The Author

LET’S BEGIN BY HARKING BACK to JK’s, Planetarium bash last year (NWBN Nov 1998).

I got there just as the tribute to John T. was coming to an end. The assembled multitude dispersed, but I was dying for a pick, and with some other guys - can’t even remember who - we got to it in the ‘classroom’. We played a lot of standards to warm up, then I kicked into The Road is a Lover, a track from the AKUS album So Long So Wrong. And the controversy began.

Derek and Jean Brandon were with us, and no sooner had the final chord faded away, than Derek, employing his patented stage whisper (bless him) announced: “That’s not Bluegrass!” [I actually put an expletive in there - Ed.

And I suppose he was right. I mean, did Bill Monroe ever record a song with a chord sequence as perverse as G / F / A7 / D; G / C / D / D ? Course not. On the other hand, wasn’t this song part of the album that was the recipient of a raft of awards, not least ‘Bluegrass Album of the Year’? I think you’ll find it was...

Here we go again. That old chestnut: ‘What the Hell is bluegrass?’

Which set me thinking. If you’re going to take stick for performing any song that just one person in the room will balk at (because they think ‘that ain’t bluegrass and I’ve paid my money to hear bluegrass music’, which is fair enough if you think about it... ) then why not be hung for a sheep rather than a lamb? The episode with DB, which you’d file under ‘banter’ as opposed to ‘aggro’, set me thinking.

First let me state the obvious. I love bluegrass. Listening to it and playing it. But, as former professional musician and song writer, I long ago resigned myself to the fact that, no matter how good I get and even if I inveigle myself into a really hot band, I’m never going to make any money. I’m not even going to earn any kind of adulation either, save from within a tiny circle of fellow travellers. (Show me a muso who gigs, and says he doesn’t care about applause, and I’ll show you a liar.)

The road to fame and fortune is paved with originality. So allow me to introduce you to Jamie Knowles. I interviewed him a couple of years ago for The Manchester Evening News and Lancashire Life.

Jamie runs Saddleworth Dental Laboratory. He spends his days making cosmetic dentures and prosthetics. He’s been in the business for 30 years; but his true passion is folk music. Everywhere in his cottage, in Saddleworth, his obsession is betrayed. A manuscript lies poised on a music stand, shelves heave with folk CDs; a fiddle is propped in the arm of a chair and a bass hammered-dulcimer dominates a corner. And he has a story to tell.

“In 1978 I was in a folk group, playing the fiddle. We played mostly Celtic music, and people thought we were pretty good; we even got a recording contract. But I felt we lagged behind a few of the other groups that were around at the time, and we all seemed to be playing the same music. I felt as if we were going nowhere, doing nothing new.” Jamie needed something different. Something fresh, that folk fans hadn’t heard before.

“Someone asked me why I didn’t play the music of my own region” Jamie recalled. He admitted ruefully “I wasn’t aware that there was any.”

Back then, the ‘Folk Music Revival’ was at it’s height in this country. Folk clubs provided an environment in which musicians could develop a repertoire of material from the performances of others. Scholars refer to this process as ‘the oral tradition’. It’s the tradition we are also part of. People new to our music learn the tunes by hearing them being played, and subsequently beginning to play themselves.

In Jamie’s case, the fact was that no-one was playing music that originated in The North West of England. They could give you a Scottish Reel or an Irish Jig, but scarcely a tune was played that came from hereabouts. Jamie resolved to find out what had happened to the lost music of Lancashire.

It must have been like looking for a needle in a haystack? Yep. As Churchill might have said, ‘Some haystack; some needle...’

His first foray yielded treasure beyond Jamie’s wildest dreams. “It was a battered old manuscript called John Walsh’s 3rd collection of Lancashire Tunes, published around 1731. This was a sure sign that the tunes had been very popular in their time - John Walsh was also Handel’s publisher. I scribbled the tunes down and rushed home to play them” said Jamie. The melodies turned out to be treasures. Tunes with names like Northern Frisk and The Glafis Hornpipe. “I knew,” Jamie continued, “that this was something special. But it felt strange at first, until I started to get a feel for it.”

Other curiosities followed, like Three Coney Walk and Spotland Hornpipe, which was found in Thomas Marsden’s Original Lancashire Hornpipes Old and New, published in 1706. Libraries and Local History Museums are a rich source of material, but Jamie has uncovered gems in the most unlikely of situations. “I was walking round Hollingworth Lake one day when I came upon a piece of music exhibited in a glass case at the water’s edge, called The Hollingworth Lake Polka.

How would the tunes have been played back then? “During the eighteenth century, it’s probable that the Lancashire bagpipes would have been used. But by around 1850, bagpipes were virtually extinct in Lancashire” he says. “They were replaced by the fiddle; which was lighter, offered the player more notes to choose from and had a new and exciting sound.” The same thing happened again when the guitar replaced the sax in the late fifties. Plus ça change?

It’s more difficult to discover how different instruments would have fitted in with each other. “We can only guess how the tunes would have been arranged back then, but that’s not important, really.

This music is like a common inheritance. We’ve all got an equal right to do whatever we want with it. For instance, the Grand Hornpipe sounds wonderful with a reggae rhythm. “One wonders what Henry Stables, who published the piece back in 1881, would have made of that!”

Jamie’s own interpretation of the music is rooted in Lancashire tradition. With friends, he formed The Band of the Rising Sun. Their collective sound was of fiddles and violas complemented by hammered dulcimers, English concertina and guitar. Many people reading this would dismiss this as ‘folky’, bung, hang on a minute...

What was that he said? This music is like a common inheritance. Oh yes, and We’ve all got an equal right to do whatever we want with it. Hmm. I clearly recall the first time I heard Red Haired Boy being played in a session, and how I naffed everyone off by contriving to sing the words to Down in the Coalmine to it. Why not, though? It’s the same tune. Common inheritance. Shared roots. It’s all down to arrangement, isn’t at? Down to people like us to take the tunes and do whatever we want with them.

I agree with Tom Travis. I was on the BBMA’s web site. Tom had written an article defending the whimsical nature of early country and bluegrass music. He was talking about songs whose lyrics, often penned by people who had been forced to eschew the country life for employment in cities and towns, which were more to do with homesickness than anything else. The Little Old Log Cabin With The Grapevine O’er The Door, (and a little whitewashed chimney at the end) - wasn’t necessarily based on experience. It was a romanticised yearning for the old days.

“Nothing wrong with that”, wrote Tom, and I agree.

But we don’t share that experience, by and large. And I do cringe to myself, sometimes, when I sing of my Blue Ridge Mountain Blues. I’ve never even been there. I’ve never been within 800 miles of Louisville...

So why not take our expertise, such as it is, for the techniques of bluegrass, and for the line up, and the style of playing, and apply that to music and songs that are our own heritage? With fiddler John Harrison, I’ve tried to ‘bluegrass’ one of those tunes Jamie Knowles re-discovered, called The Grand Hornpipe. It works, in my opinion; and it’s different. It’s interesting. Even American Jack Lawrence, who’s closer to the roots of bluegrass in his debut album than many other ‘bluegrass’ acts are, thought fit to include a version of the famous Brit folk song Geordie. And Tony Rice recorded Streets of London, for goodness’ sake.

Could it be that we could contribute to the continuing development of bluegrass by offering music like that in Jamie’s treasure trove? I can imagine the likes of Jack Lawrence and Bill Keith hearing one of these tunes, asking ‘what is that’ and taking it home with them, to apply their own style to it.

It’s happened before, and it could happen again. The alternative is to continue picking tunes and singing songs we consider to be kosher bluegrass. We’ll continue to enjoy ourselves, but we won’t be making any contribution to anything will we? And the sad truth is, that no-one in the wider music world gives a damn.

And if even Edale can’t survive, don’t we owe it to the music to do something? What have we got to lose? Whaddya think?

Ian Reynolds, Blackley, Manchester.

Ian is a professional writer for the likes of Lancashire Life and The Manchester Guardian, etc. If you have any comments please phone Ian on 0161-740-2541
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Updated 1st March 1999