Pickin' and grinnin' at a bluegrass jam session

One of the things I love most about bluegrass (admittedly about other types of music like jazz or blues, too) is that in almost every song, each instrument, each player, gets a time in the limelight. A chance to take the melody and make it their own, spinning and twisting the notes and the rhythm until the song has a different accent.

I remember going to the Casey Jones Village in Jackson, Tenn., on Thursday nights to walk around and listen to the various bluegrass gatherings. I call them gatherings because they weren't bands, per se. They didn't practice or book shows or even know one another, really. They just showed up every Thursday and paired with other people who happen to know the same song.

I once watched as one small and slightly bent man sat on a bench, unlocked his banjo case and started picking. Just a few notes at first, but his fingers didn't take long to start twitching and picking out notes so fast I couldn't keep track of what finger had just hit which string. Eventually the man on the bench, whose hands shook until he held a banjo, had four others gathered around him, and they played song after song only pausing to name a tune and wait for the nod from the others in the group.

Now a group in Cape Girardeau has started gathering in Scivally Park to do the same thing, and it quadrupled in size from the first week to the second. It started June 29 with about six musicians in the park just off Cape Rock Drive. Sunday around 25 people came out, instruments in tow.

Experts and almost everyone else disagree on the proper instrumentation of a bluegrass band, but I'm pretty sure the men and women who turned up Sunday to play in the second Bluegrass & Old Time Open Jam didn't argue semantics.

The hodgepodge gathering of musicians split into a few groups and just picked away. That natural, raw playing is — in my mind — what bluegrass is all about. The only difference was they were in a park and I think it started on a porch.

The organizers of the weekly jam saw so much participation, they decided to extend the thing. The bluegrass jam now starts at 6 p.m. instead of 7 to give them more daylight to play and talk and joke. After all, bluegrass, like any other Americana music genre, was meant to tell stories and bring people together.