Notorious for Bluegrass

Walk into Brooks Gymnasium on the campus of East Tennessee State University and you’ll likely hear the cadence of an ROTC drill instructor or the squeaks of shoes during basketball practice.

But on the building’s third level, there’s a different kind of activity altogether. Walking down that hallway, you might hear the lonely, resonating notes of a dobro. Nearby a bass fiddle vibrates the floor. Banjo breakdowns ring out. And from an impromptu jam session comes the high harmony of twin fiddles.

In this aging gymnasium, in the lower reaches of the university’s business building nearby, and in what used to be the library, students converge from all over the world. They are here to take part in an academic program like no other: Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Country Music Studies.

ETSU now offers a four-year degree in that field, and it has since 2010. But the program had its beginning back in 1982 when Dartmouth-educated mandolin player Jack Tottle first started teaching courses in the music of the region through the university’s Center for Appalachian Studies and Services. Along the way, a minor was added in 2005.

Now, there are some 60 students majoring in Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Country Music Studies, along with 35 who are minoring. Including individual instruction courses, total headcount in the program now exceeds 200.

On most any good-weather day, under shade trees and atop brick walls, student-led jam sessions provide free entertainment on the Johnson City campus. During the spring semester of 2019, there were 35 student bands, operating under the auspices of what is now the Department of Appalachian Studies. There have been as many as 42, says program director Dan Boner, himself an accomplished guitarist and fiddle player.

Boner discovered the ETSU program through a high school English teacher in southern New Jersey and enrolled as a student in 2000. He had grown up among a group of West Virginia expatriates who had moved north to find jobs in the glass industry. He first learned to play guitar in one of four Freewill Baptist churches in the Bridgeton, New Jersey, area. His great uncle, Larry Boner, was a guitar-strumming preacher.

“I grew up hearing loud preaching and attending homecomings and Saturday night singings,” Boner says. “I went to church every Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night, and I played guitar in church.”

Boner says there was no order of worship in his great uncle’s tiny church. “But it was good ear training, listening to what people were singing and trying to match it on guitar.” 

Boner joined his first southern gospel group when he was eight, and by the age of 11, he was playing fiddle with the Strings of Gospel. 

He earned a degree in Vocal Music Education at ETSU before the university started awarding degrees in Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Country Music Studies. 

“This was right after the ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ phenomenon, and programs like ours were exploding,” Boner says. 

The year that film came out, 2000, ETSU alumnus Kenny Chesney had already released a “Greatest Hits” album, on his way to country music superstardom. 

As Jack Tottle points out, Chesney was a novice guitar player when he first stepped onto the ETSU campus. But bluegrass courses and private instruction quickly changed that. While playing local bars and restaurants like the Chuckey Trading Company, Chesney earned his Mass Communications degree from ETSU in 1990. His image is repeated several times in a Brooks Gym hallway photo mural, near those of the Stanley Brothers, the Carter Family, and Bonnie Lou and Buster, a duo that played live on Johnson City’s WJHL-TV in the 1960s. 

Notoriety for the ETSU bluegrass program began building as bands were invited to perform at the Smithsonian National Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C., and for a Christmas party at NATO Headquarters.  

ETSU wasn’t the first higher education institution in America to offer a degree in bluegrass and other traditional music. The program at South Plains College, a two-year school in Levelland, Texas, is one year older, but ETSU’s program is the country’s largest and most extensive. Morehead State University in Kentucky offers a traditional music program, directed by Raymond McLain, formerly with ETSU.  

Courses in Celtic music at ETSU are taught by Jane MacMorran, a former U.S. National Scottish Fiddling Champion. Roy Andrade, best known for his work with the string band Reeltime Travelers, specializes in old-time music.

In 2008, ETSU opened its own recording laboratory. Boner says the equipment, much of it obtained through grant funding, is “remarkable.” Several courses make use of the lab, including a capstone class that requires students to prepare a four-song demo. They select their own material, arrange it, and record it.

“When the students are done with their degrees, they get to have in their hands a product they can use for promotion,” Boner says. “Some have built on those projects by adding more songs and putting out records.”

According to Blue Highway’s Tim Stafford, “This program is helping ETSU take the worldwide lead in educational leadership in the field of contemporary music studies.”

It’s not unusual for students to secure jobs well before graduation. One of those is Aynsley Porchak.

Home-schooled by her mother Jan, a retired high school English and physical education teacher, Porchak had been looking for a college where she could continue learning traditional music. Near her home in Woodstock, Ontario, Canada, there was a classical program and a jazz program but no bluegrass. 

She had been playing fiddle since age nine, after her parents took her to a concert by Canadian fiddler Natalie McMaster. Porchak’s love of the fiddle really began, though, when she was three. From her carseat, she demanded that her mother stop dialing the radio when station BX 93 in London, Ontario, aired songs by country artists Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson, and George Strait, whose sidemen played the fiddle.

In 2012, after years of lessons, Porchak traveled with her family to Nashville to participate in the Grand Masters Fiddle Championship.

“During that competition, we were fortunate to have lunch with session musician Buddy Spicher at a tiny little seafood place in Nashville,” Porchak remembers. “This man came up to our table and he recognized Buddy. He introduced himself as Dan Boner, Director of the Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Country Music Studies Program at East Tennessee State University.”

Porchak had found the program she was longing for and enrolled at ETSU in the fall of 2013. Two years later, she returned to Nashville and won the U.S. Grand Masters Fiddle Championship.

Her victory allowed her to fulfill another dream, an appearance on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, where she played the tune “Fiddle Patch.”

In 2017, Porchak won the Canadian Grand Masters Fiddle Championship, making her the only person in history, thus far, to have captured both titles.

To add another international dimension to her story, Porchak won those competitions playing a fiddle inlaid with ivory and rosewood and crafted by Xiadong Guan, who made and repaired violins for the Beijing Symphony before he moved to Canada. It was the last violin he would ever make. 

A violin in Porchak’s possession that is too precious for public performance belonged to her great-grandfather, Cazmir Porzak, who left Poland in 1913 when he was 16 with only the clothes he was wearing and his treasured instrument.

Porchak finished her bachelor of arts degree with a double major in Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Country Music Studies and English and immediately began work on a master of arts in Appalachian Studies. Her thesis topic is the music of the Louvin Brothers, Charlie and Ira, from the Sand Mountain region of northern Alabama.

“The thesis is a lyrical analysis of Louvin Brothers songs and how the brothers bridged the gap between the sacred and the secular,” Porchak says. “There are similar themes—love, acceptance, and rejection.”

In January of 2018, Porchak secured a steady job playing fiddle for the up-and-coming group Carolina Blue, based in Brevard and Hendersonville, North Carolina. Despite busy weekends touring to places like Branson, Missouri; Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; and Nashville’s famed Station Inn, Porchak’s academic work continues.

“While touring, I write in the RV,” she tells me. “I wake up in the morning and write on the trip to the venue. Then between first and second sets of music, I write again. Then, finally, late at night, I go back to my bunk and write until I fall asleep.”

In 2018, Porchak won the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Momentum Instrumentalist of the Year award, for up-and-coming artists.

At the end of every semester, ETSU bands perform at a Johnson City institution, The Down Home, which opened in 1976. 

“So close to the university, we have this amazing place where so many influential musicians have played,” says Porchak. “It gives us a venue to showcase our students to the public.” Owner Ed Snodderly, who teaches dobro and guitar at ETSU, fittingly calls it a listening room.

“Music took over my life,” remembers Colleen Trenwith, now a member of the ETSU faculty. As a girl in Wellington, New Zealand, she would gather with her family around the piano while her father, Gordon Bain, played old songs like “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” When she was eight, she started taking classical violin lessons. Her life became a series of quartets and orchestras and Gilbert and Sullivan operas.

When she moved to Hamilton, in the middle of the North Island of New Zealand, she made friends with musicians who had just discovered the music of “The Beverly Hillbillies” television show.

“They handed me the record ‘Flatt and Scruggs at Carnegie Hall!’ and told me to learn every fiddle part on it,” she recalls. “I slowed the record down to 16 2/3 speed. Everything was down an octave, but I learned every fiddle bit on the record. I took it on as a technical exercise.” 

She accepted Paul Trenwith’s invitation to join the Hamilton County Bluegrass Band as well as his marriage proposal. She gave up her job as a teacher to go on the road, introducing bluegrass music to New Zealand. Soon the band was invited to perform on television.

“New Zealand had one channel in the late 1960s,” Trenwith says. “It signed on at five o’clock in the afternoon and signed off at eleven. We were the resident band for a program called ‘Country Touch,’ based on early Grand Ole Opry television shows.”

Colleen Trenwith and the Hamilton County Bluegrass Band became household names in New Zealand.

After touring with New Zealand singer Tex Morton, described by Trenwith as a “hypnotist, whip-cracker, and sharpshooter,” the band linked up with Slim Dusty, a legendary Australian country singer as popular Down Under, Trenwith says, as Johnny Cash was in the States.

At a banjo pickers convention in New Zealand, Trenwith and her band met American folk singer Mike Seeger.

“He was a huge influence on us,” says Trenwith. “He was like a one-man bluegrass band. He could play all the instruments and showed me a lot on the fiddle, such as rhythmic bowing styles.”

Through Bill Monroe, Seeger arranged to have the Hamilton County Bluegrass Band play on the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville in 1971. 

“I still have the program,” Trenwith says. “Monroe did two 15-minute sets, and we played in one of his sets. We played a Slim Dusty song and, for an encore, a Mac Wiseman song.”

Still, though, Trenwith felt she needed more knowledge. Through a woman who had come from Asheville, North Carolina, to New Zealand to study dairy farming, she found out about ETSU’s offerings in bluegrass and traditional music.

She applied successfully for a Public Performance Scholarship and enrolled. Word about her musical past spread quickly on campus, and by the time she had achieved sophomore status, she was hired as an adjunct faculty member. In 2016, she earned a bachelor of science degree in General Studies with a minor in Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Country Music Studies and is now a full-time member of the faculty.

“I’m a patient teacher,” she says. “I get a great deal of satisfaction when I see the light go on in students’ eyes, when they first understand something and accomplish a tune that they didn’t think they could play before.”

Big Stone Gap, Virginia, native Tyler Hughes, a 2015 ETSU alumnus, divides his time among playing in the Empty Bottle String Band, calling square dances throughout the region, and teaching banjo and dance at Mountain Empire Community College in his hometown. 

He writes, “I’ll forever be grateful to the Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Country Music Studies program. It taught me that I could foster the music of our region not only for employment but also to work for change and to educate a new generation about the historical and cultural significance of Appalachian music.”

About the author: Fred Sauceman has worked at ETSU since 1985. He is proud to see his cousins, Carl and J.P. Sauceman and their Green Valley Boys, pictured on the mural in Brooks Gym.