Bluegrass Music Fans Find Store Is Country-Pickin Good

At first glance, it looks like just another San Fernando Valley storefront--impersonal, easy to overlook. But the Blue Ridge Pickin Parlor in Canoga Park is Mecca for local bluegrass fans, people whose favorite performers are Bill Monroe, Earl Scruggs, Jim and Jesse, and Byron Berline.

A biker, dressed in black, approaches, toting a tiny mandolin case. Inside, devotees of bluegrass get their fix of country music chitchat, buy the latest copy of Fret magazine, or search the bins for hard-to-find labels such as Sun and Starday.

The walls are lined with banjos, mandolins, dobros (an acoustic version of a steel guitar), guitars and fiddles. There are midget fiddles for pint-size fiddlers, $80 imports from China that--if you can overlook the orangy shellac finish--are considered outstanding buys, and $3,000 fiddles from workshops of the masters.

It’s the kind of place that softens its written discount policy with a second sign: “You can always talk to Frank and see if he’ll make you a better deal. He’s been known to bend the rules before.”

Ken Tennesen opened the shop 12 years ago, when he was a Los Angeles policeman and looking for something to do when he retired. A guitar and banjo player himself, he imagined a relaxed retirement puttering around his shop.

When security jobs kept him too busy to handle the business end of the shop, he turned things over to his daughter, Tammy, and hired music teacher Frank Javorsek to run the lesson program. Javorsek married the boss’s daughter and the couple have focused their life on bluegrass music ever since.

These days, Tennesen and his son-in-law have friendly competition going as hosts of back-to-back Saturday morning programs on KCSN. Both programs are part of the station’s daylong block of “Country Music in the American Tradition.” They eschew Kenny Rogers and Larry Gatlin, preferring old-time country music.

Twice a month, on Sunday evenings, the Parlor’s record racks are pushed to the side and chairs are set up for jam sessions.

“It’s really a lot of fun,” Javorsek says. “You might find a 10-year-old playing along with a truck driver or a pediatrician or a middle-age housewife.”

The evening opens with a beginners’ workshop, where the music is played slowly. “Then it goes on to an open jam. It’s all spontaneous. vPeople of all levels come and are quite comfortable. We’ve had groups from here that now play professionally or semi-professionally,” Javorsek said.

“This is how people entertained themselves 60, 70 years ago. People got together and played music and danced.”

The Javorseks have, on occasion, rented the dance studio next door to hold old-fashioned socials with clog dancing.

More than 150 students a week take lessons in the shop’s small lesson rooms. One is a 4-year-old who loves to play Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry tunes on the mandolin. “He’s crazy about Johnny B. Goode,” Javorsek says.

The Javorseks take their business outside the store frequently, packing up picks, fiddles, sheet music, records and their two young sons to set up booths at bluegrass festivals all over the state.

The couple stage three-day Follows Camp bluegrass festivals at an Angeles National Forest campground in June and September.

“It’s quite an undertaking for us,” Javorsek said. “We’ve drawn 1,400 to 1,500 people” to each of the three-day events. “Everyone camps, and it’s a wonderful family environment, pretty tame for rock ‘n’ roll standards but great for families to be together.”

Dozens of performers sign up for the banjo and fiddle contests. At night, everyone gathers around campfires and little potbelly stoves for long jam sessions.

For Valley bluegrass fans, the Pickin Parlor’s bulletin board provides details of local concerts and jam sessions. Tennesen’s “Ken’s Pickin’ Party” (KCSN, 88.5 FM, Saturdays 8 to 11 a.m.) and Javorsek’s “Bluegrass Express” (following at 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.) include listings of festivals and concerts.

The Pickin Parlor and the Old Time Fiddle Assn. will provide a banjo and fiddle contest at the Granada Hills Masonic Temple Sept. 13.