O Brother, Here Art Thou

Bruce Strand isn’t intending to play a lick right now. It’s dusk, and he’s walking around trying to find old friends and fellow musicians among hundreds of campsites crowded beneath towering ponderosa pines.

But when you’re considered one of the best old-style fiddle players in the West, maybe even the country, people seek you out. As Strand stands at the side of a road talking to a man with a guitar, a husband and wife--fiddlers both--sidle up and exchange pleasantries before the husband shoves an old, battered fiddle into Strand’s hands, urging him to try it.

Strand, eager to please, tucks the instrument under his chin and drops the bow lightly on the strings, a little bouncy motion that fills the air with a hint of a chord, then breaks into an intricate riff of soulful gentleness.

The wife, standing on the campground road, figures out where Strand is going with the song and begins playing her fiddle, quickly joined by the man with the guitar. The trio wordlessly evokes dark passions and bygone days as a late-arriving RV slowly swerves around them, yielding the right of way to the true soul of the bluegrass festival--the jam.

Over a three-day span, scores of professional musicians will run through their repertoires here at the Nevada County Fairground stage during the California Bluegrass Assn.’s 27th annual Father’s Day Weekend Festival.

But those performances are only the backdrop to the real event, a massive family reunion in which musical passion is the bloodline, and where the main attraction lies in the freewheeling campsite jam sessions.

“The first time I came here, I listened to the shows, but then I figured out the fun is the jam,” says Bob Baumert, 55, a regular for more than two decades, but who ventures to the stage only every two or three years. “It bothers me when my friends have groups and we have to go down and listen to them.”

With the success of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and its Grammy-winning soundtrack, bluegrass and traditional country music have become the consumable pop morsels of the moment, particularly among listeners who tend to flit among musical styles.

Yet bluegrass trackers say the movie’s success followed a trend rather than led it, fueled by fans seeking a music form perceived to be authentic and outside the marketing mainstream.

“As happens many times in the entertainment world, this is one of those overnight successes that has taken 15 years to blossom,” said Dan Hayes, executive director of the International Bluegrass Musicians Assn. in Owensboro, Ky.

Bluegrass fans have come to the music from different directions. There are older fans--such as Baumert, an Arkansas native whose family roots run deep in the Ozarks--who hear the notes of home in the music.

Some are folk music fans seeking to strip that form back to a simpler and more authentic root. And then there’s the legacy of the Dead.

“There are the jam bands, sort of a takeoff on the whole Grateful Dead scene, with groups from Phish to Leftover Salmon to the Dave Matthews Band doing it,” says Hayes. “Those are not bluegrass bands, but there’s a relationship in the sound, and a lot of those fans are finding bluegrass and roots music through that side door.”

Although embraced as traditional music, bluegrass arose in the 1930s when singer-mandolinist Bill Monroe invigorated slow-moving “old time” music by speeding the tempo and adding intricate acoustic solos and high-end harmonies.

Folk fans rediscovered the music in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but it faded again in the ‘80s until a third wave of interest developed in the late ‘90s, fueled in part by such mainstream country performers as Ricky Scaggs and Dolly Parton, and the iconoclastic Steve Earle, who have embraced it.

But the real growth has come in the festivals, which have expanded from about 50 in the mid-’70s to more than 500 a year, Hayes said.

The Grass Valley festival is preceded by a three-day music camp that drew 112 students last year, the first time it was held, and 173 students this year. Attendance at the festival itself, in its 27th year, has grown steadily from a few hundred to more than 5,000, about three-quarters of whom stay in the campground, organizers say.

One of the music’s draws is familiarity. While new bluegrass acts write many of their own songs, the genre has a wide set of standards that provide a common language at the jam sessions. Many of the songs have a hokey, kitschy tone to them, the lyrics unabashedly waxing nostalgic for a romanticized past that may have never existed.

But other songs can be piercing in their lyricism, rooted in universal themes of loss and longing--emotions perfectly evoked by keening harmonies and the lonesome wail of a fiddle.

Another appeal: the simplicity of the festivals themselves.

At the Grass Valley event, among the largest of dozens held in California each year, there is limited outside marketing. Concession stands consist of a handful of food booths, crafts, music supplies and an incongruous massage table. There’s also a large shed housing vendors selling handmade instruments.

Outside the main grounds, performers camp next to festival-goers, and after leaving the stage band members often filter through the campground, jamming with fans into the night.

The music itself is played mostly in a simple 4/4 time, which means novices capable of chord progressions can sit in and not embarrass themselves.

But it’s what virtuosos like Strand do with their solos--called “breaks”--that defines the music.

Strand is in high demand for jams and plays up to seven hours a day at festivals. A slightly built California native, Strand studied classical violin as a child but turned to bluegrass when he met some Kentucky-bred musicians in the early ‘50s as a U.S. Marine in Korea.

“I’ve been playing it ever since,” says Strand, who last year placed fourth in the senior division of the annual National Oldtime Fiddlers’ Contest in Weiser, Idaho.

Yet the draw of the festival is more than the music itself, Strand said.

“You get out here and meet people and build up friendships,” he said. “It seems like we’re all one, big happy family. It’s a real neat thing.”

For some fans, Strand himself is a draw.

It’s late at night, nearly 11, and Larry Cordle & Lonesome Standard Time can be heard closing out the day’s lineup on the distant stage. Three campers are circled like prairie wagons around two massive ponderosas, and Strand and a handful of other musicians perch in the middle on folding chairs. A handful of nonmusicians, spouses mostly, sit in the shadows beyond the reach of the campers’ lights.

Strand is one of three fiddlers. The number of guitars keeps changing, peaking at five, as players drop in for a few songs then wander off to find another jam. There’s also a banjo and two upright basses, though only one is played at a time.

Before the festival, Strand had played with only two of the other musicians, but the atmosphere is loose and friendly, as among old friends. Self-deprecating jokes are part of the bond. There is no hierarchy; anyone can suggest a song.

One of the nonplayers asks for “Ashokan Farewell,” a mournful tune written in 1982 and popularized in Ken Burns’ 1990 “Civil War” documentary.

The group launches into the song, but no one sings as the musicians move through the piece with fluid emotion, Strand leading the way. Eyes half-closed, Strand loses himself in the music, teasing wordless pain and longing from the strings as the other musicians play softly behind him.

A few passersby stop, drawn by the mournful sounds, and listen quietly as Strand takes the piece to its gentle end.

At the last moment, the other instruments fall silent while Strand holds the final note, a soft transcendent tremolo that spins loneliness off into the dark soul of night.

In the silent pause that follows, Strand’s face creases in satisfaction, and then the applause begins.