Playing weeks and weeks of Stormy Monday

I wasn't terrribly surprised to see that Stormy Monday is probably the most-recorded blues song of 'em all, with at least 1,134 versions out there. Without a doubt it's the most played by bar bands.

It's a great song. T-Bone Walker originally played it, and the lyrics take you through a week of the blues:

"They Call it stormy Monday,
But Tuesday's just as bad ..."

It was also the first blues I've played in public, if you don't count Miles Davis' "All Blues," which is a jazz piece from his Kind Of Blue album.

But in my first sessions on stage, this harmonica player discovered something about colliding perceptions and reality:

• All harmonica players do nothing but blues.
• All bar bands know "Stormy Monday."
• Therefore, all harp players end up playing "Stormy Monday." A lot.

It's hysterical. Every bar band in the world plays "Stormy Monday." In fact, with many it's the only blues they know. They play it to "prove" they know blues, but in actuality it just proves the band doesn't know much of anything.

So after years of playing it, and even hearing it in my sleep, I ran out of ideas. Got tired of playing it. There are only so many ways you can attack a slow-blues standard, and I probably used all of them at some point. Double-time in the solos. Long pauses and held notes, going into clusters of sixteenth-notes. I quoted other songs -- my favorite version was throwing a few notes from that other blues chestnut, "After Hours," into it. I had to do something with it. In 1994, I stopped playing it.

In a famous interview, jazz innovator Charlie Parker said he had the same feeling with "Cherokee." He'd played it so many times he could do it while nodding out (and apparently he often did). Got sick of that song. But he did break through that wall, by using the upper intervals of the chords. This gave him a larger pool of notes to work with, and he said he came alive musically at that point.

I didn't go that far; even in my fantasies there's no way I can get close to Parker's musicianship. Instead, I chose to "boycott" the song. Any time it came up on stage, I sat it out. Which was all right; I was working in more of a country/rock direction then. I'd do other blues every so often, but indulged my interest in other musical forms.

It wasn't until 10 years later that I consented to play "Stormy Monday" again. I was playing with a vocalist named Jayne Valentine, who had this really powerful, expressive voice. We also shared an intuituve musical rapport, and every time we got together on stage, sparks would fly. More than a few folks swore we were an "item," that's how high the energy level was. But one night she decided to sing T-Bone's song, and because it was someone with the talent level and emotional level of Jayne, I joined her on it. And again, the song came alive.

Working with folks like that would put muscle, blood, and breath to any song.

T-Bone is still one of the great blues guitarists, and Stormy Monday is still a great song.

I'd play it again.

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Bluegrass has a high purist quotient

Here's something I recently picked up from Twitter, and I'm running it with all the Twit hashtags intact:

digg_dugg (Douglas Whitworth): Am I really listening to a #ymsb song that has drums in it? #bluegrass fail #disappointed boys you're making monroe turn in his grave.

He's referring to Yonder Mountain String Band, a Colorado group that mixes its bluegrass with several other musical forms. This group makes no claims that they're the pure stuff. 

I had to laugh at digg_dugg's tweet. I love bluegrass, and of all the genres around, it's the most fun to play. It's a high-energy music. Almost impossible to feel the weight of the world when you're playing or listening to bluegrass. And it's tougher than it looks. While there's nothing terribly complex about bluegrass, an instrumentalist really needs some good chops to play it well.

But bluegrass probably has more purists among its players than any other type of music. Certainly more so than jazz, than country, than blues, maybe even more so than classical. A great many bluegrass players prefer to stay true to its roots.

Here's how the bluegrass purist will explain it: Bill Monroe, who is considered the father of the genre, took old string-band and gospel music, stuck a rocket engine on it, and lit it with his mandolin. Most of his early bands used flat-picked guitar, a fiddle or two, an upright bass, maybe some banjo in the background, his mando, and some great vocal harmonies.

To this day, many bluegrass pickers consider themselves traditionalists, sticking with the Monroe playbook. What's funny is that, although Ralph Stanley was another bluegrass founding father, banjo wasn't really a front-and-center instrument until Earl Scruggs arrived on the scene.

There's also an accepted way to use amplification in bluegrass: One microphone. The vocalists gather around it when they sing, and when someone takes an instrumental solo he steps up to that mic. That's how it's done, and sometimes the instrumentalists will form a line behind the soloist to take a lead.

I'll admit there's a lot of that traditionalist in me. Some years ago I saw one bluegrass band use an electric bass guitar, and immediately shut my eyes. I didn't want to see it. I believe there's a commandment against using electric bass in bluegrass. Maybe it's in Leviticus.

So I can understand what the guy on Twitter means about seeing a bluegrass band using a drum kit. Yeah, that would be enough to bring Bill Monroe out of the grave to put a stop to it.

In string band music, the thump of the bass, the guitar work, and the mandolin "chop" on the two and four beats is generally all the timekeeping you need. It's plenty. Shoot, I don't even like to see someone playing spoons, probably because I've yet to hear one play them with any sense of rhythm.

I've been involved in several late-night debates about traditional bluegrass, mostly because I play harmonica -- which is not considered one of the "genuine article" instruments. But sonically, harmonica is similar to fiddle in that you can do your double stops and sustain your tones, and the two instruments are in about the same tonal range. So most of the time I'd play fiddle lines in a bluegrass setting.

Some years ago bluegrass picker/advocate "Dr. Banjo" (Pete Wernick) created a stir in the harmonica community when he said that harp was OK for bluegrass ballads, but just doesn't sound good on your fast songs. Of course it can, and it does, but the trick -- again -- is to play fiddle runs. One of the best practitioners of this is Cara Cooke, a harmonica player in Austin, Texas. I learned a great deal by listening to her ideas on her Web site, then sitting down to listen to all the bluegrass fiddle players I could find.

For a couple of years, I worked in a bluegrass band with Lane Gregory on guitar, Wil St. John on mandolin, and Jamie McDonnell on washtub bass. "It's an original bluegrass instrument," Jamie would say of his bass. Wrong. Monroe's bands used an upright bass for those low tones. But Jamie's instrument was used for a lot of string-band stuff, which predates bluegrass, so I'll give him his props there. But then, our links to the traditionalists got blown out the window because we amplified our instruments. That's just not done.

A lot of bluegrass folks were wondering what Bela Fleck was thinking when he put together his first Flecktones band: Bela on banjo, Victor Wooten on electric (!) bass, Howard Levy on (!) harmonica, and Future Man on (!!!) synth-drumitar. Yeah, a fingertip-controlled drum machine shoved into the body of an electric guitar. An unbelievable sound, but it sure wasn't pure bluegrass. Bela never claimed that it was; it was as much jazz as it was bluegrass.

Gordon Small, a banjo picker/bassist I used to play with, was probably the biggest bluegrass purist I've ever met. He was quick to tell me what was and what wasn't bluegrass, though he liked what I was doing. But Gordon told me about seeing Bela Fleck play a few traditional bluegrass songs live, on solo banjo. He said it was straight out of the church of Monroe and Stanley. 

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(Photo: Bill Monroe set the standard that still lives on.)