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Modern Bluegrass Songwriting
Plowing Their Own Field

STORY BY TIM STAFFORD

Here’s a lyric for you:

There's a happy childhood home in my memory I can see

Standing out upon the hill 'neath the shadow of the tree

If I only had my way it would give my heart a thrill

Just to simply wander back to the cabin on the hill.

Oh I want to wander back to the cabin on the hill

'Neath the shadow of the tree I would like to linger still

Just to be with those I love joy my heart would over fill

Just to simply wander back to the cabin on the hill

But the saddest of it all I can never more return

To that happy childhood home matters not how much I yearn

If I only had my way it would give my heart a thrill

Just to simply wander back to the cabin on the hill

© Boliver Lee Shook

"A lot of bluegrass bands play a lot of the old traditional songs… If you go to a bluegrass festival you hear 'Cabin on the Hill' ten different times. They're all great songs, and they move people. But these kids plow their own field."
J. Gregory Heinike, Valerie Smith and Liberty Pike's manager.

In 1959, “Cabin on the Hill” hit the Billboard charts. It was Flatt and Scruggs’s second charting single, the first being “Tis’ Sweet to be Remembered” in 1952. It remained on the charts longer than any other Flatt and Scruggs hit, including “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” and “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” Lester and Earl had learned it from Hylo Brown, who learned it from Knoxville, TN mandolinist Red Rector. The song was first published in the popular James D. Vaughn series of hymnbooks in 1943. Funny, it isn’t even a gospel song, but it appeared first in a hymnbook and Flatt always introduced it as “…a sacred number” featured in that part of their show. According to Dorothy Horseman in “Sing Your Heart Out, Country Boy,” (3rd, ed., Country Music Foundation Press, 1996, p. 4), this is because “…So strong is the southern reverence for the home that sometimes it approaches a religious fervor.”

In 1943, home became almost religious in nature to many Southerners who were either forced to move North to find work, or shipped overseas to fight in a great war. By the time Flatt and Scruggs recorded the song, many expatriate Southerners were still working in Detroit, Cincinnati, Toledo, Pittsburgh and other Northern factory towns, mourning the loss of a way of life and a time past. These Southerners-at-heart became the first market for bluegrass, and for them, home became ever more religious. Thus the context of one of bluegrass music’s all-time greatest bands’ biggest hit…

It’s all about context, isn’t it?

Here’s another lyric for you:

“Danny,” she said, “I’m just tired of this Midwestern town.”
“Nothin’ to do, there ain’t nobody hangin’ around.”
She spoke of a job and some friends in L.A.
I knew she was lyin’ but all I could say
was “Write when you get there--I’ll tell them that bird had to fly.”
And the last thing I ever saw her do was wavin’ goodbye
She thought she was leavin’ this flat earth behind
But sometimes a dream’s just the mountain you climb

She called me just once but I guess I really should have known
She wanted to make the break complete--no use hangin’ on
I could tell it was bad from the sound of her voice
There’s no turning back when you’ve made that lonely choice
But life’s still the same--it won’t change in this Midwestern town
No matter who leaves or who stays or who’s laid in the ground

Lonely in a crowd, she just couldn’t find a home
She took her own life on the streets all alone

But life’s still the same--it won’t change in this Midwestern town
No matter who leaves or who stays or who’s laid in the ground
You think you can leave this flat earth behind
But sometimes a dream’s just the mountain you climb

© Daniel House Music, 1996

Needless to say, Home isn’t quite a religious experience anymore. In fact, here’s a kid literally dying to get away. It’s still bluegrass, performed by a bluegrass artist, but the subject matter has changed completely. What happened between 1943 and 1996 to produce such changes?

I wrote this song back in 1996 in a fit. I was playing with my son—who was four--in the living room, and someone had left the TV in the adjacent den on. Nancy Griffith was singing some song—I still don’t know what it was—and the idea of holding out a note through several chord changes suddenly hit me. By the time I went to get a guitar and paper, the first verse was there, and I just wrote the rest of the song down. That hasn’t happened before or since. I was lucky that Ronnie Bowman wanted to record it, on his “The Man I’m Trying to Be” project.

What’s the context of this song? Well, I didn’t know anyone like the girl in “Midwestern Town” personally, but this story has unfortunately played itself out countless times, and we’ve all seen it. We used to find photos of runaways on milk cartons—now there are Amber alerts, John Walsh and 24-hour news channels to keep us alert for runaways and possible child abductions.

Have the cabins, stills and women-killings left us as topics for bluegrass songs? Certainly not the latter, if you go by any festival parking campground. There’s still a tangible connection with the past there, and even the ancient roots of the music—witness the longevity of tunes like “Banks of the Ohio,” “Down in the Willow Garden,” “Knoxville Girl,” “Little Sadie,” “Pretty Polly,” “Poor Ellen Smith” and “Tom Dooley” and you’ll see that the centuries-old staple of the murder ballad is probably with us to stay. In fact, bluegrass is likely one of the last remaining repositories of this form.

But most folks don’t live in cabins anymore. America is less rural every year, and small family farms have taken a hit. Compare that to the America of Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, Ralph and Carter Stanley, Don Reno, Red Smiley, Mac Wiseman and the other giants of the first generation of bluegrass. You sing about what you know and how you were brought up, and what your audience wants to hear. In the years immediately following World War II, the time was right for something like bluegrass music.

I’ve made this argument many times. The inevitability of change is something that affects everything, whether we like it or not. Bluegrass is no exception.

The post-World War II years brought massive changes, some of which dictated the sound of bluegrass and its spread, but the totality of which brought somewhat of a yearning for simpler times, much like the antiquarian phase of the 1920s and 1930s, in which old-time string bands and fiddlers were championed commercially as authentic country music to a public which yearned, in the face of rapid change, for a simpler, romanticized past. Bill Monroe had been actively cultivated and treasured on the Opry by George Hay since 1939 as a bastion of the "old sound" for just such reasons. He truly could have only left the show if he fired himself, precisely because he perfectly fit Hay's romanticized idea of what country music should sound like, an idea that had been fed in part by the Solemn Old Judge's commercial hormones.

In the late thirties in popular music, here's what was hot: singing cowboys, urban swing bands and their rural counterparts like Bob Wills's band, radio crooners and jazz. The popular country acts of the time were closer to the popular music of their time than to folk music, but, according to Neil Rosenberg, were "more conservative, sentimental, and religious." Judge Hay was afraid that these new things would ruin the "authentic" music featured on the Opry, or at least the image of authenticity he had fought for many years to put in place, and he fought for many more years to keep things like drums and electric instruments off the show.

The first ten years of bluegrass, from roughly 1945 to 1955, are considered the "golden era" of the music. This is the time when it wasn't even named as a genre, when it was just part of country music. This was also the last "safe time" in country music, the period right before Elvis and Rock and Roll threatened the entire country music industry with destruction, or so it seemed to insiders. This is, coincidentally, the "golden era" for most modern country artists also--the era of Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, Webb Pierce, Lefty Frizzell, Hank Snow. It's the bluegrass of this era that most fans today who either call themselves "traditionalists" or are labeled that way identify with. It's the time when the style was coalescing. At the beginning of this decade, there was only Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys. By the end, there's Flatt and Scruggs, the Stanley Brothers, Reno and Smiley, Mac Wiseman, Hylo Brown, Red Allen, the Osborne Brothers, Jimmy Martin, Jim and Jesse and a host of others.

In the world at large, there was tremendous dislocation as a result of the war; in the nation at large, there was tremendous relative prosperity and singular insularity. This is the time of the Communist witch-hunts, the beginning of the Cold War and the beginning of a continuous growth-based economy in the U.S.A. Such massive changes helped spawn a new romantic yearning for comfortable antiquity, which embraced bluegrass. It was upscale string band music and one of the most appropriate escapist fads of the day.

This all started to change in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, which was a time of tremendous change in the country at large, as we all know. The birth of rock and roll was one facet of this change; eventually, folk and rock would have tremendous impact on bluegrass music.

The music changed in part also because there were now urbanites playing bluegrass in large numbers for the first time. These folks had different backgrounds, and they brought new sensibilities to the music--and in fact they changed it so much that they named it. The music itself seemed to sound different, incorporating new songs based on new topics, as well as new chord changes and new melodic lines borrowed in part from the spirit of rock, folk, jazz and R&B. The Country Gentlemen, Cliff Waldron and the New Shades of Grass and after them the Seldom Scene symbolized such borrowings. Later, Newgrass Revival and David Grisman put all these things into their music, which retained a link to traditional bluegrass and is in fact venerated by many current professional bluegrass players. But all were controversial at the time to “traditionalists.”

Bluegrass musicians born after 1945 were influenced by a number of musical currents not available to their parents’ generation, including rock and roll, the Nashville Sound, and the folk revival. Today, the generation born after 1980 has a whole new set of influences, including rap, jam band music, alternative rock, Americana and modern jazz and world music.

Dave Freeman recently commented that it comes naturally to today’s musicians to play “contemporary”-sounding bluegrass, unlike those that seemed to be experimenting with it in the 1960s and 1970s, and thus it sounds fresh and less forced to his ears. Of course it comes even more naturally to them. Expecting this group to play only traditional-style bluegrass is like expecting Ralph Stanley and Bill Monroe to play turn-of-the-century parlor music. We would never dream of anyone expecting Bill Monroe to only play Italian melodies on his mandolin; we expect him to be true to his influences--his Uncle Pen, blues, Arnold Schultz’s music, country music string bands of the 1920s. To expect Tim O’Brien, Tony Rice or Alison Krauss—not to mention Sam Bush or Nickel Creek--to have those same influences is a bit unrealistic, to say the least.

Some may complain about the new bluegrass songs, that they’re not traditional enough, or they have too many chords, or they don’t sound like bluegrass. My opinion? I love traditional bluegrass. I love modern bluegrass. Let’s give ‘em all room. It’s music, and its tied to culture, which changes so quickly it’s practically organic. We all know what happens when you don’t leave room for a tree to grow.

But the tree renews itself. Speaking of Tim O’Brien—he’s one of the great modern songwriters who works under the bluegrass branches, and he has a genius for making old melodies and phrasing new within a different context a la Woody Guthrie. I’ll leave you with one of his little gems. Sung to the tune of “Letter From My Darlin’,” this little masterpiece is getting airplay everywhere, not just because it’s a clever parody or because Del McCoury sings tenor on the chorus. It’s much more, a re-tooling of the tradition by someone who clearly knows and respects it, so much so that he has license to make it funny. We could all stand to be a little less serious about this topic anyway, don’t you think?

Well I got an email from you darlin; It said you'd sent me a file
It was a full-length picture, jpeg format
But I never got to see you smile
I thought of what you might be wearin’; just then my server software froze
I tried rebooting, tried compression, but it would not open past your nose

My color screen won't even function
It's one big solid field of blue
My hard drive it went soft; My application coughed
And I'm a-runnin out of memory for you

I sat alone there at my work place
Just a-thinkin’ of the good times that we had
I was dumping data to a zip drive
I was stroking on the old mouse pad

I went down to my computer center
Just to buy me a megabyte of ram
Then I hurried on back to my work place
I had my memory module in my hand

I opened up my PC casing
I thought I knew just what I'd do
But it was all for naught There were no expansion slots
And I'm a runnin out of memory for you

My color screen won't even function
It's one big solid field of blue
My hard drive it went soft My application coughed
And I'm a-runnin out of memory for you

Tim Stafford is a guitarist/songwriter/producer and co-founder of the group Blue Highway. You can contact him at his website - www.Tim-Stafford.com

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