The first thing Charles Wood will tell you is that Old Crow Medicine Show, the Avett Brothers, the newer bluegrass bands springing up in recent years. … They’re all good, but they’re not bluegrass.
Bluegrass is Flatt and Scruggs, Bill Monroe and Ralph Stanley. Their music is pure, clean and devoid of amps and synthesizers. Theirs is the music, he sighs, that made him fall in love with the banjo as a 13-year-old in a family full of classical pianists.
When he was teenager, the banjo was his love. Now, as an adult, he finds the instrument has become an extension of himself.
“The only time I’m ever really happy is when I’m playing,” Wood says, more matter of fact than dramatic. “I think as a musician it’s something you have to do; it’s not something you have a choice with.”
The 44-year-old Wood fell in love with the instrument the moment he heard a Flatt and Scruggs album at age 13. He couldn’t have known then that three decades later he would share the stage with Earl Scruggs at an arts festival in New York, or that the banjo would put him in touch with comedian Steve Martin (an avid banjo player), or that it would lead him to a spot on “Late Night with David Letterman” where he would play with Martin and Scruggs.
Full story.
Bluegrass is Flatt and Scruggs, Bill Monroe and Ralph Stanley. Their music is pure, clean and devoid of amps and synthesizers. Theirs is the music, he sighs, that made him fall in love with the banjo as a 13-year-old in a family full of classical pianists.
When he was teenager, the banjo was his love. Now, as an adult, he finds the instrument has become an extension of himself.
“The only time I’m ever really happy is when I’m playing,” Wood says, more matter of fact than dramatic. “I think as a musician it’s something you have to do; it’s not something you have a choice with.”
The 44-year-old Wood fell in love with the instrument the moment he heard a Flatt and Scruggs album at age 13. He couldn’t have known then that three decades later he would share the stage with Earl Scruggs at an arts festival in New York, or that the banjo would put him in touch with comedian Steve Martin (an avid banjo player), or that it would lead him to a spot on “Late Night with David Letterman” where he would play with Martin and Scruggs.
Full story.
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