IT'S A TRADITION
* GOOD IS GOOD, BE IT BLUEGRASS OR COUNTRY MUSIC, SAY THE ORGANIZERS OF
* THE SUNSHINE STATE BLUEGRASS AND TRADITIONAL MUSIC FESTIVAL
Steve Webb
* 02/12/99
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
(Copyright 1999)
* For a country music fan, it is a dream of a festival bill: The
greatest living country singer (and maybe the greatest all time)
* headlining a bill that also includes some of the best bluegrass
talent performing today.
Does it really tarnish that dream in any way that George Jones -
the Texan honky-tonker who began his career on the fringes of '50s
rockabilly and went on to define the potential commercial country
* would have during the '60s and '70s - is headlining a bluegrass
festival?
"I'll bet you that the crowd around the stage on Saturday night,
when George is playing, will be the biggest of the weekend," said Jim
McReynolds of Jim and Jesse, whose Virginia Boys are returning for
one of the guitarist's favorite festivals of the year.
McReynolds describes a festival last summer where Porter Wagoner
* was on an otherwise exclusively bluegrass bill. "He drew a huge
* crowd, and it wasn't non-bluegrass fans," McReynolds said. "People
* who like bluegrass like good traditional country singers."
For their parts, organizers Bill and Charlotte Pattie are billing
* this year's event as the Sunshine Bluegrass and Traditional Country
* Music Festival to alert people that, yes, it's that George Jones
playing alongside the Lewis Family, Jim and Jesse, and the others.
* "One thing we've figured out is that it is a traditional country
* music audience in the first place," Pattie said by telephone from his
* Punta Gorda home. "They go to a bluegrass festival because bluegrass
is part of traditional country in ways that modern country isn't."
The Patties organize the festival both as a business - it
interupts their regular business too much not to - and to raise
money, back-to-school clothes and canned goods for various charity
groups. "We've collected enough food to feed 100,000 people and have
helped to clothe 15,000 needy school children," Pattie said with as
much pride as when he describes the talent that will be on stage.
"You can't get any bigger than George, and in Mike Snyder, we've
* got the top draw in bluegrass right now," Pattie said. "Who's
* probably got the best rendition of tradional bluegrass right now is
Jim and Jesse and the Virginia Boys, along with that super harmonica
player they bring with them, Mike Stevens."
* The joke goes that it takes three bluegrass fans to change a
lightbulb - two to assidiously research that the new bulb is an exact
replica of the one before it, and one to then screw the bulb in
(actually, "rolling" it in; three-finger-style is preferred).
* This kind of logic, that bluegrass is a very specific musical form
that must be kept unpolluted from either modernism or the traditions
that came before it, really doesn't have much to do with the view
Pattie always has maintained about the form.
* "I wrote an article several years ago called `Bluegrass: America's
Music;' it said that we would recognize America's original music from
when the pioneers went west, and the camps of both sides in the Civil
* War as bluegrass - banjo, fiddle, guitar doing the same things with
* the same chords," Pattie said. "Bluegrass marched along with America
since America was here, but a fellow came along in the '40s named
Bill Monroe, and did such great things with the music with his Blue
* Grass Boys that people just started calling it `bluegrass.' But you
see an old John Wayne movie and what do they play at the campfire?
* Bluegrass."
A second view is that the distillation actually created a new form
- that Monroe and the other members of his 1945 - 48 quintet all
found new roles for their individual instruments that resulted in as
bold a progression from traditional string-band music as the
concurrent bebop movement was from swing or traditional jazz.
* Jones' career fits into the second version of bluegrass better
than the first. Many of his records have referred to country that
came before him. His earliest recordings on Starday in the mid-'50s
were the most-overt Hank Williams imitations this side of Bocephus:
Jones strains to capture Williams' rough-hewn moan on the two-step
cheatin' song that was his debut, "Why Baby Why." A year later, he
built his own "Just One More" from that quintessential waltz of pain,
"I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry."
The people around him, particularly his earliest labels, saw more
potential than he did in the nascient rockabilly movement of the
early '50s. But his version of Texas honky tonk had a rockabilly
element to it in his first No. 1 hit, "White Lightning," and its
somewhat-dopey follow-up, "Who Shot Sam," with its gross-Elvisism.
Jones found his own voice doing a kind of pop country - his huge
hit, "She Thinks I Still Care," was originally conceived for pop
treatment - that drew its traditions from the singer's voice itself.
"Loving You Could Never Be Better" could quote the guitar figure from
"My Girl"; "I'm a People" might be written by the same man who wrote
"Papa Oom Mow Mow" and "Mohair Sam," but there was never a question
that their tea was from Texas and Tennessee.
When folk and country traditions were recalled, it was often with
sad irony. "Golden Ring," one of Jones' and the late Tammy Wynette's
many depictions of a doomed marriage, took its stanza from a folk
song about lethal adultery, "Long Black Veil."
When commenting on the theme-park mentality of making his and
Tammy's Lakeland home a public concert facility amid their crumbling
relationship, the writers of Jones' "The Grand Tour" recall the
lament and sermonizing of Porter Wagoner's "Green, Green Grass of
Home."
Jones' live act has benefited from years of cleaning up, drying
out and taking seriously his role as one of the greatest pop singers
of his era. The British rock magazine Mojo ranked him at No. 17
among the all-time great singers. Within certain criteria, Jones
joins Frank Sinatra and Aretha Franklin in the top spot.
After the difficulties involved in last year's festival, when the
winter's only real freeze added to the El Nino havoc that troubled so
many other outdoor music events, Pattie is thrilled to have Jones in
his lineup.
"We have well over 200 RVs pre-registered from all over the South
and Southeast and the motels are filling up," Pattie said a week ago.
"The problem is, what are what we going to do for next year?"
