with Monroe. Howdy played fiddle, Sally Ann accordion. Murphy considers Sally Ann to be the first women in bluegrass.
(Photos by Casey Henry, which is why I’m not in any of them!)
We recently received a question from a guitar student who wants to learn to flatpick in jam sessions. Here’s part of his note to us:
“I’ve been playing guitar for a bit over 40 years… I can play rhythm without batting an eye and play totally by ear… Bluegrass is my all time favorite and the one thing that I want to do more than anything else is to learn to flatpick. I have your guitar flatpicking CD but still cannot get the hang of filling in between the melody notes. I’ve read where you do not advocate the use of scales. What is the secret then to filling in between the melody notes? …”
—and this was my reply:
Thanks for your note. In answer to your question (and as you’ve found out), flatpicking is a complicated skill. We try to set people on the road to it with our flatpicking DVD, but Murphy can only teach so much material on one DVD.
The way most bluegrass flatpickers learn to play lead is by sitting down and picking out the melodies to a lot of tunes—fiddle tunes may be best, since they have such well-defined melodies. This is because those tunes have a lot of great licks in them that can be played against particular chords. When you have a large enough vocabulary of licks built up to use in different chords, and have gotten the hang of putting them into a break when you need them, then you can assemble a guitar break to any tune you need to play. But the most important first step is LISTENING.
Before you can learn to play lead, you need to do a lot of listening. The best “input” is to listen to great lead guitarists (people who actually do play melodies and good musical licks) such as Doc Watson or Norman Blake, and also guitarists such as George Shuffler and Bill Napier, who played lead guitar with the Stanley Brothers. The more of the sound of good lead guitar you can get into your head, the more of it you can learn to play yourself!
We do not recommend that you listen to many modern bluegrass guitarists to learn this, since many of them concentrate on playing hot “jam” licks instead of the melodies to songs and tunes. However, if you are able to pick up some licks from them, more power to you! This goes for using scales too. Listen and learn any way you can.
Here’s another report from Saturday’s Misfit Jam. This is from Bob the bass player/guitar player/singer. Bob has already been immortalized (?) in at least one of my Banjo Newsletter columns. He’s been taking lessons off and on (mostly on) for ten or fifteen years. And in spite of his grousing below, he has developed his own really nice style of flatpicking. (Of course, he doesn’t think so.) I always enjoy his lessons because we just sit there and flatpick a bunch of tunes. Everything from “Down Yonder” to “When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder.” My absolute favorite is “Step Off On That Beautiful Shore.” I love to pick that! Last week, we worked on splitting the break, with one of us taking the first half and the other coming in for the second half. Really fun! Sometimes we even sing!
To get the flavor of Bob’s sparkling personality, I’m leaving in his introductory remarks. I had accused him, in a previous email, of being grouchy….
Grouchy my [hind toenail]. By the time this week is over I’ll make Scrooge look like Shirley Temple. 61 years old + work = sucks. Too old to work, too young to retire (not to mention the economic issues/losses over the past year). Our generation will have to work till we die just to keep medical insurance coverage.
Jam was fun, but not as gracious as the rest of the group apparently saw it (or they are just plain BS’ers). They did pretty good considering they didn’t have a dedicated leader to guide and direct the process from the technical side of the house.
Re Bass Bob, responses should have read more like: Bass player couldn’t figure out chord progression for “Banjo in the Hollow” the first two times through. Completely forgot the second verse to “Circle,” only [barely] remembered the last verse on the same. Only [barely] played through the lead to “Amazing Grace” (both times).
Sang the same verse two out of three times on “I’ll Fly Away.” Bass player had to sing “Wreck of the Old 97” in wrong key so the group could vamp to it in G. (Forgot the second verse of that also.) Several bass notes back-ass-wards on the guitar probably. You know the routine, you’ve seem me in action. But fun was had by all, so time was well spent.
Trying to start granddaughter on ukulele with your video, we’ll see how long that lasts.
Have a safe trip home, give our regards to all.
BV
Closing comment by me: Musicians, even the professionals, are always their own worst critics. Remember: you can almost guarantee that no one is paying any attention to your mistakes. They don’t hear them! They are too busy worrying about the mistakes they are making that they think you are hearing! Which you are not because you’re worrying about your own mistakes! (I do this too, all the time!) Reminds me of the Buck Owens song, “I was looking back to see if she was looking back to see if I was looking back to see if she was looking back at me!” Try to let go of all this and just play! Nobody cares if you make a mistake. Just keep going, don’t ever quit, and plow to the end of the row!
Today I have a favor to ask of you loyal TMM Blog readers. I’m working on redesigning my own website for a class that I’m taking, and adding a working store to it. If you’d care to take a minute to check it out and let me know what you think, I’d really appreciate it. It’s not all built yet (there’s only one item in the store!) but there’s enough there that you can get an idea of what it will look like. All comments welcome. You can leave them below, or email them to themurphymethod@gmail.com.
Thanks!!
We recently sold our old Dodge band-van, one that had carried us to many performances years ago. The van had been with us for 23 years, but it was time for it to find a new home.
Talk about nostalgia! We bought this van new in 1985, when Casey was 7 years old and Christopher was 4. This new van was larger and longer than our old one, and I had a high, white fiberglass top installed on it to make it easier to change clothes in at the shows. We had a full-time 5-piece bluegrass band back then, and we drove the new van all over the country. Along with going to a great many shows in our home area of Florida and Georgia, the van carried our “Red & Murphy” band to perform at festivals and concerts as far away as Louisiana, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maine, and even Canada. The van got a lot of miles on it in just a few years.
After we moved here to Virginia and shifted our musical emphasis to running the Murphy Method, we still used the van a lot. We drove it to play many shows back in Florida and Georgia, as well in other states, and Murphy loaded it up with Murphy Method tapes and advertising for the IBMA convention each year. But finally we quit doing much traveling, and the van became my personal car for some time. Then after Christopher reached age 16, he drove the van during high school. After he finished school and moved away I began driving it again, because the van’s endurance, and the durability of its Dodge 318 V-8 engine, were phenomenal. However, as gasoline prices kept rising along with maintenance costs, I couldn’t justify driving it forever, and it finally sat in the driveway most of the time. It had over 260,000 miles on it, but I didn’t want to let it go.
Then, just a few weeks ago, opportunity knocked. A man living near here said he wished he had that van, to fix it up and use it as a camping vehicle for himself and his own kids. So we made the transaction, and now the old van has a new life. But I took a couple of pictures before it left us. Here they are:
Some of my newest Misfits got together on Saturday to jam—without me—and I asked a couple of them to share their experiences. I hope some of you who are taking lessons from a teacher will consider getting together with some fellow students. All it takes is one person (or in this case one couple) to shoulder the task of making it happen!
So, here’s what Susan, who has been taking just a few months, has to say:
Saturday some of us adult beginners got together at Mark and Ellen’s house to pick a few. And a mighty few it was too! Four to be exact, because that is all I know! We started with “Banjo in the Hollow,” moved right into “Cripple Creek,” next came “Cumberland Gap” – my personal favorite–and then blew right into “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” where of course mine broke down. Being the newest misfit, I am a little behind my banjo buddies in learning some of the other oldtime favorites, but that did not stop me from practicing my vamping in G, C, and D, with an occasional E minor. Ellen happily accompanied us on my 0-18 Martin guitar and Bass-Man Bob thumped out some good rhythm and then moved on to singing lead with his own Martin guitar accompaniment.
We all inspected each other’s instruments, or at least SOME of us inspected SOME of our instruments – I can’t understand why no one wants to inspect my four-pound Good Time open back in this decidedly bluegrass jam group. If anybody out there can figure out why, let me know! I LOVE the thing! We all ate pop corn and pretzels, compliments of Mark and Ellen, and oooooo-ed and aaaaaaah-ed over Banjo Bob’s Gibson. Tired, happy, and totally banjo-ed out, we again proved true Bass-Man Bob’s comment from our last jam with Murphy, “There are all levels of incompetence here.” And there you have it! (….as Murphy would say!)
And here’s what Bob, who’s been taking a couple of years, has to say.
I promised that you’d get a follow-up report on the show we played recently with some friends, and here it is. To begin with, Murphy and I walked into the performing venue (the local Moose club) to find that thanks to Charlie and Charlotte, the sound system was already set up and working—a real plus for any job. There were 10 mikes on the stage, all ready for vocals and instruments. They and their band (the Sweetwater String Band—Charlie, Charlotte, Larry, Troy, and me) were to play the first and last sets of the day—at 10:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. —a pretty long day. So we got on the stage and started the show.
Now, at 10:00 on a Sunday morning you don’t generally expect that the crowd will have shown up yet. We began the set with an audience of 18 people. That didn’t matter, though, because we had a good time playing our set of gospel material. And everybody in the band was aware of the music—WATCHING and LISTENING to what was happening, and responding to each other, which made the music not only better but also more enjoyable. I played mostly mandolin, but picked up the fiddle to play harmony with Larry on a couple of slower numbers.
Then several local bands played their sets, and their sound suffered from a current fad: Instead of using individual vocal mikes, each band wanted to sing around one big condenser microphone. However, in this particular room, that big mike could not be turned up very much without feeding back, so the singing was hard to hear. This went on with one band after another, proving that the bands weren’t WATCHING and LISTENING to the other bands on stage and seeing that the mike setup wasn’t working, but instead kept asking to use that one mike which couldn’t pick up their voices very well.
Also, as I watched the bands, I could see that most of them weren’t listening to each other on stage. They all had a well-practiced set of music to play, but in most cases each band member just played and sang his own part without listening to their whole band and responding to the other band members. This took some of the life out of the show.
Here’s something that came up at a lesson yesterday that I thought I’d share. One of my beginning fiddle students, who is taking up fiddle for the first time at age 71, bless her heart, was having a not-too-good lesson. Her playing was not as smooth as she wanted it to be and her bow was skittering around. Somehow, as she was talking, she mentioned that she’d been raking leaves all day. Well! There was the answer! I told her, “Suzi, you cannot do something strenuous like raking leaves—especially all day long—and then expect to come to a fiddle lesson and play well. Your fine motor skills have been shot! Your muscles are tired, your brain is tired. It’s just too much!”
I learned this the hard way, thirty years ago in Florida. Sometimes before a gig, I would work in the yard for several hours. Mowing the grass, using the clippers to trim the edges, maybe even doing some weeding. (I was young, I had lots of energy! I think this was also BK—before kids!) When I got on stage that night, I found out my hands felt like LEAD. My fingers wouldn’t move like I wanted them to. They felt clumsy and huge. I think I even remember them trembling after one particularly long afternoon with the clippers! I finally figured out: no yard work before a gig! (I later extended that to housework, too! No vacuuming!)
I know it’s not always possible to avoid doing heavy work before a lesson (or even your own practice session). But, if you have a choice, put off the strenuous activities till later! Or as one of my banjo students said (when I told him this story), “I just think I’ll take a nap before my lesson!” That’s not exactly what I had in mind, Bob! Always a smart alec…..