Art Bjorngjeld Narrator
Phil Nusbaum Interviewer
May 18, 2010
PN: Phil Nusbaum AB: Art Bjorngjeld
PN: Well, this is May 18th, 2010. I’m Phil Nusbaum, and Art Bjorngjeld is the interviewee. We’re talking about Art’s experiences and perceptions in Bluegrass, and related idioms and such. Let me ask you first, your birth date, where you’re from, and all that information.
AB: Alright. I was born in 1954, grew up in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. My dad built a home there in ‘49, after the war, and settled there and that’s where I grew up.
PN: When did you first become aware of music?
AB: I grew up in a family that had get-togethers, and every time we’d have a get-together they’d play music: my uncles and my dad. My dad played the accordion, my Uncle Irvin played the banjo, Clarence played the harmonica, and so every time there was a family get-together, there was music. I did not participate much, and didn’t really appreciate it for a long time, but I was certainly aware of it.
PN: Were you encouraged by the others to participate?
AB: Oh yeah, always. When I was about six years old, they had a drum set for me, and I’d drum along. They encouraged me to play music in band, and as a kid, we had an organ in the house, I had organ lessons. I played clarinet in high school, but no real big interest in any of it.
PN: Just something that was taking place in the house.
AB: Yeah.
PN: Was there some event that caused you to want to get involved as a player?
AB: I don’t know what it was, in the ‘70s, when I was in about 10th grade, all the sudden I started hearing music, guitar music - I think some of my friends were playing guitar - involved at the church. All the sudden I just got the bug to play the guitar. Every free moment, I would pick up the guitar and fool around with it. I listened to the Folk music: Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, John Denver, but I also had, because my Uncle Clarence was an avid record-collector, and my dad had a reel-to-reel machine and would tape all this stuff, I would hear a lot of Country
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music and Bluegrass music…and recordings of my family, and I would listen to all them, and start to try and pick it up.
PN: He would record LPs?
AB: 78s, singles, LPs, yep, my dad would put it on big reel-to-reel things so it’d run for a couple hours.
PN: They would play it back, just to have music in the house?
AB: Yes, yep.
PN: Your friends were playing guitar, so you joined ‘em, basically.
AB: Yeah.
PN: And which came first: the Scandinavian music or the Bluegrass?
AB: Bluegrass.
PN: What caused that to happen?
AB: In the early ‘70s, when I was going to the University of Minnesota, there was great street music: Bill and Judy were out there; Peter Ostroushko, Jim Tordhoff, Mike Cass - all these people you’d hear ‘em out on the street, and I’d just stop and watch, and listen. I was kinda fascinated with it. A big turning point came when I got acquainted with Doc Watson. I bought that, Doc and Merle Live. It was on Vanguard - a double album set, and I listened to that morning and night - all the Blues songs on there, and the Folk songs. That album really opened my eyes to traditional music, and the just superb guitar work on there - I couldn’t believe it! Those folks were comin’ around to the college scene, down in The Whole Coffeehouse [at the U of Minnesota]. I’d bring Clarence and my dad, and we’d hear Norman Blake, and Doc Watson…
PN: Oh, those at The Whole in Coffman Student Center in Minneapolis?
AB: Yep, yep. You go down those long stairs down there and they had all the peanuts shells - they gave out free peanuts - so that was taking me closer. Then the first Bluegrass band - professional, top-notch Bluegrass band - that I ever heard, Country Gazette, came. They had Alan Munde, Byron Berline. Roland White played guitar, and then they had that bass player who was kinda the emcee, I’ve forgotten his name right now…
PN: They had a number of bass players.
AB: He was a real funny guy.
PN: About what year was this?
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AB: ‘73 or ‘74. Man! That, to me, was just so exciting! My dad had been talkin’ to me about trying the 5-string banjo, and I had never had any interest in it, but after seeing that show, I went down to The Podium and bought a banjo.
PN: Alan Munde could have that effect on people.
AB: [Laughing] Well, it was just the whole thing; the atmosphere - that whole place was alive, like it was charged!
PN: You mean the music and the crowd?
AB: Yeah! Yeah! It was just exciting, but it was deep in a way…not politically, the way the songwriters were in the ‘70s, or in a feely, touchy kind of way, just an earthy way. It just hit me.
PN: How did hearing Bluegrass hit you in a different way than the Folk music - the singer/songwriter, and the associated things that you heard…started with, with your friends - how did Bluegrass hit you in a different way, or traditional music in general?
AB: I don’t know that I can answer that, Phil. It’s just a feeling, you know that high, lonesome sound is so intense, and it just draws you in; the drive of the banjo keepin’ things goin’, the fiddle above the whole thing - just soars above it, the mandolin drivin’, and the guitar punctuating everything with the bass runs, and it’s fun. There are fun songs, and there are blue songs, and there’s dance music. It’s…I don’t know what it is, but I was hooked.
PN: What did you do once you got the banjo?
AB: I got Pete Seeger’s book - that red one, learned Foggy Mountain Breakdown, and Cripple Creek, and then got the Earl Scruggs book, then spent most of the summer of 1974 just tryin’ to learn the banjo.
PN: What’s the hardest part about learning the banjo?
AB: Well, I think the real key to it is getting your right hand just so solid that those notes are…your rolls don’t speed up, ya know. If you go from a reverse roll to a forward roll or anything else, it should be flawless. I remember Earl Scruggs, in his book, he did an exercise where he covered like…made three strings all have the same G note; the fifth string, and the first and second string. Then he said he would just practice rolls, and he should not be able to tell when he switched from one roll to another, it should be just an exact stream of 16th notes playing the G, which will drive you nuts in a hurry, but whether you’re doing [making banjo sounds]…whatever kinda roll you’re doing, it’s gotta be just absolutely solid. I think if you can get your right hand disciplined like that, that’s a good start.
PN: What did your dad think of this - the banjo playing?
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AB: Oh, he was thrilled - both him and Clarence - that all of the sudden, someone from the younger generation was excited about Bluegrass and Country music.
PN: I know they were interested in Country and Bluegrass, but it really wasn’t their playing forte.
AB: But when they grew up, Country…Bluegrass was part of Country music. They didn’t differentiate it. I have recordings of my Aunts and Uncles. Whether it’s Country songs or Bluegrass songs, it’s all about their tempo, their feel, their harmonies - they would just take the song, whether it came from Country or from Bluegrass. They did it their own way.
PN: Would they consider themselves Scandinavian musicians, although I knew they knew that a good deal of Country music had crept into their Scandinavian music, and I think that they really enjoyed that - that special niche that they had. Well, it was shared by others like, Slim Jim, and other players in the upper Midwest, but I think that made it even more fun for them.
AB: Yeah, I don’t think, they, in their own mind, pigeon-holed themselves as Scandinavian, or as Country, or really as anything else. Clarence used to call it, “Music in the Bjorngjeld manner.” [Laughing]
PN: Could you describe the Bjorngjeld manner? When I saw the family play it out at Dulono’s Pizza, it was a little event - more people than average would come to Dulono’s, and it was sort of family, it was funny, and it had its high points, musically.
AB: Yes, Olga and Borghild, the Dakota Sweethearts…
PN: Those are your Aunts?
AB: My Aunts, yes, could really sing the duets style of singing, but the instrumentation of different. Olga would play the mandolin, but she wouldn’t play lead, it was just a rhythm instrument. Guitars didn’t play lead, most of the leads were taken by the accordions, and when I came along and tried learning fiddle then, well, they were happy to have a fiddle player, too. So they were real open to different instrumentation. They tried to copy Bluegrass music - they would take Bluegrass songs and sing ‘em, but they never…no, no one would ever confuse them for a real Bluegrass band. But it was just a combination of Country, and Scandinavian, and Bluegrass, and American…They would - the Aunts would sing songs, some of ‘em…I liked their older material…
PN: Such as…?
AB: …when they would do the Carter Family songs, and a lot of the ballads, and stuff like that. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, they were doin’ whatever came along: “Proud To Be An Okie From Muskogee” - my Aunt Olga loved to sing that one, and that’s…when you’re in Folk music, ya do what the folk do. [Laughing]
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PN: Could take us back a little further, whatever you’ve learned about when they were kids - they were from a farm in North Dakota, was it?
AB: Correct, yes.
PN: They seemed to have different interests which could be molded into a performing unit, or different types of performing units when they felt like it.
AB: Right. Yeah.
PN: And so Olga and Borghild were duet singers. I remember that they sang Norwegian songs in that duet harmony, and they told me that they learned from the Grand Ole Opry: one would write down the lyric to a line, and then the other girl would write down the next line, and then by that time, the first one was done writing down the…and that’s how they would get the words.
AB: Yep. They could hear a song once and have all the words [Laughing].
PN: It’s kind a funny to think about that today, now, you type in the name of the song on the internet, and up come the words.
AB: Yeah, as a family, it was never a homogeneous band situation; the boys were older, the two girls were the youngest, and…
PN: What were the boys’ greatest interests in music? The accordion players and the harmonica - was it Oliver who played the accordion?
AB: Yes, Clarence was the oldest, and he struggled, I’ve heard, to play music, he just didn’t have it. But all the sudden he got a hold of a harmonica, and he could figure out how to make a tune out of that. Then Ernie came along, and he was not a natural musician, but the third son, Oliver, really had music in him, and loved music. He took up the accordion, took up button accordion, he played guitar and banjo, but he started on button accordion, and switched to chromatic accordion. He was the one who could play for dancing. Ernie would play along on the banjo, and he didn’t even really hear the chord changes, so he would sit so he could watch Oliver’s left hand, then he knew if…
PN: …he could read accordion chords.
AB: Right. Yeah. So that’s really how he got by, but Ernie was a guy who could get a crowd goin’, ya know, a party goin’, the life of the party, and get people dancing, and get people up and about. And Oliver - he was the real musician of the group. So they played…they quickly figured out there was a coal mine up there, and they found out what the wages were for working all day in the coal mine, well, then they started playin’ house parties, and they’d pass the hat; they could make more at a house party, so they just did that. Ernie rode the rails quite a bit during the Depression. He was a hobo.
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PN: So, over the years they would play together, I guess there would have been marriages and moving from different places…
AB: It was really World War II that split everything up. Clarence was born in 1910, the three boys came pretty quick, and my father was the youngest of the boys.
PN: Al...?
AB: Yes, 1917 he was born, so he was a little bit behind the other three - wasn’t involved in as much of what they did. But World War II: Clarence and Irvin went out to Seattle to work in the shipyards, my dad went in the army, Oliver stayed on the farm to help with the farming, and the two girls, who were the youngest, were the first to get married. None of the boys got married until they were in their 30s. But that split everybody up, and then after the War, Oliver stayed in North Dakota with his parents, but the other three boys settled in Minneapolis.
PN: Well, and we were talkin’ about what it was like earlier, whenever there was a holiday or some kind of family occasion, there’d be music, and then you started to play Bluegrass, and then you found your way into the musical circle with the banjo?
AB: Yes. Before that, I think I’d been playing along…I had chorded along with the guitar…my dad and I. I would play clarinet, and he would play the accordion, and I found that I could play harmonies, and play the tunes by ear quite easily. I had been at the fringes, and gradually work your way into the inner circle…kinda like a jam session. [Chuckling]
PN: What songs do you remember playing, if any, from the era when you were first playing the banjo - the mid ‘70s?
AB: Oh, when I was playing the banjo?
PN: Or the guitar, that you played with the family.
AB: Hmm, well the banjo tunes, they kind of had to learn them, like I’d have to show ‘em the chords, whether it’d be…‘cause they’d just hadn’t played those tunes. They never had a banjo player. But, it didn’t take ‘em long to learn the G and E minor, or D, or whatever it took to…
PN: You’re thinking of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” now.
AB: Right, yeah, sure. I remember learning “Blackberry Blossom” and working and working on Earl’s breakdown, and all those tunes - just kind of standard stuff, nothing out of the ordinary.
PN: That was in the ‘70s, I think that’s what people were playing.
AB: Yeah. They were all excited; they didn’t let lack of knowledge about the chords stop ‘em! [Laughing] They would just hammer away and hoop and holler, and they thought it was great.
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PN: It almost seemed like they had really internalized, soaked up, the old kind of radio show where the band would finish a song and the band members would go, “Hey! Ho!” Like that.
AB: Yep, it was just natural! [Laughing]
PN: You know who commented on that? Bob Andresen, he said that, personally he dug that, the radio show with real human people on it playing. He went for that. What was your first band?
AB: College. A group of Forestry students, we were all in Forestry Club, they called it at that time. Herb Slekta - I think we called ourselves Herb Slekta and the Turkey Trotters. We played like two times for the Forestry Club annual event, yes, I remember I was very nervous - getting up on stage and playing. I was playing banjo and mandolin, Herb was on the guitar, Mike Lock was scratchin’ on the fiddle some and guitar, and a guy named Al Bergstrom. But I remember the thrill of getting off that stage and going, “That was fun!” It was fun playing music and people appreciated it.
PN: Where was this?
AB: The St. Paul campus of the University of Minnesota.
PN: Oh, so it was like a University coffee house or something?
AB: It was the Forestry Club annual event.
PN: Oh, that’s right. Where could you play, then, if you were a Bluegrass band or a Bluegrass player?
AB: Well, the next group I got together with was with Pete Ing, Whitney Anderson, Don Mitchell, and Rod Sando. We were The Sidewinder Band…started out Snake-eyed Pete and the Sidewinders, and then we were The Sidewinder Band. Gosh, we played some place on Payne Avenue, some eating-drinking establishment. We played a couple of late-night things. Again, I was very disappointed, in a way, in how I played, but I was enthused about keeping up trying, and that’s been a common feeling throughout my career. It’s never like you want it to be, but I just don’t give up.
PN: Well, this is really not supposed to be my story hour, but I’ll tell you a little story about that anyway…
AB: Good.
PN: In ‘93 or ‘94, I had started doing the local Bluegrass radio show, and Alison Krauss played at the Guthrie or the Walker, so afterwards, I had my wife with me, and we were playing in a band, and we went back and saw Alison Krauss and Union Station and her band in their dressing room. You know what they were talking about? The cues that they missed. So I said to her,
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“Well I’m glad you guys talk about this stuff, too.” And of course their show was outta this world.
AB: Right, and nobody else missed it. [Laughing]
PN: No one knew, but anyway, I guess if you’re thinking about it at all, you gotta want perfection - that’s why we do that.
AB: [Laughing] Yeah, that’s a good story. Then, I remember that Sidewinder band, we played over at the Cedar Theater, and this was before it was…I don’t remember if they were renovating it?
PN: What year are we talking about now?
AB: I’ll say ‘76.
PN: I don’t know, I wasn’t here for that, but now it’s the Cedar Cultural Center, but before that it was a theater, but there was an era - what was the name of the Folk music club on the West Bank?
AB: I don’t know, but they put on kind of a festival, and I don’t know if this was…this would’ve been before the Association [MBOTMA], but Mad Jack and the Black Label, I remember Mary Du Shane being there, and Pop Wagner, and Bob Bovee. They did a little thing - it was kind of a benefit or a fundraiser or something. That was the first time I met Bruce Jaeger, he was playing with, that was before he was with the Middle Spunk Creek Boys, he was with some band, so all these people, I got to meet them and start to know them, and see Bluegrass, the local Bluegrass scene. I remember that event. We didn’t play out a lot though; we didn’t have a lot of gigs.
PN: If you wanted gigs, were there a lot of places to play?
AB: No, I didn’t know about Dulono’s, if Dulono’s was going, I didn’t know anything about it.
PN: Others have mentioned places like The Scholar Coffeehouse. I can’t remember, but they say that there were few places to play, but there were opportunities. Did you have opportunities to play for fun at parties and things like that?
AB: No, not too much. I was involved in college, the College of Forestry, so it was just the people that I met there who played music, and, of course, I was aware of the street music that was going on - the West Bank scene, but I was not at that level, and I don’t think I ever thought myself to be at that level.
PN: What level was the street music level?
AB: Well, I thought they were extremely super! [Laughing] I was just in amazement of Jim Tordhoff playing the 5-string banjo - how could he do all that?! To me it sounded as good as
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anything that I’d heard. I wasn’t good enough and I didn’t have the confidence to play with those folks, and I still think they’re a notch above anything I’ll ever accomplish. I have a lot of respect for all those musicians.
PN: We’re talking the ‘70s now?
AB: Yeah.
PN: Then you got out of Forestry school, finally?
AB: Right, and then I worked in the Black Hills National Forest, then I moved down to Arkansas. ‘77 and ‘78 I was living in Arkansas…I played with a little Bluegrass band down there.
PN: Was it different than playing Bluegrass in Minnesota?
AB: Ah, yes and no; different and the same. I met some pretty good players down there, and some pretty average ones, too. And I also got involved with Old Time musicians - fiddle players who didn’t really play Bluegrass, but really appreciated Bluegrass. They played old fiddle tunes. So that’s kind of the Old Time and Bluegrass - there’s the separation, but it’s the same, but it’s different…it’s connected…it has the same roots. So I lived down there a few years, then in 1979 I moved back up here, was married, starting a family; our daughter was born at the end of ‘79, so not a lot of time to get involved. But then I reconnected with some of the musicians in The Sidewinder band, and we played - this was Whitney Anderson, and Don Mitchell, and Gordy Abel played bass with us some, and Whitney got us in on the park jobs, and we played Lake Harriet, and some of those things during the summer. We called ourselves Snoose Caboose at that time.
PN: Where’d that name come from?
AB: Oh, I don’t know, Don Mitchell came up with that name. It was a short-lived thing…I don’t think we went a year. [Laughing] Then my dad, he always played nursing homes with my Uncle, as the Happy Valley Boys, and they knew Leo Koet, he had played with Upper Mississippi Bluegrass; they were around in the early ‘80s with Johnson - RW Johnson - and his brother, and there was another Johnson, and Leo Koet. They were a local Bluegrass band, but they were kinda breaking up, and then Leo and Roger were both members of that band and I got together with them, and we started playing together. We started getting together once a week, then we met Larry Cable and he played bass with us, and then we asked Mark Briere to play mandolin with us, so that was the Hardly Heard. We went from 1980 - we played through the ‘80s. I think we called it quits about 1991.
PN: We’ve talked about a pretty big chunk of time now, and what strikes me is that you started out really in a family context of performance. I just would want to know if you’d be interested in reflecting a bit on the difference between that sort of a setting versus a professional setting.
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When you’re with the Hardly Heard, you’re playing for money - it wasn’t millionaire money, and it wasn’t Ricky Skaggs and the Kentucky Thunder money, but where the money part of it is a big part of the equation.
AB: Yeah. It was difficult to put the Bjorngjeld family on a stage together. The sisters, Olga and Borghild, know hundreds of songs, but when you want to do one song, they don’t know the words…they don’t know ‘em absolutely for sure. They’ll know one verse, and then maybe the other sister knows the second verse, so they sing one verse then they’re lookin’ at each other and one of ‘em will get started, so you never know how many verses they’re gonna sing, what order their gonna be in, or if they’re gonna remember ‘em, which, to me, was very frustrating. It made some tense moments, and their personalities were not such where you could take a song, play it once, and then…ok, let’s…how do we want to work with this, how do we want to set the arrangement... No. They played a song and they were ready to move on, they didn’t want to play it again, “We just did that one!” [Laughing]
There were Clarence’s songs, and then the girls did their songs, and then my dad played the Scandinavian dance music on the accordion, and I played along with that, so there was like, three or four different things happening, and just to coordinate that and keep everybody happy…the two sisters, who loved each other dearly and sang so beautifully together, had very different personalities, and could get quite jealous of each other. And so, for me, as someone from the next generation down, I certainly couldn’t be telling them, “Hey, cut this out…let’s get on with what’s at hand!” [Laughing] So, in that sense, it was not like a band at all, and it was not something that you could really work with and improve. That’s just our family - I’m sure there are other families: the Lewis family, or…I don’t know how other families work, but that was just how it worked for us.
So for us, we were almost like a jam band, just the same thing we would do in our living rooms where ya just do a song, and when you’re done with it, you’re done, and whether it came out right or wrong, you went on. That’s how it was, playing with my family, which is fun, but it’s a different kind of fun. I very much enjoy working in a band setting where you can take a song and work with it, and if it’s not right, then you do it over, or you do it over three/four times, or you try a different arrangement.
PN: That’s a good way to put it: the difference between music as recreation and music as art. Well, they’re both art. There’s so many ways to approach music, even in the same band sometimes, you’ll have somebody who is instinctive, doesn’t have to learn any tune, they just hear it and they can figure out something, and others who want to have every note rehearsed. Well, Hardly Heard lasted ‘til about ‘91, you said?
AB: Right.
PN: Did you just have enough of it? Or people moving?
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AB: There were a number of things that happened in there. Leo had a heart attack in the mid ‘80s, and that kind of set us back. Then Mary Henderson was part of the band for a little while. I had heard her sing and just loved her singing. She was part of the band for a while, then she kind a backed out, and then it wasn’t as much fun. Then she started playing music with Dick Kimmel, and she asked me to play banjo with her, so I was doing double duty there. I think Mark Briere was doin’ some other things, and at the end, we never did, I remember the last thing that we did was Dulono’s, I think in ‘91, and we all said, “Well, are we gonna practice next week? No, let’s just wait ‘til the next gig comes, then we’ll have a practice.” and the next gig never came. It was time…it’d been a long time, we’d had a lot of fun, and I think people were tired of us; we were tired of it a little bit.
PN: The other part that I’m aware of, of your music, is the Scandinavian performance that seemed to get stronger over the years. I knew of you first as a Bluegrass player, and then found out about the family connection, I think I heard you first with the Mill City Ramblers in about ‘86 when I moved to Minnesota. But then the other thing seemed to grow, as all the music seemed to grow. You had your formal education and music was this thing that came second, then you had your career in the wood with making cabinets, but music seemed to play a greater and greater role all the time, is that right?
AB: Yes, very much so.
PN: You mind commenting on that?
AB: Well, the Scandinavian came about really, in about 1980 when I met Dick Rees. Now, he had played with The Happy Valley Boys, my dad and Clarence, and so when I met him, he was very interested in Scandinavian music at that time, and that was really an eye-opener for me, because I really hadn’t been overly interested in the Scandinavian part of it - I was Bluegrass! I could play Johan Pa Snippen and all that stuff without thinking about it. But Dick Rees had been part of the Powdermilk Biscuit band [Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion show band], and so I had a lot of respect for those musicians, and the fact that he was interested in our music, really opened my eyes to Scandinavian music. He was askin’ me if we’d played in North Dakota…so then I’d start really paying attention to the songs that Oliver played – “Tommy Peterson’s Waltz”, and “Pa’s Tune”, and “Henry Halverson’s Tune”, and these tunes that were floating around in North Dakota that had come from Norway, and plus, he was gettin’ some gigs. He would hire me to play, I think the first thing we did was he got some job at Dayton’s [upscale department store in downtown Minneapolis for decades], and Adam Granger was there, and I met Adam Granger! What was a thrill, for me that was, ‘cause I’d heard these guys on the radio, I thought they were great! Still do.
So, I was playing along with them and they were doing…Dick was kinda bringing up the Scandinavian stuff, of course, they were eclectic musicians who could do anything, and they do whatever the gig called for, but more and more, Dick was discovering Scandinavian music, and
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he really studied it. He went to Scandinavia, and continually kept going back and back to the older, the Bygdedans, from Scandinavia, and the Polskas, and the Pols, the Mazurka, the older dance forms. I was just kinda along for the ride, he learned a few tunes from me, but I was learning many, many tunes from him. And it really piqued my interest in Scandinavian music. That came after the Bluegrass.
PN: Is learning that instrumental music, did you play it on the violin?
AB: Yes.
PN: Is that a little different, mentally, than learning banjo music?
AB: Yeah, it sticks with the melody more, there is a pretty distinct melody, and you’re not trying to improvise on that. You may try to add to that melody through a harmony, or a counter melody, but the melody is pretty firm. Whereas banjo music, it’s all about the variations…taking a break, you don’t want to keep playing the same thing over and over. Yeah, there was a difference there.
PN: It seemed, for a while, that the Scandinavian took over from the Bluegrass as far as your performance life?
AB: Yeah, I always considered myself a side man, and anybody who would let me play with them, or would hire me, I would go with that; and I was getting more Scandinavian gigs then Bluegrass gigs. They very seldom seemed to conflict, and through Dick Rees, then I met Helge Lamo, and Kip Peltoniemi, and Char Bostrom, Leroy and Mel; I started playing a with Leroy and Mel in ‘92, and so, just one thing leads to another. In 1996, I had two instruments disappear, I can’t say if they were stolen or what, it was a summer where my kids were home, and my wife and I were both working…I always kept instruments scattered around the house: one in the basement, one behind the bed, one behind the couch - I never had ‘em all together in one place outta necessity. [Laughing] It would just look…my wife would wonder, “Why do we have all these instruments?!” if I had ‘em all in one area. [Laughing] So, one time I went to go get my banjo and I couldn’t find it. I started looking and looking, all around the house and I couldn’t find it, then I started checking out my other instruments, and my mandolin was missing. Now, I know that I never used my mandolin and the banjo…I was using mandolin some with Leroy, and I was using banjo some with Bluegrass, so I know I didn’t have them out together somewhere and leave them somewhere, but they were just gone. At the time I thought, I hadn’t probably played that banjo in about three or four weeks, I just thought, “I’m just not gonna replace it.” By that time I was working on accordion quite a bit; started button accordion in ‘85, and chromatic accordion in about ‘95, yeah, just shortly before this happened. That’s when I decided that my banjo career was done.
PN: Only it wasn’t, I bet.
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AB: Well, I’ve picked it up several times since, on occasion, I guess, I still have a 5-string banjo, but those rolls don’t get any better with months and months of not doin’ ‘em.
PN: I thought you were playing with a band now.
AB: Playing fiddle.
PN: Oh!
AB: ...trying to play fiddle, which is extremely different for me and extremely hard, ‘cause I’d played Scandinavian music and I’d played Old Time Hoedown music, and then I met Dan Hansen and Rob Coleman, and they had Rich Smith, at the time, playing banjo, now Barry St. Mane is playing with us. They asked me to play fiddle, so now it’s like bein’ in Bluegrass Fiddle 101, and I’m learning “Jerusalem Ridge”, and “The Brown County Breakdown”, and I’m tryin’ to learn Bluegrass licks on the fiddle and my fingers just aren’t that fast, so I just gotta find a lotta Bluesy double stops and hang onto ‘em. I still love playing Bluegrass; it’s a real treat to get together with those guys, we’ll be doing a set at the Kickoff this year on Sunday.
PN: Oh good.
AB: So, I hope I don’t embarrass myself. [Laughing]
PN: I kinda doubt it, Art.
AB: [Laughing] Well, you haven’t heard me play Bluegrass fiddle yet. [Laughing]
PN: Do you prefer Scandinavian fiddle, or Bluegrass fiddle, or any kind of playing Bluegrass, or are they just different sorts of experiences?
AB: They’re just different, if you had to choose one or the other, all I could say is it would be an extreme loss…whichever one…I’d have to give up something that I love, and there’s other types of music, but I just don’t have the ability to play them all.
PN: Do your kids play?
AB: Yes, my oldest daughter, Molly, is a musician, she took Music Therapy at Eau Claire, and she played piano, then she learned to play harp, and taught herself guitar - she can play guitar pretty good now, quite heavily into Gospel music. My son, Jesse, who showed absolutely no interest in playing music, after he got out on his own out to California, took up the ukulele, and that led him to playing guitar, and now he trying to drum. He wants to play drums. So, he’s very enthusiastic about playing music, not so interested in Bluegrass. Molly’s not either, but my youngest daughter, who doesn’t play, Andrea, loves Bluegrass, she’ll go, “Could you play this little lick on the banjo that goes ding a ding a ding? I love that when it comes in there!” [Laughing] So, it’s really neat to see that she appreciates it.
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PN: It seem that, in the last few years in the Twin Cities, there’re all these Bluegrass groups, and Old Time, or maybe you’d call them New Time, groups. You have any thoughts on the coming aesthetic?
AB: All I can say is, Bluegrass and Old Time music is very fortunate to have that interest, whichever direction it takes, because the Scandinavian music does not. I know of very, very few young people who are learning the old waltzes, and polkas, and schottisches on the accordion, there’s a few that learn ‘em on the fiddle, and the ASI [American Swedish Institute] Spelman’s Lag has helped with that tradition in the Swedish fiddling, but Scandinavian dance music in general, seems to be dying out.
PN: Well, I’ve learned to never count anything out, it was the same with Old Time fiddle music. When The New Lost City Ramblers started out, they were very much preservationists, because things didn’t look good at the time. Now, look around, it’s not only that the generation that immediately followed the Ramblers did a lot, now it seems, 2005, 2010, a whole lot more young people coming into it. I don’t think they find it necessary to be preservationist, because to them, it doesn’t seem that the music’s dying out, they weren’t around in 1955. So, there’s an evolution.
AB: Absolutely. I’m not despairing, but, I think that Bluegrass and Old Time music…the Association has done a wonderful thing in promoting young people with new band contests, or whatever it takes to get them interested. And they are interested, and they’re taking new directions, and that’s just the way it is; it’s not good, it’s not bad…change is inevitable, so if you become attached to the old way of doing it, that old way will always be there and people will always be going back to it.
PN: I have just one or two other things I wanted to ask, one thing is - when you first wanted to play Bluegrass, you described…I’ve seen it in print like a Bluegrass conversion experience. It’s so common for people to have heard Bluegrass and then they have to have more. Does that still happen with you? Like you hear something and you want more.
AB: Yes, it still does. I still can sit for hours and try to figure out a break. Now I’m trying to learn fiddle breaks. I don’t know what that drive is, because I’ll never be a great Bluegrass fiddle player, but just to hear something that’s so good and try to learn it, and then to be part of it…and I still, ya know, when you get in your 50s, there’s not as many things that excite me, [Laughing] but the thought of going to Bluegrass festival, to me, is…I just can’t wait! We’re going out to Grey Fox [Bluegrass festival at Walsh Farm in Oak Hill, NY] this year. My sister lives in Boston and her son’s graduating from high school, and so we went out there and this’ll be the third time - the first time at this location…first time we went it was still Winter Hawk, I think. So I look on the Web and see: Del McCoury’s gonna be there, and Doyle Lawson - those guys, Ricky Skaggs, Doyle Lawson, Del McCoury, they’re getting’ to be the real tradition bearers. They’re the old timers, the Osborne Brothers, Jimmy Martin…well, you know the history of it. But what a treat
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to have Del McCoury and some of those guys who learned right from the first generation; they were part of it, but they learned from ‘em.
PN: To me, Del is very post-Monroe - the Blues that’s in that.
AB: Yes, yeah. And the way his sons have really kept the sound and expanded it at the same time. It’s so exciting to see. [Laughing]
PN: Who’s your favorite fiddle player?
AB: [Long pause] I’d still say, Benny Martin. That stuff that he did with Flatt and Scruggs is just unbelievable. I like Kenny Baker, but his…they’re all good. All right, Curly Ray Cline.
PN: Anything that you’d like to address that I’ve not brought up?
AB: Well, I want to thank you for all you do for the Bluegrass community, through the years keeping the Bluegrass show going, and I get to listen to your syndicated show up in Grand Marais. All the people in the Association [MBOTMA] that have really worked so hard, Jed, to keep this going - I know it’s a labor of love. The last few years I haven’t really been able to volunteer much, I usually try to volunteer at the festival a little bit, usually do clean-up - they can find something to do for me after the festival’s over for me to clean-up. A lot of people have put a lot of work into keeping this going. When I go to other communities, sometimes I miss what we have here. We’ve got a wonderful Bluegrass music scene and traditional music scene in the Twin Cities, and we’re fortunate to have it; thank you for being part of it.
PN: Sure is fun, as you know!
AB: Yeah [Laughing]
PN: Thanks very much. Real good. Real good.
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