By Nancy Cardwell
In articles published during the past few months in honor of IBMA’s 25th anniversary, we’ve examined the goals we’ve accomplished as a bluegrass music trade association and a music community. Through the end of the year we’ll chat with a dozen industry leaders about what the future may hold—for IBMA, as well as for the music itself. We hope you’ll add your thoughts on our membership listserv, IBMA-L or on our Facebook page. Thanks for joining the team to support bluegrass music through your membership in IBMA, and we hope to continue working with you for the next 25 years!
Pete Wernick, IBMA president for 15 years from 1986-2001, is probably still most widely known as the talented banjo player with the legendary bluegrass band, Hot Rize—the recipients of IBMA’s first Entertainer of the Year award in 1990. He also performs currently in a duo with his wife, Joan; as a member of the genre-bending Pete Wernick & Flexigrass; and in the new, Colorado-based traditional bluegrass band, Long Road Home. (Wernick also bears a slight resemblance to Waldo Otto, the donut-hawking “electric table” player in Red Knuckles & the Trailblazers, but he doesn’t like to mention this in polite company.)
Pete holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University—hence his nickname, “Dr. Banjo”—and has a teacher’s heart. Utilizing the Pete Wernick Bluegrass Learning Method and Network he has taught hundreds of individuals to play the banjo better or to jam on all the bluegrass instruments, in an effort to, quite simply, make the world a better place by helping more people discover bluegrass music. When you consider the power our music has to connect people of different ages from different backgrounds, religious beliefs and cultures, it’s easy to understand Wernick’s personal mission. In fact, perhaps the United Nations should consider sending Dr. Banjo out to start up bluegrass jam sessions around the globe to help promote world peace!
Opportunities---
Pete points to individuals in mainstream popular culture who are authentic bluegrass fans and musicians, as one opportunity for our industry. “It seems like the biggest opportunities tend to be created from the top, down,” he notes. “For instance, the interest that Steve Martin has in bluegrass and the banjo has been helpful. In fact,” he adds, “everyone reading this can look forward to hearing an announcement from Steve soon that will help bluegrass. It involves television.”
Martin asked Pete recently, “If I was trying to help deserving talent get better exposure, how could I go about helping these people accomplish their life’s goals? What would be the biggest help?”
“I told him it’s really helped bluegrass when there has been bluegrass in a popular movie. It’s happened three times, and it creates a long-term effect. It’s nice to have people who are in a position to help that happen. He’s the most well-known person who has ever been a musician himself, who can get walloping amounts of television exposure. Now he’s recording a second album, so we can look forward to more media attention about that when it comes out.”
Wernick mentions recent tours and recordings from country artists like Dierks Bentley and Hank Williams, Junior, who have made a connection with bluegrass and bring it to the attention of their fans.
There’s nothing as helpful as an entertainment big shot who shows the world that they are also a fan of bluegrass,” Pete comments. “Some of them are closet players, and they greatly admire bluegrass musicians. If they understood how much exposure would mean to bluegrass, they could possibly be enlisted to get in on some projects. Ed Helms, the actor in the television show, The Office, comes to mind with the bluegrass event he organized recently in Hollywood.”
The artists directly involved with these celebrities or movies will capitalize on media exposure and get a career boost, Pete says, and then “all the boats in the harbor also rise,” he explains—which is one of the basic tenets of IBMA. Working together, we can accomplish more than we can separately; and success for individual artists often helps increase the visibility and the popularity of the entire genre of music.
Wernick also points to the immense popularity of the Colorado-based Yonder Mountain String Band, “which is truly a bluegrass band—not a rock band that likes bluegrass,” he says. “They are also taking care of a giant amount of exposure of bluegrass to an age group that we often miss. I’m not clear yet what the dividends will be, but Yonder Mountain does occasionally hook up with other bluegrass artists and then they have exposure to a new sized audience. All these things are only opportunities,” he emphasizes. “They’re not guarantees that things will automatically get better. If an opportunity is capitalized on, sometimes we can have breakthroughs. Once we have people who are highly placed looking to bluegrass for the things we do so well, other people might get hip to what we’re doing.”
On a different front, pulling out his education hat, Wernick firmly believes tremendous opportunities have been incredibly facilitated by the proliferation of $25 tuning devices for bluegrass instruments. “It’s amazing how a little invention like that is going to make a world of difference,” he says. “It’s not unrealistic to think that fifth graders could learn to tune and play banjos and mandolins and guitars. There are also more good, beginner-level instruments available now than there ever have been before. I remember 20 years ago at World of Bluegrass when George Gruhn was bemoaning the fact” that these instruments did not exist in the market.
“There are also more instructional materials now—so many, that some of the better ones get lost in the shuffle,” Pete continues. “In my opinion, people should learn how to jam first, before they learn to solo. It’s easier and it’s more fun—I tell my students jamming is ‘fun and fundamental.’ Learning to solo is too much like learning algebra in the fifth grade. It’s better to learn to use simple arithmetic first and be successful at that. For too many years students have blamed themselves because they can’t accomplish what the teacher is asking of them. We need to get more people learning a few chords and singing songs. It’s easy to get started playing bluegrass, but becoming a good bluegrass musician is hard. I’m convinced that many wonderful bluegrass instruments are sitting in attics and closets because an aspiring musician gave it up—they thought they were not capable. I’m trying my darnedest to reverse that situation. They should be learning to chord and accompany easy songs that everybody knows, and learn to navigate a small jam situation with a few other people.”
Up until now Wernick has personally gone out to organize and teach jamming camps in different areas across the country and around the world, but his plan for the immediate future is to develop a certification business “to not only instruct people how to run classes, but facilitate things for them by offering all the resources from my website to publicize their jam classes,” he explains. “They will teach, using my methods…and all of this wouldn’t be possible without $25 tuners,” he smiles.
The jamming first method of teaching bluegrass will open up opportunities for bluegrass in public school systems, Wernick believes. “It’s very easy to tune an instrument even when you’ve had no musical training, and you can start people out on two-chord songs that are easy to learn. An entire room full of kids could do this, and it’s such a great opportunity. The kind of music that we offer sets up the opportunity for kids to play music on easily portable instruments, and it’s all over the world! A novice player, using the internet, can find jam sessions in all corners of the world, and then go there and make new friends, and play music together.” In fact, two websites already exist: www.bluegrassmusicjams.com, with more than 700 jams listed so far, and www.folkjam.org is very similar.
“We’re surrounded by the templates of a former era when people assumed you have to take lessons and read music to learn to play an instrument, and they would be taught by rote,” Wernick observes. “This is not the way bluegrass is played, or the way it should be taught. We have a large population of people who play bluegrass, but an even larger number of folks who have tried and given up because they think they’re not capable. We need to adjust our instructional methods.”
Pete is encouraged by new trends and philosophies in public education. “There is not as much inherent resistance to roots music as there used to be because teachers are in the mode of finding a way to connect with students any way they can,” he says. “Mariachi music has made an entry. I think the time is quite good, even though there is a contraction of music programs in many schools. We can make easily replicable programs for roots music—both on the music appreciation and instructional levels. It’s not a pipe dream to think of fifth graders being able to learn a few chords on banjos, mandolins and guitar—which will give them a good introduction to string band instrumentation. They might sing a country or a mariachi or a bluegrass song—we’ll be in there with other forms of roots music for which the instrumental skills are very comparable. I’ve made a very specific effort to align bluegrass with other roots music forms because I think we’ll have a much better success at getting into public schools. Roots music should be part of what’s taught in the schools, just like any other part of American culture---for example, literature and art.”
Challenges---
One of the biggest challenges in the music industry overall, Wernick believes, is “the chaos in the record industry. People are trying hard to make things happen, but it’s very hard to predict what makes sense for two years from now. Modes of distribution and sales have been reinvented, and they’re not working as well as the old system. The majority of music now is consumed by means of YouTube and free downloads. We have a lot of good, free exposure, but musicians and songwriters are not being compensated. A lot of things are possible, but we’re having to figure out how to monetize bluegrass all over again. One thing that hasn’t changed: there are still live shows that people come to, and money is being made. Recordings can’t be counted on to make money. The best advice I can give to a band that wants to get on the map is they need to have some good YouTube videos that can be spread virally,” Pete advises. A successful new band needs to have “something attractive about them—either they’re young and attractive, they have great visuals, or there’s just something about them that will start people talking about them.”
Aside from the music itself, Pete says, a bluegrass band’s job is “to be entertaining and interesting—so much that people might pay money to watch the music being made. Lots of bands are playing for other musicians, to establish their competence. You have to go beyond that to be interesting. You may have won 20 flatpicking contests and two fiddle contests, but that’s not your ticket to making enough money to live on in this business. Another opportunity for musicians is to learn how to run novice jam classes, and teach privately the ones who need a little extra help,” he adds. “I think teachers would hold onto more students if they were jamming.”
Opportunities & Challenges for IBMA---
“In general our goal is to keep the community together,” Wernick says. “When I was president, that was very prominent in all of our minds. At the time we weren’t sure IBMA could survive, and we needed the involvement of people who understood what we could do together. We still need to keep membership up, and there’s a tendency for people to snip and complain about how things should be done or why their friend hasn’t won an award. These kinds of obstacles sometimes create a lack of unity, which is extremely detrimental. If everything had to be perfect before someone would join an organization, our country wouldn’t have 50 states,” he adds. IBMA is “a tool,” and it’s the membership’s job to use it. We are the tools, in fact. The leadership of IBMA “does a very job of letting people know how to participate and be listened to, and help accomplish things,” Wernick says. “Patience is a big part of this. It’s not a perfect world, but we’re very lucky to have the IBMA. I’m one of the few still around who knows what the bluegrass world is with, and without, IBMA. It’s a lot easier to function in a world with the IBMA. There are some people who smugly say they won’t join because it’s all screwed up. Well, they need to be a part of the solution. Get involved, and make things better. That’s how America--and a lot of other things--was built. We have to believe and trust and be ready to work, even when the results don’t leap out at us immediately.”
Trends & New Developments in the next 5-10 years---
Wernick compares the bluegrass world to “a big forest. Some people worry that one tree is getting too much sunshine and rain,” he notes. “There’s natural competition and various trends and all these pockets of different concerns. There will always be people who want to play bluegrass down-to-earth, just like the old days. I’m in a new band now in Colorado with Gene Libbea and some guys in their 20s who play straight ahead bluegrass and wear suits and ties.” On the other hand, “there will always be people who want to tear their jeans and wear tattoos and play bluegrass,” Pete smiles. “There’s always room for that, if the music is good—and not phony or pretentious.”
Hot Rize showed that it’s possible to tweak the formula while still maintaining a respect for the core of where bluegrass came from. “Some people think some bands take it too far…Cadillac Sky, for example,” Pete continues. “But more power to them! They’ll find an audience and it’ll be part of the big umbrella that is the bluegrass music community. There is still a lot of hard core, traditional bluegrass music being made by young people. It’s not going away. I just see the forest getting bigger. I’m a bluegrass musician who likes to play down to earth sometimes, and then sometimes I like to go to France…or Mars! This summer Joan and I have been invited to play bluegrass at the first American/Russian Jamboree in Russia. I want to keep exposing the music to people in far-flung places, to hopefully plant seeds all over the world.”