Pop 89: The Bard in Your Back Yard
By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
In 2010 the Grammys decided to do away with the Polka category. “They can’t do that!” I complained to Carole, my producer, “Canadians clean up in that category!” What they replaced it with was this new thing called Americana. “And what is that?” I asked. “I mean, besides gun shows, snake-handlers, and twinkies? I think you should let me drive down to Nashville and do some investigating,” I half-joked. She took me up on it.
I drove, I did not fly, because, I figured, this new category of music was to the road what hip-hop was to the street. So I needed to take the bi-ways, stop at truck stops, talk to locals, “kick it old school.” I had to listen to stories along the way, knowing I would glean as much information from the journey as the destination. In fact, what I was doing was how Americana songs are made: through observation, playing with language and chords, listening to everyone - not just the celebs and the good connections. It still means being a bard. While Americana is new in name, the tradition of the travelling bard is not. So, I prefer to call the category Bardic, from the ancient Greek. Or, I could call it Vagabondus, a term conceived by16th century Scots. But they considered itinerant poets troublemakers, and it wasn’t until the end of that century the wandering singer-poet bard earned universal admiration.
Bards sing ballads, tell stories accompanied by everything from lute to lyre and, today, from guitar to accordion. Bards wander from gig to gig in broken-down vans or chartered busses. If you put in the hours of travel and bone-crushing exhaustion, you might be lucky enough to travel by plane. Many bards are American, but the tradition and the treasure is not restricted to the American experience. I often find myself wishing I’d challenged the new name. But the Grammys are American, after all. And no one now does PR better than America. And they did invent branding, so it makes sense that our southern neighbours might assume all bards come from the US of A.
But it does bear repeating that the first drums in North America were beaten by Indigenous drummers living in my part of the woods - or grass - and by black slaves stolen from the west coast of Africa. New Celts, with their bodhrans, picked up the beat. Maybe a fiddler joined in; they’d arrived in Quebec -New France at the time - in the 1600s. It’s also possible an accordionist was not far away. Every country has its accordion music - from those beloved polka-players in Germany and Poland to the French chansonniers of France, to the reel-playing Celts. And when they crossed to Canada, they created new Acadian classics that later found their way, through capture and escape, to Louisiana and morphed into Cajun and Zydeco.
From a series of interviews in out-of-the-way clubs in Nashville and an old Knoxville theatre, I managed to whittle a one-hour documentary called “Portrait of Lincoln with the Wart.” The title came to me as I was driving back to Canada in a snowstorm. A preacher on the radio was giving a sermon about “transparency.” He spoke of a portrait painter who, assigned to Lincoln, approached the subject of the president’s facial wart by asking: “How shall I paint you, sir?” Lincoln responded: “Paint me as I am.” “That’s it!” I declared, hitting the steering wheel with my hand. “This music is the portrait of Lincoln with the wart.”
There was a day when transparency, presenting oneself “warts and all,” was considered noble. The term “warts-and-all” also came from a conversation about a portrait. Peter Lely was about to paint Cromwell, who supposedly said: “I desire you would use all your skill to paint your picture truly like me… but remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts and everything as you see me. Otherwise, I will never pay a farthing for it.”
In a time of reputation rescuers and image handlers who are paid a fortune to make things go away, any form of art that treasures transparency should not be underestimated. When I asked musicians what they like best about being bards, they said things like: “You don’t have to wear hair gel.” ”You can get old.” “It’s salt of the earth music.” “It’s worn and scarred and bloody.” “It’s like the people I like: full of sweat and toil.” “There’s a variety of topics, it’s not just boy meets girl.”
The musicians I met were approachable unadorned folks, people who look like you and me. People exposed to weather and landscapes. They were devoted to their art, their families, their kitchens and gardens more than fame and fortune. Most spent more time in motels than resorts and in small cafes and bars than in revolving restaurants.
In the end, it shouldn’t really matter what we call a category that is, at heart, about impermanence. Authentic art reminds us that we are tiny specks on the long timeline of human existence. Our speckness permits us to relish the little things: like the way the late afternoon sunlight shines through the diner window on the empty salt shaker on the table. Our brief stay on planet earth behooves us to quit comparing our insides to someone else’s outsides on Facebook and go stand under the awning and smell the rain.
Go find the bards in your backyards or bars. One named Maurice just pinned a poster on the Val Marie Hotel bulletin board yesterday. Hand-written with a ballpoint pen on yellow construction paper, it says: “Music Night, Friday.” A few of us will show up with guitars and harmonicas and rusty voices, and we’ll sing the old country tunes and maybe a few Christmas carols. And maybe some of the boys in the back will bring their beers over to our table and sing along.