Music Lesson on Bluegrass Fiddling

Bill Munro, the bandleader, was a very hard guy to work for. He was very demanding. This had one very positive result in the long term: almost every musician he worked with moved on to work with somebody else. It kind of worked as a training ground for spreading the idea of bluegrass.

Influential Fiddle Players

After Chubby Wise left, Benny Martin and then Kenny Baker came along. Both were extremely capable fiddle players. Each new fiddle player that Munro worked with brought something new and added some development, then went on to spread the word around to different bands.

Benny Martin Licks

Let's look at some licks from Benny Martin:

• Parallel Fifths

  • A phrase like this in the key of A sounds pretty plain, but if you play your second finger, a parallel fifth above, it suddenly sounds extremely exotic.
  • Playing two notes at once, each one a fifth above, incorporates notes that are kind of outside the key but make sense because they're attached to a note that's inside the key.

  Let me do that again and up to speed:

  1. 1. 1, 2, 3, 4.

  This is the kind of thing that sounds startling when you hear it within the context of a performance, but it's very easy to do.

• Triplets with Parallel Fifths

  • Often, Benny would do the same thing with triplets. Something like this:

  Add the parallel fifth, and you get...

  And suddenly, it is really startling. It sounds much more difficult and flashy than it actually is. It's pretty easy to play that first, and it comes out with such a tumble of notes that people can't understand how anyone can play something so difficult. Actually, it's really easy.

• Sliding Double Stop

  • Another Benny Martin lick is a sliding double stop. Starting in the key of G, play a B over a G, sliding both of them up.
  • As they do that, the third finger moves a little bit further than the first finger.
  • Then, slide them both down a half step and back up, followed by second over fourth, and slide down again.
  • There's quite a lot of work involved in this.

Benny Martin, after his stint with Bill Monroe, moved on to Flat & Scruggs, who, incidentally, were the band that did the Beverly Hillbillies theme. You will definitely have heard them from the 50s through to the 80s, and the fiddle player very often was Kenny Baker.

Kenny Baker's Style

Kenny Baker is perhaps the most representative fiddle player of Bill Monroe's band, even though he wasn't there at the start. His style was a little different from Benny Martin's, as he used a lot of single bows rather than long slurs, and he also employed less vibrato, favoring a cleaner sound.

• Example: Lost Indian
  • An example from one of his solo albums is "Lost Indian." Let's try that now.

First of all, let's try it slowly and without the backing track:

Now let's try the same thing with the backing track.

Assignment

Your assignment for this lesson is to listen to some Kenny Baker and some Benny Martin. See if you can recognize the differences in their styles.