I got doubly whacked last week. A drubbing most foul! A couple of disparate cultural voices from deep within my wheelhouse fell silent.
Poet Adrienne Rich and musician Earl Scruggs have left the building! Before I even had the chance to introduce them, possibly have them over for a road-coke or two prior to hauling them around town to check out the sordid side of Heber nightlife.
Imagining the feminist poet from Baltimore and the five-string banjo picker from Flint Hill, North Carolina, sharing some obscure back booth as flashing neon and deep shadows play across the dance floor is a concept model worthy of most any hero worshipper with too much time on his hands.
Had it not been for back-to-back tributes on PBS NewsHour last week, pairing Adrienne and Earl might not have arrived as such an obvious package. Upon reflection, however, it soon became apparent that their creative differences were not all that dissimilar.
Each went well outside the box to raise the bar in their respective crafts to the level of art. Plus, their vocabularies were singular to the point that, by the second time either’s sound lay upon your inner ear, recognition was immediate.
Rich’s voice could develop an attitudinal landscape within an utterance or so. Her inflection, slow and methodical and often biting, never seemed to grate. Her poetic rants were spot-on as they had their way with societal injustice. The filleting of war and peace and racism and homophobia seldom had a more accomplished surgeon.
And, as has often been said, to be properly perceived, poetry needs to be heard, not just read. Not that there aren’t wondrous epiphanies to be had from the printed page alone. It’s just that when the poet is surfing the syllables, profound insights occur in the strangest of places.
Over time, it’s been frequently noted when discussing the music of Thelonious Monk that the notes he didn’t play were every bit as integral to his art as the ones he did. The same could be said of Adrienne Rich. She “read” the line-spaces in her work with the lyrical authority of a Sinatra.
There was her fierce independence, of course, always evident in her work but, perhaps, even more so in her rejection of both the National Book Award for Poetry in 1974 and the National Medal of the Arts in 1997. You got the feeling that her depth would have appealed as much to Blake, Keats, and Tennyson as it did to those in her radical-feminist camp.
Then there was Earl. Not unlike Charlie Christian with the jazz guitar, Scruggs took an instrument performed upon for years by untold thousands and completely reinvented its place within the collective ensemble. The five-string banjo, the quintessentially American musical instrument, would never again ply its trade solely within the rhythm section.
From the time Kentuckian Bill Monroe brings Earl and guitarist Lester Flatt onboard as members of his “Bluegrass Boys” in 1945, it’s a brand new ball game within the evolution of American old-time string band music. What would become known as “bluegrass” was now fully formed with fiddle, bass-fiddle, guitar, mandolin, and five-string banjo embellishing a quorum of uniquely Appalachian “high lonesome sound” harmony vocals.
Once they appeared onstage at the Grand Ol’ Opry a few months later, it would be Scruggs’ highly syncopated three-finger picking style, of course, that would completely turn the paradigm on its head. No one had seen or heard anything like it before. Imagine Hendrix at Monterey. Not a far stretch at all!
And, of course, with the creative eruption that ensued once Earl and Lester left Monroe to go out on their own, followed by the seamless insertion of “Flatt and Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys” into the ’60s folk revival, we hadn’t heard nothin’ yet.
The sheer virtuosity unleashed within the music with the spread of “Scruggs picking” as the predominant banjo-playing style along with the conceptual and improvisational freedom it allowed would soon find the instrument prevalent in most any genre. Bela Fleck doesn’t even exist outside the context of Earl Scruggs.
Knowing that Earl Scruggs and Adrienne Rich will no longer be adding to America’s cultural legacy is, admittedly, something I am ill-prepared to deal with. Hopefully, however, my somewhat meager collections of their past recordings will help ease the pain by reminding me of the collective joy inherent in their work!
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social scenes for the past 40 years.