Canter Bridge

Somewhere in an interval between sets by The Harmans, Donna Ulisse & the Poor Mountain Boys, Balsam Range, the bodacious Monroe Crossing, and the Josh Wiliams Band, some errant soul ventured the observation that you can line up the same five instruments multiple times at an event like this one and the sound will be completely different every time.

Welcome to Bluegrass!

Strange it is that I should be welcoming you, for not 24 hours ago I was a stranger to this odd, intrepid, poignant, hilarious little slice of americana.

Then Old Pal Gene Green and his Luscious Wife Debbie summoned me to the four-hour journey northward to sample the goods at the Naperville Bash. Unexpectantly, Spring-Break-Son Christopher and Ubiquitous Pal Lucas joined me for the journey and the frolic.

And, oh, what a party!

One of the particular enchantments of this vast, beguiling nation of ours is the unending pockets of subcultures. Each, its own vocabulary fluent and intact, carries on in uneven dialogue with the Big Thing that is americana as seen from 30,000 feet.

But you can’t see Naperville from up there. Or Bluegrass. Nor the exquisitely self-deprecating The Harmons with their 13-year-old Man-Child or the evocative voice of Donna Ulisse and her obedient troupe of musical Male Things nor the hilarious prowess of the over-achieving Balsam Range nor the single-microphone choreography of the those inestimable—and hitherto unknown—oddities that comprise the magnificent Monroe Crossing.

One asks, in pensive moments, how such sinewy, self-aware, calculating, astonishing American art could carry on, largely unperceived save to its devotees, between these parenthetical oceans.

Yet it does, in festivals, campgrounds, and trailer parks. This is one of the reasons for which America, much critiqued, is best not despised.

She is an endless range of fertile soils and bow-tied geniuses and oddball fiddlers who, in a lick, can reduce grown men to inarticulate tears with the beauty of four strings nobly touched.

Yesterday, to this distracted chronicler, Bluegrass was a name and an ignored station on Sirus Satellite Radio.

Today, the same word evokes a community, a current, a subculture, an ineffable beauty trucked up in suits, fiddles, banjos, and an unerring touch for the kind of humor that says, ‘Beauty is here, check your pretense at door, may I shake your hand, friend, we were expecting you …’