BLUEGRASS: Growin’ All Around : Calico Ghost Town Festival Today, Sunday Launches Series of Southland Musical Jubilees

They began swarming in Friday, in pickups and Porsches, BMWs, beat-up Chevys and RVs, gobbling up the best camping sites for the evening. Lawyers and auto mechanics, optometrists and insurance salesmen: people from all walks of life, all headed for Calico Ghost Town and festooned with camping gear--and guitars, fiddles, mandolins and banjos.

No, it’s not an early Rose Bowl Parade.

Bluegrass season is here.

“We traditionally draw between 10,000 and 12,000 people,” says Don Tucker, organizer of the Calico Ghost Town Spring Bluegrass Festival. “In 1976 for the Bicentennial, we were one of the biggest events in the nation. We had 24,000 that year. Made all the wires.” Tucker laughs good-naturedly, saying: “I don’t know if I can deal with that again!”

But with more than 250 acres in and around the desert park, there’s room for all the campers as well as those who drop in for the day.

The Calico festival kicks off a whole series of Southland bluegrass jubilees. For here, as around the nation and the world, bluegrass has managed to draw thousands of enthusiastic fans--in spite of the prevalence of synthesized popular music.

Informal Pickin’ Sessions

And that just may be why bluegrass is so popular: It’s the kind of music that encourages those who love listening to it to play it too--or at least try.

At a “hootenanny,” practically every fan carries an instrument of some sort. And after the scheduled performers have done their bit, informal pickin’ sessions begin around the campfire.

“My biggest love about it is that it’s participation music,” says bluegrass fan and amateur mandolinist Julie Harris, a Simi Valley mother of two. She and her husband, Bob, who plays the banjo, rarely miss a bluegrass festival. “It’s a real family event,” she says.

An American art form, bluegrass grew from the varied musical traditions of blues, folk and gospel in the rural Southeast and jelled into a recognizable style in the early 1940s with the innovative artistry of mandolinist Bill Monroe and his band, the Blue Grass Boys.

During the next 20 years, bluegrass--a generally upbeat, foot-stompin’ amalgam of reels and jigs--developed an army of fans in the United States and abroad, in spite of the fact that it was almost exclusively recorded in Nashville, Tenn. Many American bluegrass musicians enjoy star status in Europe, especially in Ireland.

The Nashville Bluegrass Band, the prime attraction of this year’s Calico festival, has grown so popular internationally that it toured China last year and this summer will give concerts in Bahrain, Qatar, Egypt, Iraq and Bangladesh.

The virtuoso playing of early bluegrass pioneers such as guitarist Lester Flatt, banjoist Earl Scruggs and fiddle player Vassar Clements elevated bluegrass to the status of a solo instrumentalist’s forum and spawned a whole new generation of accomplished string pickers: Tony Rice, David Grisman and Ricky Scaggs among its better-known contemporary exponents.

Even some country/rock groups, such as the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, have made forays into the bluegrass idiom.

But during the ‘70s and early ‘80s, as the country music industry became more commercialized and mainstream pop-oriented--which included the incorporation of electronic instruments and slick orchestral backup--it largely left its folk roots behind.

Thus, bluegrass went underground with its die-hard aficionados, who prize the notion that in it resided many traditional medleys from grass-roots America, and--perhaps even more prized--that it was and is performed almost exclusively on acoustic instruments.

Bluegrass came to Southern California in the 1960s.

The first major festivals were organized by UCLA in 1963, along with the annual Topanga Banjo-Fiddle Contest, which celebrated its 27th anniversary last July in El Camino. In 1973 bluegrass enthusiast and musician Dick Tyner brought bluegrass pioneers Monroe and the late guitarist Flatt out from Nashville to perform in the first Golden West Bluegrass Music Festival in Norco, Riverside County.

The Norco festival, still promoted by Tyner, is ordinarily the first of four important annual spring bluegrass get-togethers in the Southland. However, due to last month’s heavy rainfall, the Norco festival was rescheduled, so this year’s roster is leading off with the Calico Ghost Town Spring Festival.

The Calico festival--today and Sunday--will be followed by the Golden West Bluegrass Music Festival at Norco, May 27-29; Follows Camp Family Bluegrass Festival, June 3-5, and Huck Finn’s Country & Bluegrass Jubilee June 17-19.

Many Southland bluegrass fans spend their spring and early summer traveling from festival to festival, pickin’ and grinnin’ and camping out.

Frank Javorsek is proprietor of the Blue Ridge Pickin’ Parlor, a combination instrument shop, jamming headquarters and bluegrass music school in Canoga Park. He calls his shop “an oasis (of bluegrass) in a sea of heavy metal,” confirming that “bluegrass is growing in Southern California.”

Javorsek, who co-produces the Follows Camp Festival with Joe Davison, camp manager, and sets up his instrument/accessory stands at the Norco festival, also notes that “There’s been a steady increase in the number of people attending the festivals in the last few years, and more events going on now. And more of the young students (at the Pickin’ Parlor) are interested in studying traditional music.”

Ever-Changing Sound

But lest one get the idea that bluegrass music is staid, unchanging or strictly folk-oriented, it’s important to remember that from its very beginnings it was a new idiom founded on a bedrock of traditional music, not merely a reinterpretation of old tunes.

While the generally fast pace and modal quality of bluegrass encourages instrumental virtuosity, it also inspires stylistic inventiveness. New songs and compositions are constantly added to the repertoire of what is considered “authentic” bluegrass, and its proponents constantly draw upon new influences.

Acclaimed 24-year-old fiddle player Stuart Duncan, a native of Southern California, began playing at the Calico festivals when he was 8 or 9 years old. He now plays with the highly regarded Nashville Bluegrass Band. He expresses the aims of contemporary bluegrass musicians this way:

Still Progressive

“We’re trying to present bluegrass traditionally, with acoustic instruments, but putting it across in a very contemporary style, with a lot of new tunes,” Duncan says. “When it came out in the ‘40s, bluegrass was considered ‘uptown music,’ city-slicker stuff--not traditional. It was progressive then, and it’s progressive now.”

The young fiddler met Nashville Bluegrass Band guitarist Pat Enright back in 1974 at the Calico festival. As Duncan matured and mastered his chosen instrument, he was invited to make appearances with various groups around the country until, three years ago, he was asked to join the band. Now a resident of Nashville, he’s looking forward to returning to play at Calico this spring before leaving for the Middle East.

Out in the Desert

“Calico’s the greatest,” he says enthusiastically. “It’s all in the atmosphere--something great about being out in the desert. We don’t have a lot of desert here in Tennessee.”

So are we about to see Southern California get into the act as one of the few major hootenanny sites east of the Mississippi--a place where bluegrass can take root and grow? Could be.

Though bluegrass has for years been an essentially East Coast phenomenon, Don Tucker happily points out that “we’re finally getting some of the important Eastern bands out this year.”

The Nashville Bluegrass Band is certainly one of the best in the business, but there will also be a host of excellent local bands, clog dancers and instrumentalists. So come on down, kick your shoes off and enjoy. . . . But be sure to bring your instruments, because pickin’ is half the fun.

Calico Ghost Town San Bernardino County Regional Park and State Historic Monument is on Ghost Town Road, off Interstate 15 north of Barstow. General admission (12 years and older) is $4; juniors 6 through 11 pay $2. Children 5 and under are free. Camping sites are offered nightly at $7 per night. For further information and enrollment in the various clog-dancing and instrumental competitions, call (714) 780-8810.

For information on the Norco 35th Golden West Bluegrass Music Festival, call (619) 758-7205.

For information on the Follows Camp Family Bluegrass Festival, call the Blue Ridge Pickin’ Parlor at (818) 700-8288 or Follows Camp at (818) 910-1100.

And for information regarding Huck Finn’s 12th Country & Bluegrass Jubilee, call (714) 780-8810, or write to Jubilee, P.O. Box 56419, Riverside 92517.