Read no. 4

Greetings!

Summertime! And the living is easy! No more getting up at 6:30 to get the kids off to school! The flip side of this is that I am back in school. Right. As if I didn’t have enough to do. I am starting work, one course at a time, toward a Master’s Degree in Women’s Studies. My first course, English Literature, finds us delving into Quantum Physics! Go figure! I’m up to my ears in Planck’s Constant and the Heisenberg Indeterminacy Principle! What a relief to set that aside to talk about something I know and love: women in bluegrass!

I am enjoying the heck out of doing this newsletter. And it is always gratifying to hear from women who understand exactly what I am trying to do. Ann Brock of California had this to say:

“I like the tone of your publication. It’s not a “poor me” complaint sheet, but it helps other women realize that their problems as they deal with the “hormone culture” are not unique or even unusual. It also shows the progress that has been made and is being made. We’ve needed a forum so we can work toward opening things up even more. There are too many talented, skilled musicians being overlooked only because they’re female.”

Molly Snow Revisited

In the book review (Come and Go, Molly Snow by Mary Ann Taylor-Hall) that I did for WIB3 I mentioned that I had written to Ms. Taylor-Hall and was hoping for a reply. Bingo! I not only got a reply, I got a phone call, and a subscription to WIB! I also got her own essay about how she came to write the book. After numerous peregrinations around the globe, Ms. Taylor-Hall fetched up in Kentucky, acquired a second husband (who came with two adolescent boys), and finished “the novel I’d worked on all of my adult life. Nobody took it. While waiting around for nobody to take it...I started writing something about three women sitting around a table peeling peaches.” Her father had died and her mother was dying.

“Why I chose to write about a fiddler who’d lost her child I’ll never know.” To paraphrase Prissy, from Gone With The Wind, she didn’t know nuthin’ ’bout playing the fiddle. She learned. She went to bluegrass festivals (she’s been to Owensboro!), listened to

bluegrass music, and read Bluegrass Unlimited. She talked to musicians and, most importantly, listened, with a keen ear, to them talking to each other. Several years later, the novel was finished. She did let Laurie Lewis read it before publication to catch any fundamental errors about fiddle playing. There were minor corrections only. This was a quantum leap (there’s that physics kicking in!) for an author who started off thinking that a fiddle had frets! When she was young, Mary Ann Taylor-Hall wanted to be a singer. “But all I had to go on were five good notes and a lot of breath.” (Too bad she didn’t know about bluegrass then. Just kidding!) She says, “Many years later, I found this way to sing. We sing however we can." Amen! She sings like a lark. If you haven’t already read this book, once again I strongly recommend it. It is available at your local bookstore.

Votes For Women!

Folks, don’t forget the women when you are filling out your ballots for the IBMA Awards. It’s not that we want to vote for women just because they are women. NO INDEED!! But, sometimes, because we are not yet as visible as the men, we simply go unnoticed, even to ourselves, especially in the Instrumental Performers category. (Alison Brown is the only woman to ever win an Instrumental Performer Award.) Think hard when you cast your vote. And, although the first balloting is over, when you can indeed vote for anyone you choose, keep your eyes and ears open this next year for women who are excelling at what they do in bluegrass so you can vote for them on that first ballot. Remember, visibility is important. Recognition is important. If young women see other women being recognized for their achievements in bluegrass, they may be encouraged to take up an instrument or hang in with the one they’ve got!

Stories on Child Care Wanted

One of the hardest things that working women everywhere have to deal with is child care. This is especially true in bluegrass where there is much travel coupled with little money. Now, I could do a whole issue on the trials and tribulations of my own experiences (such as the time we came back from a weekend gig and paid the babysitter more than we made!) but I would much rather share the space! So, I am asking and encouraging you to send in your own stories. What were your best of times? What were your worst of times? Did any of you actually quit playing because of child care difficulties? How helpful were your husbands? Was extended family an option? How did you handle being away from your little kids? How did they handle it? There is much to explore here and very little has been said. Do “those memories still haunt you?” Please, share them with us!

—Murphy Henry

Letters…

Dear WIB,

Thank you for identifying, validating, and supporting the unique experience of women in bluegrass. Recently my husband and I attended a bluegrass concert in North Carolina in which the leader for a nationally known band made a comment to the audience. He said, “Yeah, if she can’t cook cornbread, cut a switch...” I was shocked and appalled [but] recognized he may have thought it was just a harmless joke. However, everyone else, including all the other women, was laughing up a storm. This incident reflects a basic attitude that we are somehow second class citizens, existing to serve or be dominated. In response, one may say, “So what? You can’t expect everyone to share your values, Toni.” True enough, but I would like to offer the following food for thought. Those who grace the stage are ascribed a certain status; performers are revered and adored in our society; [they] are treated like heroes, viewed as role models... Who would even pay attention to such a comment? Consider the fourteen-year-old who emulates that singer’s every voice lick, mannerism, and comment. Or perhaps the man who mistreats his wife and/or daughter(s) and who is justified in his reprehensible attitudes and behavior by such a comment from someone he admires. Our words are indeed powerful. I acknowledge freedom of speech in this country but those responsible performers who truly deserve our adoration are those who understand the power of the spoken language, their unique position in society, and the influence they possess as a result. Ignorance is not pretty, especially amplified. And, women, stop laughing at these stupid jokes...”

—Toni Murphy, Raleigh, NC

Dear WIB,

Yes, there have been many times I’ve been disappointed, mad, embarrassed, even to the point of quitting. I’ve been at jams where backs have been turned, have had comments made about the keys I play in (Bb and C#) but I’ve discovered the good musicians have no problem. Yet most of the worst [comments] were early on when I first started and now they are fewer and far between. Spent a lot of rides coming home from jams in tears due to the treatment. I was very insecure earlier about my ability and now am somewhat more aggressive and have improved on my rhythm playing and am vocally stronger. Yet I still find that if several of the group aren’t there for jams, that does make it more difficult...Had it not been for my husband’s support and encouragement and Bob’s [her singing partner] belief in our sound, I would have probably given up years ago. But, thanks to them, I am doing something I love—performing music.

—Becky Stephens, Kentucky Heritage, Gordon, OH

Ratifications

By Casey Henry

Well, school is finally out. After 180 days and all my exams (I had to take them all because I have a habit of taking off school to play bluegrass and therefore was not exempt), I am finally free to take up this summer’s occupation: learning to play the fiddle.

I cannot, truthfully, say starting to play the fiddle or taking up the fiddle because I did that in January of 1994. We had had a tremendous amount of snow and I needed something to do while I was cooped up in the house with the three other members of my family. The fiddle provided a welcome distraction and kept me intermittently amused for eight months, when after playing Soldier's Joy in class for a history project, I let it drop. Recent events have persuaded me to take it up again. The most significant of these events was a baby shower we held for David and Gay McLaughlin. As always happens when a bunch of musicians congregate, there was jamming. And, as always happens, the four main instruments (banjo, bass, guitar, mandolin) were quickly taken. I thought to myself, “If I could only play the fiddle, there would be a perfect niche in this jam session.” But I didn’t at the time, so I just had to play a second banjo, a rather unsatisfying position.

This summer I have set about to change all that and give myself a useful position. And the journey might not be as hard as I had thought. I picked the fiddle up yesterday for the first time in seven months and was pleasantly surprised to find that, after knocking a little rust off my fingers, I am just as good as I was seven months ago. Maybe all that information just needed time to ferment and is now ready to drink, er, play. Some of Murphy’s Misfits have kindly extended an invitation to join their weekly jam session and I will be glad to take them up on it. So maybe when Owensboro rolls around I’ll be able to hack out a tune or two and find a niche there in some nice easy jam session. Even if there is already one fiddle, a second fiddle is looked upon much more benevolently than another banjo.

So, this summer I will toil diligently along on the fiddle all the time I’m not working down at Bluegrass Unlimited (my other summer occupation) and hopefully this stint will turn out more successfully than the last.

"Take Your Pillow from Home and Don't Ever Let Them Have Your

Guitar."

An interview with Mary Jo Leet and Suzanne Thomas of the Dry Branch

Fire Squad

Mary Jo Leet, from Dayton, Ohio, did not pick up a guitar until she was 23. She was a listener. To folk and blues. Then, looking for some live folk music one day, she found Frank Wakefield and other locals picking bluegrass in the park and was “baptized in bluegrass.” Still, she was a listener. Then she saw her first woman playing bluegrass: Suzanne Edmundson (now Thomas), on stage with the Hot Mud Family. “I can do that!” Mary Jo thought. “She was such a good guitar player and her hand was so small.” Also, Suzanne “played bluegrass guitar like a man.” And not just any man but Red Allen himself. After that “eye-opener,” Mary Jo learned to play guitar so she could join jams and sing harmony.

Her arrival on stage was courtesy of Ron Thomason, who, in 1976, was starting his own band and inviting people up to pick. Mary Jo, the listener, scared to death, was pestered by friends to get up and sing. “I never did anything like that.” But she got up and did some gospel harmony. “We had a good time and they liked the harmony so that’s kinda how that started.” From 1977 she played part-time with the band, going full-time in 1984 when Dave Edmundson joined on the fiddle. “They really needed a guitar player at that point.” Mary Jo met Charlie Leet in 1983, married him in 1984, and he joined Dry Branch in 1989. No longer did she have to be his “Tuesday night girl.” She could see him every night of the week.

Suzanne Thomas, also from Dayton, played guitar, clawhammer banjo, mandolin, and piano with the Hot Mud Family from 1970 until they broke up in 1989. She joined Dry Branch in January 1990 and has been adding her powerful voice, cross-picked guitar, and clawhammer banjo to the show ever since.

Suzanne, you said your father was a musical genius...

Suzanne: Yeah, he played swing music and he played saxophone...

So, how did you get from that into bluegrass?

S: Old-time music was really in my family and also where I grew up there were people who played this in my neighborhood in Dayton. I lived in Dayton till I was about eleven. That was like a little hillbilly ghetto...a little hillbilly heaven right there... the west side of Dayton, Ohio. So this kind of music was indigenous and my parents were transplanted

hillbillies [from Kentucky] who got sophisticated so they didn’t want any part of it. I'm like a throwback.

In the old-time community were there any women?

S: I really didn’t see very many women playing this kind of music.

Mary Jo, were you coming up about the same time, in the same area?

Mary Jo (coyly): A few years later. [Much loud laughter.] I’m sorry, two years later. Yes, Dayton, but my family wasn’t into bluegrass or country music. In fact, they didn’t have any live music.

So how did you get into the bluegrass? Just by being exposed to this Dayton community?

MJ: I was listening to folk music in the early ’60s. And you could find a lot of folk music and looking for folk music you would run into hillbillies. You were in Dayton, so if you’d go to enough places sooner or later you’d run into a bluegrass bunch and it just knocked me out.

But again there were no women playing?

S: The community that would play that kind of music were pretty hard core traditional hillbillies and women didn’t do that.

What made y‘all different?

S: Well, I said, “I can do that.”

MJ: And, by golly, you can!

S: I didn’t mean like “I can do that.” I meant like, “That’s an option. I could do that.” Why did no other women think that?

S: I’m real competitive, I think.

What was the first instrument you learned to play?

S: Actually, I learned to play the piano first. And I really started playing the guitar when I was about 13 and then I just put it down and I never thought about it again until about 5 years later...

But it was easy for you?

S: I don’t think it’s real easy...

If it was easy everybody would do it?

S: No, actually, what I do is easy...because I don’t try to do anything that’s not easy. [Much loud laughter.] I never try to play anything hard. Why work harder than you need to? [Laughter.] I don’t like playing things too hard.

You just seem to pick up these instruments and...

S: Well, what happens with me is I can pick up something and I can sort of catch on to some of it right away and then I get as good as I’m ever gonna be in about two months. I go from zero to mediocre in two months and then I just never get any better so I stop doing it.

But there were no other women playing, especially when you were coming up, so you couldn't get together and trade licks...

S: When I started, we would play at festivals and I was it until Sunday when there’d be Janette Cooke [of the Cooke Duet].

But when guys learn to play, they get together and they exchange licks and they talk about this and that but for us there were never any other women...

S: I always did that with guys. I was a tomboy when I was little and I’ve spent my whole life trying to prove [I could do] whatever they did as good as them.

MJ: But, when I met you, you played music so well, Suzanne, that you could play with them and show them up...

S: You know, I’ve never been shut out of a jam session. Never. I read about this and I think, god, that’s so weird. That never happened to me.

MJ (emphatically): But, only because you were such a good player they couldn’t keep you out.

S: Whenever I would have an instrument, I was not a woman, I was a player. And so I don’t think I was discriminated against because somehow it didn’t occur to them that I was a woman.

[Much loud laughter from MJ.] They didn’t think about me being a woman. It did not occur to them to think about it at all.

So, Mary Jo, you think Suzanne was accepted in jam sessions because she was so good?

MJ: Yes, they could not keep her out. She could out-play ’em and they had to let her in. They were like, “Here’s a hot picker. Get in here and pick. Do you know this? Let’s play this. Can you follow this?” Read a few chords and she’s pumping out the jams. You were an excellent musician. You have a wonderful understanding of music. S: I was just competitive.

Aggressive?

S (emphatically): Yes. I was just real aggressive. I think it was because I did learn from and play with guys. I’ve always been in bands with guys. Mary Jo’s the first woman I’ve been in a band with long term. [Lisa Ornstein played fiddle with Hot Mud for a little while.]

What about your cross picking stuff? You really downplay that, Suzanne, but it's awful good. Did you teach yourself that?

S: Yes.

MJ: For hours, and hours and hours...it wasn’t hours it was weeks.

S: No, actually, it wasn’t but it was real intense though. It was real intense. MJ: It was days and weeks. You played the banjo. I remember going to visit you during that time and you sat in the kitchen and you said, “Just sit down here, I gotta do this...” And she’s frailing, and frailing and frailing...

S: I’m in recovery now. [Much loud laughter.] I’m a frailaholic.

MJ: I’ll never forget. I sat there for two hours. I don’t think you stopped playing the banjo the whole time...

S: Probably not. I used to have this group called the Thursday Afternoon Ladies Banjo Society...there were all these women who wanted me to teach them how to play the banjo. So I said, “Why don’t we all come to my house and get together?” I didn’t work with any of them individually. So it ended up being like six or seven [banjo players] and people who also played guitar and fiddle. No men were allowed and we’d sit there by the wood stove and eat chips and drink wine and play all these tunes. And that was my first real experience at working with women on that kind of level. It was so cool.

What do you think is the biggest difference you can see in women playing together and men playing together?

S: If you’re in a jam session, there’s basically a competitive tension with men. I have these girlfriends that I get together with, that I went to high school with, and we’ll sit up for hours and it’s just real relaxed and nobody wears a bra...And the Thursday Afternoon Ladies Banjo Society was a lot like that. Everybody could finally relax and just play music and have a good time. And when I say “competitive tension” I don’t mean it’s an actual competition, even an informal actual competition. It isn’t that. It’s that everybody wants to out-rooster everybody else. At all times.

[Rude remarks ending with, “Oh, turn the tape recorder off!”]

All right, Mary Jo, are you a jammer?

MJ: A reluctant jammer, I guess. [Laughter.]

Why do you say “reluctant jammer?"

MJ: You know, it is hard to jam. The best advice I got was from Linda Elkins who said, “Don’t give him your guitar.” You know, when they reach over and say, “Hey, little lady, that’s a nice guitar you got there. Let me play it.” Say no. And you have to do that. I don’t know, jamming...I love to play. I wanted to be in a band so I would have to play...Not jamming, just playing.

S: This is the difference. Men jam and women play. They call it jamming, for heaven’s sakes, we call it playing. Now, which sounds the more cooperative to you? Jamming or playing? Would you rather jam or play?

I don’t know if you read the interview I did with Lynn [Morris] but she was was talking about auditioning for some of the all-male bands and they wouldn’t even give her an audition...

S: See, I would never have done that.

Never have asked to audition? Or...

S: No, I might have asked to audition. I would audition. I would have bullied them into it. I would have said, “Look, I asked to audition, you said I could audition, now you see that I’m a woman and you don’t want me to audition, that’s just bull...You know, I’m here to audition and that’s what I’m going to do and you, by god, are going to listen.” Wow. [To MJ] Ooh, she is aggressive isn’t she? [Much laughter.] I think that's great.

S: I grew up around a bunch of guys trying to push me around. And I wasn’t going to have it. And my mother was real assertive, my grandmother was real assertive, I come from a long line of bitchy women on both sides of my family...[MJ screams laughing and we all dissolve in laughter.]

When you started in music, were they [your parents] supportive of you in that? S: Oh, yeah. I sort of broke it to them gently by folk music. My mother bought me my first guitar. She was working and she bought it on time. So, they were real supportive. And they didn’t even especially like the kind of music I did except when I tried to sing like Joan Baez. They liked that. They thought that was all right. And then I started reverting to my real self. And they said, “Oh, god, caterwauling!” [Laughter.] So, Mary Jo, you never were raised with any of these [women can’t do this] attitudes? MJ: I didn’t know about “girls can’t do.” I always thought you can do anything you want. I really in my mind never thought there was anything girls couldn’t do. I just didn’t think that way. I mean, by the time I got through high school I kinda knew that was what was thought [by other people] but I was already molded by then.

S: At a very early age, I saw that boys got better treatment. And I’ve always been really competitive with guys and set out to prove that I can hit the ball as far as they can. I’ve always wanted to beat them at their game. Isn’t that awful? It’s just awful. You DON’T really think that's just awful?

S: I do in a way. I think in a way it’s kind of horrible.

Murphy (plaintively): Why?

S: Well, I mean you know...

'Cause it's not a common attitude?

S: No, no it’s just...it’s inhumane or something. It isn’t nice.

Since y'all were some of the first women in bluegrass music and there wasn’t a lot happening for women back then, do you wish you'd come along later? Do you think this is a good time for women? If you were as young as Alison Krauss would there be more opportunity?

MJ and S: Yeah. Yeah I do.

S: I think even if I were as young as Alison Krauss, even though I’m real aggressive in some ways, I really don’t have any desire to be a star. I like being part of a group. I have a desire to be involved in, participating in, moments of really good music. That’s what I really care about. I don’t care about that other stuff. Obviously I don’t care about that other stuff. Who else do you know that’s been doing this as long as I have that’s remained as obscure?

Murphy (thinking hard): Uh...not many. But that's one of my questions. Is that by choice? How do you feel about that? I mean, you've got a great voice, you're a great player... S: I don’t know how I feel. I mostly don’t think about it. I just want to play good music, I want to record good music, I want to be famous eighty years after I’m dead. Then, you know, I don’t have to deal with it. I think it’s because I don’t care about being non-obscure. If you stay identified as bluegrass or folk music, you can [play] till you drop. If you are identified as a country artist, when you get to be my age, you can’t even get jobs opening Big Bears any more. So, who needs it? I’d rather be a fairly obscure traditional music performer so I can have something to do when I’m old.

Y’all obviously like what you're doing. You drove down here [to Virginia] from Ohio to play a gig and you're happy that you’re going to get to spend one night before you turn around and go back.

S: The driving is the part we really like. [Laughter.] We just do all this other stuff so we’ll have a reason to drive. [Laughter.] And we’re always taking those male short-cuts. “It’s a few miles out of the way but it takes a little longer.” [Huge laughter.] Well, to kind of wrap this thing up, do you have any advice to offer to the young women coming up in the music today?

[Big Silence.] Murphy, prodding: Do you think it's a good thing to do? Would you advise them to stay in? Get out?

MJ: The best advice is, don’t make it your day job. You guys [Hot Mud] did that with great success for a lot of years but I don’t know...

S: It’s just that we lowered our standard of living to that which could be supported by a musician’s salary.

MJ: If you’re going to play music for a living, you’d better be willing to be a starving artist. And especially in bluegrass. You’re not going to make a living. So, if you want to play bluegrass music, look at the whole picture.

I did read in an article that that's all y'all's philosophy about keeping day jobs.

MJ: It takes a lot of pressure off the music. And it allows you to play better music because that pressure’s not there and you don’t have to take jobs because you need the work.

Suzanne, what was your advice?

S: I probably didn’t have any.

MJ: My advice also is don’t give him your guitar. [Laughter.]

S: I don’t have any advice. I’m not the kind of person who should be giving anyone advice.

MJ: Here’s Casey. Here’s this young woman sitting here and we’ll discount the fact that Murphy’s your mom and Red’s your dad. So, supposing she’s a normal kid... S: Always make sure that you take your pillow. [Loud laughter.]

MJ (admiringly): Excellent advice!

Anything else?

S: If you want to tell your daughter the two things that will get her through, it would be take your pillow from home and don’t ever let them have your guitar. Or your banjo. Or your fiddle.

That’s good. In fact, that might be the title of the article. [And you can see that it is.] S (afterthought): Oh! Festival advice is eat, drink, or ingest, in whatever mode is appropriate, anything somebody hands you at a festival. [Laughter, particularly from Casey.] Not their Pekingese or something. Also if you’ve been up all night at a festival, you can do a pretty acceptable job of washing your face in the dew on people’s bumpers. [Laughter. And Mary Jo saying, “Take it from one who knows!”]

S (in a sing-song voice): “After a night of sleeping on the ground under the van, I get up and I wash my face in the windshield.”

And on that note, we quit! Good thing! No telling what these wonderful, out-spoken bluegrass women would have said next!

P.S. I did a follow-up interview with Mary Jo on the phone and before we hung up she said, “There is one question that you didn't ask us that everybody always asks.” “What was that?" I replied. “You didn't ask us if Suzanne and I have trouble getting along with

each other because we are two women in the same band. Everybody always wants to know that.” Funny, that question never entered my mind.—MH

They’re Holding up the Ladder We’re Climbing On

Angels are the folks referred to in the lyric-title quoted above. We, as women, are climbing a ladder composed of rungs forged by “angels” from generations past. Years of getting the public ready to accept women as musicians have preceded us.

Juanita, a sixty-five-year-old rhythm guitar player, told me a tale that is all too common. Her father fronted a hillbilly band back in the ’30s and ’40s. She and several teenaged girlfriends were allowed to come and sing occasionally where he played, but he actively discouraged her from trying to learn an instrument. When she married, her husband also frowned severely on her hopes of being able to play music, so her guitar lay untouched under the bed all the time her children were home. After she was on her own again, in the late 1980s, she began attending old-time fiddlers’ meetings and took out her guitar, learning a few chords. She plays a strong rhythm on many three-chord songs, but realizes she doesn’t “hear” more subtle changes. She backs up fiddlers tirelessly and wants to play more but her health is fragile and she has little confidence in her ability to learn. She sings for her own pleasure and wonders if she could have gone further musically had she had the support of her family.

Within the last five years, I’ve listened to perhaps eighty women, all past retirement age, who told similar tales of having wanted to play music but having deferred to the male authority of their fathers, husbands, and even sons, who discouraged them from trying. Nearly all these women have approached me after performances, praising me for playing an instrument, then telling me of their own, unrealized dreams.

A few of these women wondered if they could still have a chance, and I’ve encouraged every one of them, showing them easy chords on guitar, mandolin, and banjo. Many of these ladies are widows now, with children grown and time available to learn an instrument, if their health allows.

Making music can improve the quality of life at any age, so, even though these women are never likely to become professional, we women musicians owe them much thanks and support. We can thank them for their support of our music. Their continual requests to play may have helped to pave the way for our being able to play music without asking permission.

—Elena Corey

Nancy Pate

On Singing At Funerals

Before the next funeral where I’m asked to sing, I’m going to clean the ball ends out of my guitar. I had never sung at a funeral prior to this spring. Now I’ve sung for two and it’s a different experience. The idea of performing was a little distasteful to me. I wished I could be invisible or out of the way somewhere, letting the music the family picked do its work, hoping to touch their hearts.

As with any appearance there were details to attend to: what to wear (do I have a plain dark dress?) and arranging child care with only a couple of days notice. Most importantly, I tried to think of anything I could do to minimize the obtrusiveness of my presence: practice the high notes, try (again) for perfect tuning. Cleaning out the broken string ends from my guitar simply didn’t occur to me.

I’ve performed at many weddings. Wedding crowds are easy to please; they’re determined to have a good time. But at a funeral, the listener’s expectations are so different. Some people want to be soothed, and the music is their balm. Some want to be touched by the memories a familiar song can bring. Some want to have their wound gently probed so they can find release in tears. The atmosphere seems fragile at a funeral, as if a missed note, a bungled chord, or a rattling guitar could be the jarring intrusion that spoils this time of reverie.

At the recent funeral of my grandmother, my much loved cousin sang. He has a beautiful baritone voice, and one of the songs he sang was my grandmother’s favorite hymn, In The Garden. I expected to cry; I wanted to cry. But I couldn’t. My reflective mood had earlier been shattered by hearing the preacher mix up the names of the survivors; he had two of my sisters married to each other’s husbands. It was a little thing, but off-putting enough to prevent me from being in tune with the music. For the two funerals where I sang, my twin goals were to create no disturbances, and, if possible, to contribute something positive to the service. At the first one, my sister Argen and I sang from the front of the funeral parlor chapel, a chilling atmosphere. The big question was what to do with her guitar? Should she hold it in her lap (awkward), or pull it out of the case just before our song (distracting)? She decided to leave it in the case, and that seemed to work well. But we felt very odd, standing and singing from the front, as if the people attending were an audience to entertain. And after one glance I had to avoid looking at the family, because I choked up; yet they were the group for whom we were really singing.

The second funeral took place in a gentler setting, the tiny but lovely old white clapboard Episcopal church in my hometown. The organ is up in the balcony, at the back of the church, and the family asked us to sing from there. This was a better situation, less of a performance; we were the “voices from on high.” Sound carried well from the balcony, too well, as I discovered shortly before the service when I took my guitar from its case. A couple of ball ends from broken strings rattled loudly. Rather than lay the guitar back down, I held it carefully on my lap until our first song. I remained a little apprehensive, but thankfully the string ends stayed quiet.

Afterwards, members of the family said our songs made them cry, “in a good way,” one lady reassured us. I didn’t interpret that as a compliment to our voices, but rather as an acknowledgement that the music had really touched their hearts. We did our job by putting the notes and the words out there, and then got out of the way. And maybe that’s the mark of a truly successful performance.

HORROR STORIES

“I would love to learn some of the “off’ chords...but just ask a fellow musician and he looks at you like ‘hey, gal, when did they let you out?’ Or, if you miss the chord a time or two, they decide it’s time to eat. If you’re given the opportunity to sing one, heaven forbid it be in “C” chord. And I tell you another thing to be cautious of in a jam session. Now, believe me, I appreciate the grinners as well as the pickers, but if you notice a male picker shifting his eyes from his instrument over to his wife, you’d better not sing harmony closer than three feet from that dude. He’ll quit picking and take the jam session to the other side of the building.”

—Janice Burgess, Crossville, TN

This next comment I’ve included because in my twenty years of teaching I’ve found it to be so true that it hurts.

“I never could sing in the keys they [the men] did. I thought I just couldn’t sing. Now I found the younger men are very supportive.”—Sue Coulter, Colorado Springs, CO WIB welcomes your comments, contributions, and letters. Because of limited space, these frequently will be edited. I try very hard to keep your exact words and, more important, your meaning.

Women in Bluegrass is a quarterly publication. Editor, Publisher, and HWICC, Murphy Henry. Layout and Computer Consultant, Red Henry. Address all correspondence to: Women in Bluegrass, POB 2498, Winchester, VA 22604.

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"I’m putting my money where my mouth is—also my heart. " (Scotty in Alaska) Keep in touch with what other women in bluegrass are thinking and doing!! Subscribe to the Women in Bluegrass Bulletin. Not a rehash of the same old bluegrass stuff, but women’s stories that no one is telling. To subscribe for 1 year (four issues), just fill out this form, and send $10.00 to this address (make checks to Women in Bluegrass): Women in Bluegrass

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Change of Life

The All Girl Boys, from California, who were desperately seeking a banjo player in WIB2, have recently added Sonia Shell on banjo. Sonia, formerly of Sidesaddle replaces Debbie Cotter who is moving to Oklahoma this summer (and desperately seeking bluegrass there! Help her out, ladies!).

All our sympathy goes to Dottie Eyler, her daughter Bonnie Eyler Young, and son Dale of the Carroll County Ramblers of Taneytown, Maryland, on the death of Leroy Eyler, husband, father, and leader of the band. Dottie and Leroy had been playing together for almost 45 years.

Congratulations to Gay McLaughlin, part-time bluegrass photographer, and her husband David, of Winchester, Virginia, on the birth of their first child, Mollie Shepherd McLaughlin, on the date of the summer solstice, June 21. Mollie weighed in at 6 lb. 8 oz. Both mother and daughter are doing well. Gay says she could use a little more sleep! In your dreams, Gay!

Congratulations also to Sandy Chrisco Hatley and her husband Gary, who are the proud parents of a third daughter, Kacie Lauren, born on April 24 weighing 8 lb. 6 oz. Sandy says she hardly has any time to pick now!