Word: instrumentally
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...find it vaguely creepy too. Keeping the genre fresh and alive is going to take more than an embalmer's devotion, and suddenly Jerry Garcia seems a lot more relevant than some might give him credit for. It is about music first, after all, not just the instrument...
...everybody knows your name. Make that every Buddy - it seems that the biggest guns in the business frequent the site, including the legendary Buddy Emmons, who is frequently referred to in postings simply as The Greatest Pedal Steel Player Who Ever Lived. A query about the history of the instrument gets me a personal e-mail from one of its elder statesmen, Maurice Anderson. It's the pedal steel equivalent of a guitar chat group where Jeff Beck or George Benson would weigh in occasionally...
...Throughout the convention, as in the online forums, one gets the sense of lore carefully being passed along. The instrument's pioneers, after all, are still with us for the most part, but judging from the convention it doesn't appear to be a magnet for youth: At 45, I'm in the younger half of my 10-man seminar, and I see maybe two people all weekend who are clearly under 30. Perhaps I'm not the only one who got put off by it the first time around...
...Luckily, some of the instrument's heaviest hitters are in their prime and have come to play, and the jam session Saturday night is the weekend's highlight. Herby Wallace, Doug Jernigan and Joe Wright, accompanied by bass and drums, tear into a set that ranges from "Sweet Georgia Brown" to the bluegrass standard "Rocky Top" (featuring a scorching ride by Jernigan) to "Johnny B. Goode." As is not always the case with highly technical instrumental displays (think jazz fusion), some actual music is being played here, and very well...
...occurs to me that in this quixotic adventure, I'm following those same currents of refined obsession, trying to claim a small, evanescent patch of the American fantasy. The maverick creative spirit that animated Henry Ford and Les Paul and Elvis is fully manifest in this impossible instrument, which is as crazy and American as it gets...