Bluegrass
A wise man on the bluegrass-l once wrote “When I’m in a good mood, I want to listen to bluegrass music. When I’min a bad mood, I need to listen to bluegrass music.
Right now, I’m listening to one of the most tragic characters of the genre: Bernarr “Buzz Busby” Busbice. Talk about a tough life. Buzz was born in Louisiana in the 1930s. His plans to go to college were dashed when his mother became gravely ill. Instead he joined the FBI, but his addictions to drugs and alcohol plagued him his entire life. In 1962, he did a 6-month stint in the pen for drugs.
Buzz’s tenor is frighteningly high and lonesome, probably the most ghostly and mournful voice I have ever heard. His mandolin solos sound like a car crash, and I mean that in a positive sense. His sessions with legendary fiddle player (and legendary addict) Scotty Stoneman are the gold standard by which I judge most bluegrass recordings, and the digital remixes in the “Going Home” compilation don’t do the original any degree of justice. Once you’ve heard Buzz and Scotty distort a microphone by playing and singing that loudly on vinyl, the compressed sounds that come from the cd sound wimpy and flat. If you can get “Honky Tonk Bluegrass” on vinyl, it’s worth the dough.
The accounts I’ve read clearly indicate that drugs or no, Buzz was hard to work for. His guitar player on Honky Tonk Bluegrass, Leon Morris, left over creative differences ovet the darkness of Buzz’s vision. “Dark” is an understatement. With songs like “Lonesome Wind”, “This is The End”, and “This World’s No Place to Live In (But It’s Home)”, Buzz’s catalogue is a story of hopelessness, desperation, depression, and loss.
Where will this end I ask, my friend
What is my destiny
My broken heart, it just won’t mend,
Oh where, oh where will this end?
When I was playing in Jim and Jennie and the Pinetops, we learned that Buzz was in a nursing home, ravaged by Parkinsons Disease. We made plans to meet him, but it never happened. When he died, I felt like I’d personally failed the man, someone I’d never met, but who spoke to me at such a visceral level.
Buzz, not long for this world
As my friend Travers, a mandolin player in Virginia likes to say, Buzz Busby scarred me. All I know is that I’m sitting here at work, wondering how I’m going to support myself and a two-year old for the next two weeks on $89.00, and Buzz Busby’s unique nightmare is speaking volumes to me. Kindred misery.
November 18th, 2006 at 5:32 pm
[...] This is what it’s like, being poor. Brendan knows what I mean, and he’s working: That $89 is supposed to purchase my gas to drive to Syracuse and back to pick up my son, pay for our meals for the next week, pay to get us to New Jersey and back for Thanksgiving, and pay for us to get back to Syracuse next Sunday. And that doesn’t count the two credit card bills that are also due ($30 some bucks apiece) or the fact that I still haven’t bought fuel oil since that’s out of my price range this week as well. Or the old phone bill that’s probably in collections right now. [...]