bluegrass and happiness

Ever sense something that "takes you back"...maybe it's a smell or a special touch that carries you back to a previous time and emotion. You re-live it in your mind and you feel it all over. Maybe it's a good memory or feeling OR maybe not. Well, for me, bluegrass music "takes me back". In me, bluegrass music emotes happiness. Perhaps all this started back on the trampoline, after dark, playing, while David Honeycutt sang "Blue Moon of Kentucky" across the road at the store during his weekly "concerts" in the pines. Or maybe when we stayed up (and outside) all night, pretending to rest on stretched out lawn chairs while Daddy, Marion and Uncle Creighton cooked a pig...all the while listening to the Hee-Haw Quartet's gospel cassette. (I had to have my own copy). Or perhaps I was hooked when I first heard Alison Krauss on "Austin City Limits" one Saturday night. The picture was so fuzzy on Channel 4 I could hardly see her...I taped it on the VCR anyway. Never the less, I have an attraction to Bluegrass music. I know to some folks bluegrass is a completely hokey genre of music where most the folks couldn't sing if they didn't have a nose to sing through. But to me, it's the purity of the songs. Bluegrass is so raw, real, and unpretentious. The singer doesn't really have to sing so good because it is the instruments that the players make "sing". It's supposed to have that yearning, needing, and pining sound. I appreciate the artistry of the "picking". It's the music you sit on blankets to listen to. It's the music you smile, joke, and tap your foot to. For me, it will be the emotion I feel as much as the music I hear.