2018-19 Guide To Yellow Springs

20 the Guide to YelLow Springs y 2018 - 1 9 Y e l l ow S p r i n g s N ews $ $ $ Continued from page 19 y Antioch college ' s bluegrass first y propitious Saturday in early March. They brought along sidemen Benny Birchfield from W. Va., and Jimmy Brown from Eastern Tennessee (both resettled in Dayton) and played the historic concert to a full house. The legendary high tenor Bobby Osborne, now 87, recently reflected on the concert, saying he “had no idea it was the start of bluegrass on a college campus.” “It was really a shock to us ... We didn’t know what kind of songs to sing to those kids,” Osborne said. “When we first went on stage we were singing some country songs. We were singing … popular songs that we thought they would like, and … they didn’t show a lot of interest in the songs because I guess they hadn’t heard them.” At intermission, Neil Rosenberg — an Oberlin student whose band, along with Ger- rard and Foster's band, opened up for the Osbornes — advised him to play songs like ‘Pretty Polly’ and ‘Little Maggie’ and “some of the real old [folk] songs that Carter and Ralph Stanley put out,” according to Osborne. “So we started doing them old songs and those kids really appreciated what we were doing. We learned right there that something was going on that we didn’t know anything about. That’s when the college kids started liking bluegrass and it just went from there.” The Antioch concert helped form the repertoire of bluegrass that would make it irresistible to urban, Eastern, college- educated people, whose appetite for roots music had been whetted by the earlier folk boom, and who ended up embracing bluegrass as “part of folk music in the late 1950s,” Bartenstein said. According to Barteinstein, Yellow Springs was on that leading edge for two reasons: the first was geography, being only 25 miles from Dayton; the second was taste. “We had very aware, very discerning folk music listeners here who recognized that bluegrass artistically was head and shoul - ders better than most of the folk music played,” like the Kingston Trio and the Limelighters, Bartenstien said. Radio keeps bluegrass alive In addition to being near live bluegrass in Dayton, Middletown, Fairborn and Xenia, Yellow Springs became a bluegrass hub because of WYSO, born in the heating ducts of Antioch College in the late 1950s, and later becoming an NPR affiliate and public radio station for the Miami Valley. “Folks started associating bluegrass with Yellow Springs because they heard it on WYSO,” Bartenstein said. Yellow Springs was the local eddy where the two currents — Appalachian migrants and East Coast intellectuals — mingled. In fact, Bartens- tein says, “bluegrass appreciation has contin - ued in Yellow Springs more than most places in the world because of the exposure through WYSO.” And while the bluegrass scene is not what it once was in this area, he said, one “can hear bluegrass played live 365 days a year” here in the Miami Valley, Bartenstein said. In addition to WYSO, another regional station, albeit a commercial one, broadcasts authentic classic country music, bluegrass and gospel from its headquarters in Xenia. WBZI, which has also been on the air since the 1950s, is owned by Greene County resi- dent Joe Mullins, who is arguably one of the best banjo players in the country, and heads his bluegrass band, Joe Mullins & the Radio Ramblers. Old-time: another popular local style Alongside bluegrass, old-time — aka “old timey” — music also has a healthy presence in Yellow Springs and the surrounding area. While both genres use the same instrumen- tation, the sounds are quite distinct. Generally speaking, old-time music is made to be danced to, which is why it has more “rhythmic stability,” according to Bartenstein. Old-time music is also necessarily slower, and instruments play more as an ensemble, as opposed to the lightning-fast solos that are part of the bluegrass trademark sound. You can’t really dance to bluegrass, Bartens- tein said, “it’s too fast, too syncopated.” The two musical forms have different cultures as well. While a bluegrass musician would take a pop tune and record it blue- grass style, an old-time musician would “get excited about a fiddle tune that someone’s great-great-grandpa taught them in East- ern Kentucky that’s never been recorded before,” said Bartenstein. “Old-time music highly values the folk tra - dition, the notion that music is learned from person to person, part of a living culture,” he explained. “Something that’s old is privi- leged, something that’s new is diminished.” Basically, it “should be played on a back porch and you should never charge for it — it’s the people’s music,” Bartenstein said. One rare player that straddles both genres is WYSO’s own Tom Duffee, who has been a bluegrass and country programmer on WYSO for 40 years, and makes his home with his wife and fellow Corndrinkers band- mate Linda Scutt, outside of Yellow Springs. “We do straddle the fence,” Duffee said recently. “We insert ‘breaks’ into a largely old-time format. Our repertoire is largely from the early days of radio — pre-blue- grass, but still a music meant for the stage — rather than strictly old ‘folk’ tunes.” Why is Yellow Springs a hub for old-time music?  “Clearly WYSO has a lot to do with it,” Duffee said. “But Yellow Springs has always been supportive of non-majoritarian arts, and this old-time folk music fits right in.” And the village has the artists to prove it. There’s Yellow Springer Ben Cooper, a musical polymath who plays banjo, fiddle, guitar and bass, his style ranging from Western swing to bluegrass to old-timey. Residents Joe Cook (banjo, fiddle and mandolin) and Leslie Lippert (quarter-sized bass and banjo-ukelele) keep old-time music’s down-home tradition going by hosting local jams at their “tunetarium” for anyone interested in keeping old-time music (and terrible puns) alive.  Paul Van Ausdal (hurdy-gurdy, fiddle) and his wife Carol (fiddle) are also part of the local old-time scene, as is Dave Finch (banjo). And when not shoeing horses or fighting for green space, Rick Donahoe plays rhythm guitar with old-time musicians in Yellow Springs and at the Trolley Stop in Dayton, which hosts old time music jams weekly. Newgrass, jam grass and the future  Yellow Springs is also host to some exciting new bands that are hybrids of bluegrass, folk, rock, old-time and jazz, with a touch of the Grateful Dead; Bartenstein calls it “jam grass.” The village “has continued to produce a number of ‘new acoustic music’ bands — Blue Moon Soup, Wheels — and continues to generate them.” But whatever the sound or genre, Yellow Springs still seems to have the right cre - ative mulch, open-minded and encouraging fans, and diverse influences to keep pro - ducing innovative, fresh music right here. 1 Where to Find it: Live bluegrass, old-time music: “Tunetarium” old-time jam Contact: Leslie Lippert, 767-2999 Trolley Stop, Wed. nights 8–11 p.m. 530 E. 5th St., Dayton, 461-1101 Southwestern Music Festival Nov. 9 and 10, Wilmington, OH On the radio WYSO 91.3 FM • Downhome Bluegrass, Sat., 8–10 p.m. • Rise When the Rooster Crows, Sun., 6–8 a.m. • A Country Ramble, Sun., 6–9 PM WBZI 1500 AM and 100.3 FM • The Chubby Howard Show Sat., 9 a.m.–3 p.m.,
Sun., 1–5 p.m. • Dan Mullins Midday Music Spectacular weekdays, 10 a.m.–noon • Hymns from the Hills, gospel, weekdays, 1-2 p.m. • The Banjo Show weekdays, 2-3 p.m. As Antioch students, Alice Gerrard, a performer herself, and her then- husband Jeremy Foster brought the Osborne Brothers to the college. • submitted photo By Irene Young Bluegrass comes to Antioch The tale of the Osborne Brothers’ con- cert begins with Alice Gerrard and Jeremy Foster, a married Antioch couple living in Yellow Springs. Foster was an avid early documenter of bluegrass, and Gerrard, who had dropped out of Antioch after becoming pregnant, was beginning to make music with their mutual friend, Hazel Dickens. Gerrard and Foster spent a term work- ing as co-op students in Washington, D.C., to be near the music parks of Baltimore and D.C., where bluegrass was played every weekend. After co-op, they brought recordings and records back to Antioch, and spread the music among their friends. It was Foster’s idea to bring the Osborne Brothers to Antioch. The Osbornes were part of the Appalachian migration after WW II that drew migrants to work in Day- ton’s factories. In a recent interview, Gerrard recalled Foster, who later died in an automobile accident. “He was really charismatic and had all these great ideas and could persuade people,” Gerrard said. As for the reasons they decided to host the concert, it was simple. “We loved the stuff [bluegrass] and we wanted other people to love it, too,” Ger- rard said. So with $300 ponied up by Antioch, Bobby and Sonny Osborne traveled to Antioch, a world away from Dayton, on that 241 XENIA AVE 937.769.5015 WanderAndWonderYS.com Sustainable and local outdoor lifestyle clothing and gear.