Bluegrass -- EWOB report

The European World of Bluegrass has come and gone (last weekend) and, as I reported earlier, I was unable to attend because of other commitments...

But -- you can see pictures and a report at the EWOB web site and also at the EBMA blog.

Organizers say there was perfect weather and record attendance this year.

Winners of the band competition and fan vote were:

#1 European Bluegrass Band 2009:
1. Downtown Ramblers, Sweden (www.downtownramblers.com)
2. G-Runs ‘n Roses, Czech Republic (www.g-runs.com)
3. Kreni, Czech Republic (www.sweb.cz/bgkreni)

Audience Popularity Award 2009
1. Blackjack, CZ (www.blackjackband.cz)
2. Bluegrass Stuff, Italy (www.bluegrass.it)
3. Sunny Side, Czech Republic (www.sunnyside.cz)

I've heard most of these bands perform at other festivals and have interviewed some of their musicians. As usual, the Czech bands demonstrated -- with their popularity, prowess (and sheer number, I guess) -- how deeply rooted bluegrass is in CZ.

Here's a picture of Sunny Side in action -- at the Caslav Banjo Jamboree a couple years ago:

Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

More on Charlie McCoy and also Czech Texans

Days of Texas poster, Roznov pod Radnostem, CZ, 2005. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

As I reported earlier, the virtuoso harmonica player Charlie McCoy is being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. An article about him in a Ft. Myers Florida paper describes him as

one of the most recorded, most influential musicians in Nashville. And he’s virtually unknown outside Music City, USA.

Read full article

I write about Charlie on this blog because he is quite wellknown in the country music scene outside the USA. He tours regularly in Europe and elsewhere, and he makes a point to play with European bands (like my friend Steve & Heather in France and Druha Trava in Czech Republic) and also records with them.

I met him back in 2005 when he was touring with Druha Trava -- the concert I saw was at a "Days of Texas" festival in the little town of Roznov pod Radnostem, in eastern CZ.

Texas quilts in Ethnographic museum. Roznov pod Radnostem, CZ. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

As I wrote in the International Herald Tribune (the link has expired), the setting was the Wallachian Open-Air Museum,

a sprawling complex dedicated to the preservation of local folk traditions and architecture. And the festival highlighted the fact that from the mid-19th century until World War I, thousands of people emigrated from Roznov and other towns and villages in the region to the Lone Star State. Today, Texas has the largest ethnic Czech community in the United States.

There were demonstrations of 19th century farming customs used by the emigrants, and performances by American-style Czech country-western groups as well as by local folk groups performing Wallachian songs and dances. An exhibition of quilting featured local designs as well as a big patchwork quilt reading "Texas," hung prominently from the upper floor of the old Roznov Town Hall.

I felt an immediate connection. My own great-grandfather immigrated to Texas from Lithuania in the 1880s, my mother and grandmother were both born there, and I had relatives who lived in some of the heavily Czech Texan communities.

Near Roznov, I made it point to visit the village of Lichnov, where a private little museum documents the Wallachian exodus with an exhibition called "Hope Has a Name -- Texas." It is a genealogist's paradise of archival records, photographs, maps and memorabilia tracing family histories on both sides of the Atlantic.

It was rather poignant to see how the immigrants, building new lives in a new world, named raw new prairie settlements after their ancient Czech hometowns and, in many cases, maintained at least some of their native customs and even a command of the language.

Indeed, the then-Mayor, Vaclav Mikusek, recalled his surprise when he first met descendents of Wallachian immigrants to Texas about 15 years ago. "There was one man whose ancestors had come from a village near Roznov, and when he started to speak Czech, it was like I was hearing my grandfather," he told me. "He was using the same words, same expressions. We were discussing it in the museum," he said. "Anyone who wants to hear a pure Wallachian dialect must go to Texas."

Prague -- More Druha Trava Obama

NPR (National Public Radio) on Sunday ran a really nice piece on Druha Trava performing ahead of President Obama's speech in Prague -- but the correspondent, Don Gonyea, for some reason never identified the band by name. He played a lot from their performance, comparing their version of Bob Dylan songs (from the CD Dylanovky) with Bob Dylan originals.

Most of the comments on the npr.org web site (including my own) point out the oversight.

Prague -- YouTube of Druha Trava playing for Obama

Here's a youtube video of the "Czechgrass" group Robert Krestan and Druha Trava playing in Prague on Sunday to 30,000 people gathered to hear Barack Obama at Prague Castle.



The song in this video is one of Robert's songs that I have translated into English, for a planned English-language CD:

BEFORE WE SAY GOODBYE

Now that we're saying good-bye
Now that we're saying good-bye
I'll give back your stories, and you'll return me mine
Now that we're saying good-bye

Before, dear, we both go to sleep
Before, dear, we both go to sleep
I'll give back your smile to you, it's yours for you to keep
Before, dear, we both go to sleep

You say you don't want nothing, you've got nothing, you don't know
Is it my head you're after, oh my darling Salome?
Or my soul you're searching, oh my dearest Lady M?
To take away…

Now that we're saying good-bye
Now that we're saying good-bye
I'll give back your stories, and you'll return me mine
Now that we're saying good-bye, dear

The truth she is a dancing girl, from the Moulin Rouge
And I don't want to die again, I just want to help you
There are many things I know, that never have an end,
Don't conclude….

Now that we're saying good-bye
Now that we're saying good-bye
Now that we're saying good-bye
Now that we're saying good-bye

Pete Seeger for Nobel Prize?

There's a movement on to nominate the legendary American folk singer Pete Seeger for the Nobel Prize...

I'm posting this here, as Seeger was incredibly influential in sparking the rich country and bluegrass scene that developed in what was then communist Czechoslovakia in the mid-1960s.

To the hundreds of young musicians who play bluegrass in the Czech Republic today it may seem like ancient history. But a series of concerts Pete gave in CZ in March 1964 were almost legendary as a catalyst.

Seeger, an avowed leftist who was blacklisted for a time in America, was on a world tour, and he was booked by the official Czechoslovak concert agency in part because of his politics. He was allowed to perform, his friend Gene Deitch recalled to me in 2007, "an example of a 'progressive' American performer, singing for the rights of the 'oppressed American masses,'" and "all those living in the darkness of [the] 'imperialist' American society."

At his Prague concert -- which Deitch recorded and released on CD (issued in 2001 as Pete Seeger in Prague 1964, Flyright FLY CD 68) -- Seeger played a mix of traditional American folk songs, songs from other cultures and even a few folk revival protest songs. His performances electrified his audiences of fans of tramp music, the acoustic music that was part and parcel of the "tramp" outdoors movement that grew up in CZ after World War I, and changed the face of the Czech acoustic music scene.

My friend Lilly Pavlak saw him in Brno. Seeger, she told me, "sang a lot of songs we knew from tramp music, and so I realized that they must be American originals, not just tramp songs. That was the defining moment not just for me, but for the entire bluegrass movement that followed."

Seeger described one of the concerts in a letter: "Last night I had my first concert [in Czechoslovakia], with a shaky weak voice. Plunged bravely on, with help of a very nice woman interpreter. Audience exceedingly friendly, but very shy. Like blues especially. Listened politely through my singing of strange and unfamiliar things. Stood clapping for ten minutes at end. O, maybe seven. But I was mightily flattered. Maybe partly it was because I was the first American
performer in 18 years to have sung in Brno. But I could not get them to open up and really sing." (Quoted in Todd Harvey and Steven Winnick, "The Incompleat Filmmakers: The Little-Known Career of Pete and Toshi Seeger," Folklife Center News, Winter/Spring 2006, pg. 7. )


Click HERE to see an article I wrote about the Czech bluegrass scene.

Czech Republic -- Bluegrass Article in Prague Post

I am quoted -- and this blog mentioned! -- in an article in the Prague Post on the Czech bluegrass scene, about which I have written extensively.

Pickin' and grinnin'

Far from its home in the American South, a thriving bluegrass scene

By Darrell Jónsson
For The Prague Post
December 3rd, 2008

“These blues are so blue. They are the coal black blues/ For my place will cave in and my life I will lose” wrote American folk musician Alvin Pleasant Carter in 1938. In the years following World War II, the Carter family and musicians like Bill Monroe found plenty of true believers for their brand of tragic but high-spirited music on both sides of the Atlantic.

Musically, the multithreaded form Monroe would coin as “bluegrass” contained all the dynamism of the first African-American banjos, the postwar energy of jazz and the lyricism of Appalachian Anglo-Celt ballads. Filtering the spirit of the times through the use of acoustic instruments enabled bluegrass to travel from its Southern birthplace to anywhere a guitar, mandolin, banjo and bass (or, in a pinch, a washtub) could be found.

With most of these instruments available in Europe, it wasn’t surprising that this infectious music excited enthusiasts throughout the Continent. And, as writer Ruth Ellen Gruber, who chronicles Central Europe’s “virtual West” on her blog “Sauerkraut Cowboys,” notes, “Of all European countries, east or west, it is the Czech Republic where country and especially bluegrass have been most totally assimilated, or reinvented, as genuine local traditions.”

Read Full Story

Upcoming Bluegrass Fest in Bratislava

(Czech band Relief performing in 2007. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber.)


There are DOZENS of bluegrass and country music festivals, big and small, in the Czech Republic and Slovakia each year....the two Czech festivals I attended last month in the towns of Frydek Mistek and Chotebor were on the small or smallish side.

A more major festival, whose line up looks great, is coming up next month in Bratislava, the Slovak capital.

The third Bratislava Bluegrass Fest will feature top Czech and Slovak artists such as Monogram, Garcia, Peter Dula, Relief, Alan Mikusek, etc etc etc.

The web site includes clips of songs from each artist.