- - - - Richard Parks grew up in California, where he was first exposed to bluegrass music as a teenager. He culminated his high-school education with an academic paper and a lecture titled "Bill Monroe at the Center of the Bluegrass Canon." Proceeding from the observations of Neil Rosenberg in Bluegrass: A History, Robert Cantwell in Bluegrass Breakdown, and Richard Smith in Can't You Hear Me Callin', the project attempted to posit a comprehensive theory of bluegrass provenance. Richard Greene and John Hartford also contributed interviews. Parks now resides in Montréal, Québec, where he plays mandolin in a bluegrass group and is a regular contributor to Fred Bartenstein's "Banks of the Ohio," a show that airs on WYSO weekly and streams on www.bluegrasscountry.org. Richard is available exclusively through McSweeney's to answer your bluegrass-related questions. You may contact him at: mcsweeneysbluegrass@hotmail.com. - - - - March 1, 2004 Dear Mr. Parks, Hats? Bluegrass?!?!?! —Jane Bruce - - - - Lesson Six: Hats make you look good. CARTSONIS: The same hat that allows a Kentuckian's head to breathe will as well cover and disguise (often for the life of the performer) any real or imagined lack of hair. There is a long tradition of hat-wearing by hair-impaired men in rural musics (ref: Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Bill Monroe, Dwight Yoakam, Shotgun Red). It should be noted that in some cases, garish hairpieces may be used in place of the cowboy hat with some success (ref: Hank Snow). ROBERTS: They help us look good, as do the suits. Lesson Six and One Half: Looking good is a kind of respect for others. ROBERTS: Along with a suit, the hat serves well to demonstrate a respect for the audience. I believe that many audiences desire to see performers who are dressed a little better than they are and recognize this as one component in demonstrating the appropriate respect for the audience. I also see this as a sign of our respect for the music we play and those who have gone before us to establish this valuable music tradition. Lesson Seven: Hats are often made of felt. CARTSONIS: Hats are often made of felt. Lesson Eight: They're just hats. CARTSONIS: Hats cover heads—probably the most practical truth about headwear of any kind. The cowboy hat tends to have more space between the crown of the head and the inner top boundary of the garment, offering ample air exchange to the scalp. This is particularly important in bluegrass and other southern musics where performers tend to use amounts of hair oil and styling product far in excess of other proximate cultures. ROBERTS: Open Road was chosen as our name in part because of the name of the hat. It's also just a good bluegrass band name if you didn't know about the hat. We don't actually wear Open Road model hats although we've had a couple of guys in the past who wore them. Mine is a similar-shaped old Stetson in dress-weight felt that barely holds its shape and I really think I ought to get another hat that's in better shape. GREENE: I chose to wear a fiberglass fake-weave white hat, less sweat. Postscript: An elegy for the bluegrass hat as we (perhaps) have discussed it here. There is a handful of groups that go in for the whole classic bluegrass look these days who dress the part: Open Road of course, and Matt Large reminded me that David Peterson and 1946 is also one, and Karl Shifflit and Big Country Show is another. However, in the main I think the trend tends toward what the Del McCoury Band does—nice suits of any inoffensive color, no hats, looking good, but nothing too far outside of what you'd wear to the office—no cowboy hats very much any more (I don't know a single group who has brought the jodhpurs back and that's one thing I'd like to see). Otherwise, there's the casual approach—bands like the Newgrass Revival and Old and in the Way ushered in the whole long-hair/goatee/close-fitting jeans/ironically-irrelevant-thrift-store-T-shirt thing back in the seventies, and lots of groups perform in their civvies these days, sometimes with hats, sometimes without. I once played with a group called the Bluegrass Bastards for a period of three hours in 100-degree heat at a biker bar in Ojai and I assure you that for that entire length of time the dobro man whose name I think was Cisco did not remove—nor have I ever seen or heard of him without it—his short-brimmed fedora hat that's covered entirely in gold sequins, and I think was adorned with some type of bird feather. It's possible that the whole Nashville "country music" industry and the people at MTV have claimed the cowboy hat for the bad guys once and for all, and that's the reason most bluegrassers stay away from the headwear of their predecessors. That is to say that there is perhaps something of the corporate in all of this—I'm reminded of those lines from the late John Hartford's 1999 Rounder release Good Old Boys, "Now I'm layin' in this tanning booth, a-dreaming of my youth / The gangster rap and the cowboy hat just make me feel uncouth." John Hartford—now there was a man who could color you, me, and your mother bluegrass five ways from Sunday—a man with a profound and revelatory sense of irony, a man who always looked dashing in a bowler hat of the type we see in Magritte, and I believe we should take his words to heart—gangster rap and the cowboy hat are now equal parts in the apparatus of show business, and the real people are scared to death of it all. So what's my point? I guess it's that there are no hard-and-fast rules (any more). It's anyone's game, and no one's got it right. And for some reason I find this a little bothersome—I'm nostalgic for a time when things were more black and white. It's statements like that that get me in trouble with my university friends—Matt Frassica told me the other night that I speak of bluegrass as if it were a fascist mechanism, with statues of Monroe and the whole bit. I see his point, but even so, time and time again I find that as soon as you stray too far away from the source, the center no longer holds. I think we're lucky to have the authority figure we have in Monroe. It comes back to the old maxim: If it isn't straight from Monroe, it " ain't no part of nothin'," as the man Himself put it. I think Matt Cartsonis nails this idea in something he wrote to me, which might help put things perspective and is a nice place to end: In a band of any kind, and especially in the rural, traditional forms, pan-culturally we observe that if hats are worn by only one member of the group, that member will invariably be the leader. This phenomenon can be seen in the Norteño conjuntos of Mexico, the choirs of the Vatican, and the Gamelans of Indonesia. It is no great leap to associate hats with tallness with leadership with power. And in bluegrass, the power of Bill Monroe could never be disputed. He wore a hat. And he wrote tunes with power names, including "Big Mon." The casual student may not understand the literal meaning of "Mon," nor is there time or space to discuss it here, but it is indisputably big. Cheers,
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