Wayfaring Stranger: A Musical Tour in the American South. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, Publishers, 2020, 314 pages.
What I know about bluegrass music you could probably write on a large sticky note. In college some friends and I headed to Union Grove, North Carolina, for the annual bluegrass concert. Years later, I spent a few evenings in various pubs and restaurants around Asheville listening to my brother-in-law and his band playing original and traditional bluegrass.
And that’s about it.
Having confessed my lack of credentials, let me introduce you to Emma John’s Wayfaring Stranger: A Musical Tour in the American South, a memoir centered on bluegrass music that was one of the most delightful books I’ve read in years.
Emma John, a Londoner used to the fast life and a classically trained violinist who burned out on that instrument at a young age, has some time on her hands. Having listened to the music of Mumford & Sons and watched the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? she decides to travel to the American South and learn about bluegrass. On the flight across the Atlantic, a woman she meets on the plane puts her in touch with her elderly friend Fred, who plays banjo and guitar. Sight unseen, Fred takes Emma into his home for a week’s introduction to bluegrass.
Several years later, weary of London and feeling at loose ends, Emma remembers how “kind and generous the people I’d met in the South had been,” and she determines to return and “turn myself into a bona fide fiddler.”
Wayfaring Stranger is the story of that journey.
And much, much more.
Here readers will find an informal history of bluegrass and Emma John’s homage to this art form. Here we meet musicians past and present who have preserved this music and made it new again. We travel with Emma to numerous concerts, watch as she first becomes engrossed in these performances and eventually becomes a participant, and share her delight in the Southern hospitality she encounters in the towns of Appalachia. We also witness her frustration and tears as she tries to shake off the penchant for perfectionism bred into her by the classical violin teachers of her youth and transform herself into a bluegrass fiddler.
Adding to the pleasures of this book are Emma John’s keen eye for description, her ability to write well, her wonderful sense of humor, which is often directed at herself, and her willingness to open her heart to her readers. We find some of these elements in this account of a dance in Boone, North Carolina, where “the main aim was clear: to swing your partner until you induced internal haemorrhage, or at least some mild ear bleeding …”
A paragraph later, she writes, “I stood at the edge of the floor for only a short time before a man with a pork-pie hat, middle-age spread and a heavy Teutonic accent asked me to dance. After ten minutes of twirling, my brain was in danger of coming loose. It was like being on a waltzer at a fairground, if it had no seats, no safety bar, and was operated by an eight-year-old psychopath on a sugar high.” (A waltzer is a British fairgrounds ride with freely spinning cars.)
Interspersed between the chapters about her adventures in the music world are short lessons about the history and culture of bluegrass, lists like “A top-five of audience requests” (“Rocky Top” is number 5, “Orange Blossom Special number 1) and “A quick summary of bluegrass song topics” (the old homeplace, trains, cheatin’, drinkin’, killin’, and chain gangs). Several of these interludes are devoted to “A brief and incomplete history of bluegrass,” and there’s even a page on banjo jokes: How do you get a banjo player off your porch? Pay for your pizza.
Although she has a few less than glowing opinions about the South, Emma John for the most part is effusive in her praise for the people of such regions as Southwestern Virginia, Western North Carolina, and Eastern Tennessee, places that all too often others have despised or mocked. Sometimes the ways of the natives catch her off-guard, as when one jam session with an audience opens with the Pledge of Allegiance—”I froze. I’d never been in a room where people did this before. Did it look rude not to hold my hand to my chest?”—followed by a prayer.
Emma John’s refreshing take on our region is charming. She even begins her acknowledgements at the end of the book with these words: “Southern hospitality is not a myth. And—unless I win the lottery—there is no way I can ever repay the kindness and generosity of the people I met on my travels. I can only hope that, when they read this, they will at least understand how special they are to me.”
And at the end of Wayfaring Stranger, Emma John wrote, “I may have arrived a stranger, but this place, and its people, hadn’t allowed me to keep my status for long. Acquaintances had turned friends had turned family. Now my own memories were soaking into the landscape.”
As some people around here might say, “Emma John, you’ve done yourself proud in Wayfaring Stranger.”
And you’ve done the same for bluegrass and the people love that music.