By Rick Anderson
“It changed my life. That music — I sought it out so hard.”
— Ron Thomason, on his youthful discovery of the Stanley Brothers
My parents tell me that when I was a toddler, my favorite activities were listening to music and looking at books, and that given the opportunity to do both, I would do them simultaneously for hours. They also tell me that I had favorite composers and asked for them by name, and there is documentary evidence that I had memorized songs from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas by age three. But for some reason I’ve never fully understood, the first music that really took me by the throat and refused to let go was old-time country and bluegrass. I was fascinated by that music by the time I was 10 or 11 years old.
When I was in my early teens and had exhausted my local library’s collection of bluegrass and old-time records, I walked to the next town over and exhausted its library’s as well. I would set my radio alarm clock to wake me at 7:00 am every Saturday with WHRB’s “Hillbilly at Harvard” show. Waking up that early was hard — I wasn’t then and am not now a morning person — but I would lie in bed and struggle to keep my eyes and ears open so I wouldn’t miss a single cut.
I think now that one of the reasons the music became such an obsession for me was that it was an artificially scarce commodity. In reality, there was plenty of it out there, but it was scarce to me for two reasons:
There were no really effective ways to find the stuff that was available for free; there was no Internet and no Google to search it with, and library catalogs were print-based and bitterly ineffective (and my local libraries didn't have much in their collections anyway).
I couldn't afford to buy it for myself. Plenty of records were commercially available and I knew where to find them in the Boston area, where I grew up — the Harvard Coop, Cheapo’s in Central Square, Discount Records on Boylston, Briggs & Briggs, the small but lovingly selected record bins at instrument shops like Sandy’s and the Music Emporium in Porter Square — but I had no money. I’d go to those stores anyway just to flip through the records and think about which ones I’d buy first if I ever could, the fire of my ardor stoked by the warm, slightly musty scent of cardboard and vinyl or (even better) the wood-glue-and-varnish smell of guitars, banjos and mandolins lining the walls of the Music Emporium.
The instruments tantalized me even more than the records did. While I wore out the few records I did own, I fantasized about making those sounds myself — the growling bass runs that Jimmy Martin would toss off like curling wood shavings from his customized Martin D-45; the throaty chatter and bark of Bill Monroe’s and David Grisman’s Lloyd Loar-model Gibson mandolins; the brightly flashing cascades of arpeggios from J.D. Crowe’s prewar Gibson Mastertone banjo.
I felt like an impostor every time I walked into the Music Emporium because I couldn’t play any of the gorgeous instruments that filled the store with that wonderful smell, and when I walked on the creaky wooden floor and inhaled the air I felt like I was taking something that wasn’t mine. When I saw real customers sitting on stools trying out the guitars and mandolins, their fingers magically making — right there in my silently awestruck presence — sounds that some part of me had always thought could only be created in a make-believe place, I felt as if I were intruding on the playground of a more advanced race.
My musical drive was like a river, and as a river always does, it had its way: I eventually learned to play the banjo (both bluegrass and clawhammer styles, though I would finally settle on the latter), the guitar, the bass, the mountain dulcimer, eventually the Irish flute.
And I kept digging up information wherever I could. I read about tonewoods and inlay techniques and scalloped bracing and fretboard binding and block lamination. I learned to hear the difference between Scruggs-style and Keith-style bluegrass banjo playing, and between the tone of a prewar flathead banjo (like Earl Scruggs played) and a Whyte Laydie (favored by melodic pioneer Bill Keith).
I wolfed down every crumb of information I could find, wherever I could find it. Every bit of it was precious and delicious, all the more so because each was so hard-won.
Most of my memories of late childhood and adolescence have something to do with seeking that music out so hard — either digging like an archaeologist for traces of its past in books and on records, or wearing grooves into my fingertips trying to make the sounds myself.
Now I own more recordings than I have room for, and plenty of books, and I have good instruments and opportunities to play them. I love seeing my fine Chanterelle banjo hanging on the wall in my music room, and I love taking it down and letting the tunes fall away from me like smooth round stones skipping down a mountainside.
But there’s a part of me that misses the seeking and the struggle, and the thrill that came with every song I heard for the first time and every scrap of biographical information I dug up in a library or a used book store. I wouldn’t trade my current abundance for the former scarcity, but I do kind of miss the thrill that came with seeking that music out so hard, and at long last finding it.