Bluegrass and
folk set themselves apart from other genres of popular music by
reaching deep into turn-of-the-century, rural Americans. They wrote
songs about hard times and fond memories, as well as about what lies
between those two extremes. What follows from that distinction are a
variety of songwriters and performers who relish in the details of
common stories, including local folk and bluegrass master John
Rossbach, who has nurtured the genres by performing and recording
throughout Central New York outlets since the early 1970s.
The Salt City will suffer from the lack
of 54-year-old Rossbach’s dedication to his art when the guitarist and
vocalist moves to Elkins, W.Va., with his wife, Joyce Rossbach, after
one final gig. It’ll be with his band Chestnut Grove, a group Rossbach
has championed during a 22-year stretch. The last local chance to catch
the Grove will be during a Folkus Project performance at the May
Memorial Unitarian Universalist Society, 3800 E. Genesee St., on
Friday, Nov. 21, 8 p.m. Tickets for the concert are $12, and may be
purchased by calling 440-7444.
Rossbach’s move, a process that began in
February and will conclude after the gig, will bring him just 25 miles
from his hometown. In Buckhannon, W.Va., he embarked upon a lifelong
journey in the music business, starting in the genuinely hillbilly
Appalachians and continuing to the bar scene that fostered all types of
music in the 1970s and most lately to the concert halls and niche
venues that today harbor the musicians who cling to old-time styles.
During an interview with the Syracuse New Times on Nov. 19,
Rossbach detailed that adventure and shared his thoughts about what it
means to leave Syracuse, the city that became his landing pad.
John Rossbach: Pictured at his Westcott
home, from which he is moving, the local folk and bluegrass musician
will perform a final Syracuse gig this week. MICHAEL DAVIS PHOTO
The move will also leave behind scores
of musicians who have played with Rossbach and who will miss his
collaboration. Not the least significant of those players will be
Andrew VanNorstrand, an up-and-coming folk musician who became one of
Rossbach’s closest musical partners at the age of 10. Although
VanNorstrand, now 21, will continue to play music in a duo with his
brother, Noah, he will miss the fellowship of his mentor.
“John’s been a huge incredible influence
on my musical career and just basically my growing up,” VanNorstrand
explains. “I mean we’ve been working together for a long time. Noah and
I play a ton together—that’s my main gig these days anyway—but it will
be tough because all these years I’ve always played bluegrass and it
will be a little unusual to not have the band around. John is a
fantastic guy and has been a huge and incredible part of making me in
to whatever musician I am.”
{mospagebreak}
Similarly, Rossbach’s longtime
collaborator and Chestnut Grove mandolinist Perry Cleaveland shares
warm sentiments. “I’m definitely going to miss playing with him. He was
a great friend and a super musician with the best knowledge of the
genre. It has been a lot of fun playing with him. Hopefully he’ll
continue to come up and play gigs with us.”
Rossbach supplements his performance
career by teaching classes for students, as well as by writing for a
variety of music publications and for the newly created book publishing
division of the famed bluegrass record label, Rounder Records. During
the late 1980s Rossbach also served as a contributor to the Syracuse New Times, having written record reviews and a column about the kind of music he has come to know so intimately.
Having released three albums under his
own name and another with musician Mac Benford’s group, Rossbach isn’t
in a rush to record another right away. Rather, his West Virginia plan
is to play it by ear, to meet new musical friends and to see what comes
out of the next chapter of his journey.
Q: Can you tell me about growing up in West Virginia?
A: West
“by God” Virginia, as they say down there. I was born there, and I left
in my teens for Ohio as most West Virginians did, looking for work. I
experienced one hell of a culture clash moving from rural West Virginia
to Oberlin, Ohio. 1969 was a hotbed of radical protest. My sister was
going to school there and my mother moved there to find work because my
sister had contacts. By 1970, when Kent State happened, things blew
open and some of the Chicago Seven had gone to Oberlin. So I
transformed myself from basically a typical West Virginia kid to a
radical, handing out SDS {Students for a Democratic Society} literature
for a year or two, and then worked my way back toward the center.
I ended up hanging out with radical
lefties, people that were basically like my own personal nature and
people who reminded me of home. I left West Virginia having learned a
bit of rock’n’roll guitar, but I’d gone into the bluegrass and the
old-time music and stuff like that from the Oberlin College folk, and
then from people on the west side of Cleveland, in the urban,
Appalachian ghettos there. After I left Cleveland I went to Cincinnati,
and that was really the hotbed of bluegrass. That’s where I got my
education.
Q: What eventually brought you to Syracuse?
A: At some point
the bar scene was drying up {in Cincinnati}, and I was looking for
another place to continue a career in music. I connected with an odd
kind of guy named Lou Martin, who it turns out changed his name to
Harry Gilmore. He was a Syracusan, born and raised here, and he had
played with Tony Trischka in the Down City Ramblers. He taught Tony
Trischka a lot about bluegrass. I bought a record in 1972 or 1973,
something like that, and I was enamored with their playing. So I knew
about the scene.
I moved here and formed a duet with
{Gilmore} called the Sun Brothers. I’d say we left it as an opening act
for six to eight months, and I joined a band out of the Geneva area
called Bristol Mountain Bluegrass. I played mandolin and sang lead for
a year or so, and then when the band leader decided to throw in the
towel and get off the road, I became the singer. I fired myelf on the
mandolin and hired Perry Cleaveland, and then I hired myself on the
guitar and took another year with Bristol Mountain Bluegrass. Then I
took me and Perry out of that band and formed Chestnut Grove. Perry and
I teamed up with a guy from Rome named Karl Lauber, who was the best
bluegrass musician around, bar none, and a bassist named Jack Metzger.
Fiddle sticks: (From left) Jack Metzger, Rossbach, Karl Lauber and Perry Cleaveland formed the 1988 version of Chestnut Grove. MICHAEL DAVIS PHOTO
Q: Around what time period did you form Chestnut Grove?
A: In November
1986. We got together as a foursome in Jack’s Reef in a pub there. We
played, and we didn’t have a name, and we chose the name a little later
on, but that was the start of the band. That foursome was together for
two years, and then we got a bassist named Mary Burdette, who is in the
band now. She came in from 1989 to 1994, and a fellow named Doug
Yaehrling was in the band for nine or so years.
At some point I started fragmenting
things; that is, in order to make my full-time living in music, because
I had worked at a record store here in the 1980s. It was called
Transcontinent Records, out of Buffalo, and they owned Record Theatre,
the retail arm. I worked for the wholesale arm of it, but I also worked
in conjuction with Record Theatre. I got rid of the part-time day job
somewhere around 1989, I think.
Q: So by that point you were able to support yourself with your musical career alone?
A: One week I
clocked in 12 hours, because I was gigging so much, and the boss was
like, “Isn’t it about time you made a decision here?” So, within a few
weeks I made the call, but my part-time job was down to nothing for the
last several years of it. The 1990s were a good decade. In 1990 I
joined a band called Mac Benford and the Woodshed All Stars. Mac
Benford is an icon in the old-timey world, the sort of cousin to
bluegrass that’s like the older roots of bluegrass, preserved forever
in some way. I had known his work from the days I was in Oberlin. I
first saw him in 1973 or 1974, and in 1990, for his 50th birthday, he
decided to put together a recording band for a new album. The recording
was such fun, and it worked out so well that we decided to make a band
out of it, and that band lasted about 10 years.
Marie Burns of the Burns Sisters was one
of the main singers, and she was so fabulous. And a babe to boot! God,
what a babe! She and I would sing duets, and she’d like just look right
in my eyes and sing full right into my face, and I’d just almost melt.
She wrote a song called “Stay Away From Me If You’re Not Free.” It was
written for me, and we’ve recorded it on one of my albums. Then the
Burns Sisters did it on one of their Rounder Records albums. She wrote
it in the back of a van when we were traveling in Michigan. That was a
fun band.
Q: What was the
gigging circuit like back then?
A: We’d play in the blood bucket, or what I called the knife-and-gun clubs. Just like The Blues Brothers
when they had a cage around the stage. We played in two places like
that. That was so the flying bottles didn’t catch you. There were some
really rough, redneck places. There was one place in Cincinnati we’d
played every weekend for eight months, and it was full of incredibly
drunk University of Cincinnati kids, and incredibly drunk rednecks. It
was like oil and water.
There were incredible fights sometimes.
Sometimes they emanated from the bandstands. I remember once this guy
in the audience was yelling for “Rocky Top” all night and we did it. He
yelled for it some more and we did it again, and finally he yelled for
it again and my guitar player in my band, who was a sheet-metal
worker—a big, tough guy with his sleeves rolled up with a pack of
Marlboros under it—goes “We already done that number. Y’all are rude!”
And he handed me his guitar and went off and cold-cocked the guy.
Q: How well did you get to know Tony Trischka during that period of time?
A: We had a
friendship pretty early on when I moved here and I had the duet with
Lou Martin. It was Lou who taught him how to play. I had met Tony
informally a few times on the round before. He lived here, his father
taught up at Syracuse University, {John} Trischka. I knew his father
well. I maintained a friendship with him until he died, because he
lived a few blocks from me here in the Westcott basin.
When I’d come to Syracuse, {Tony
Trischka} would come from New York City, and we’d play a few jobs. Like
there was sort of an impromptu band that would play whenever he was in
the area: Lou Martin, me, Tom Hosmer, John Dancks and Trischka.
Q: How
did you
meet Andrew
VanNorstrand?
A: His mother
and father were bringing him to some of my shows. I noticed this kid
watching my fingers intently. Then Dan Ward, a local folklorist, said,
“That kid can really play the fiddle. He’s getting good,” and he was
only 10.
One day on a whim I invited him up on
stage when I was playing a duet somewhere. The kid gets up and pretty
well nails a tune when he’s 10, and by the time he was 11 he had an
entertainent value. By the time he was 12 I started gigging with him. I
remember the first time he played a set with my full band at the Oswego
Music Hall, and he got up and did the whole second set with us and just
nailed everything, so we hired him. By the time he was 13 I’d had a lot
of duet gigs with a guy named Karl Auber. When {Auber} moved to Florida
I had all these duets booked, and I took Andrew on the road with me
when he was 13. We played constantly back then, you know? I gave him
and his brother lessons when he was 10 and his little brother was 8.
Q: What do you look for in the musicians you pick to play in your bands?
A: I want
musicians who know how the traditional stuff was done, who the
important figures were, can play in the pocket of most of those styles,
but can also take whatever comes at them at the moment. Players who can
really improvise on their feet and think, who can do various vocal
parts and can serve more than one part. They need to be able to play
more than one instrument well, keep really good timing, improvise and
be able to sing more than one harmony part. It’s hard to find someone
with all of those qualifications who also doesn’t have a massive ego,
or a drug or alcohol problem. So I’ve always had to go pretty far
afield to fill out the band.
Andrew fit all the qualifications,
except he didn’t have a big knowledge of the history of the tradition.
But having a quick ear and a respect for it, he was such a sponge, and
I was handing him CDs constantly and he would come and ask questions
and I’d show him stuff. When we were on the road traveling I’d be
playing this stuff to him, saying, “Here’s a kind of sound you might
like to try out,” and two years later he’s playing stuff for me. So it
was a two-way street. He’s such a virtuoso, and has such an open
attitude that he can take things in a lot of different directions.
What’s unusual about such a young virtuoso is that he separates the
wheat from the chaff. It’s not just a totally indescriminate barrage of
notes. He understands dynamics and phrasing, and what works and what
doesn’t.
Q: Can you explain when and what kind of writing you’ve previously done for The New Times?
A: Mike
Greenstein was the editor who hired me, but first I started just doing
some record reviews in the area, because there weren’t enough people
knowledgable in the pocket of music that I loved. I sort of had become
a historian of the music as well, and working in the record industry I
had thousands of CDs and LPs. I had a record collection that was
astounding. Then he asked me to cover a couple of events that came to
town, so I started a column called “The Acoustic Sound Board,” and that
probably went from like—I’m guessing—1985 to 1990. At some point I
started getting so busy that I wasn’t turning in copy that much, and I
remember going into the office and talking to him. I said, “I still
have my column, don’t I? and he says, “A column, by definition, appears
with regularity.” I’d trickle copy in now and then, but it got too busy when I got on the road, you know?
Q: Why are you moving away from Syracuse?
A: I met my
wife, Joyce, at a music camp in West Virginia about 15 years ago. I
would teach at the Augusta Heritage Center, which is a world-renowned
center for various types of crafts and traditional arts, and they have
eight different theme weeks throughout the summer, but it’s a
year-round thing to run it. My wife had worked there in the summers,
through the last 15 years, and we met there in 1995 or 1996. I would
teach either mandolin or guitar for a week or two at a time, and I
would teach the history of bluegrass or various things like vocal
harmonies.
During one of the weeks when I was
teaching, she and I had met, and then the next year we struck up a
relationship. Before you knew it I imported her to Syracuse. We were
married in 1998. She lived here in Syracuse from 1998 until this
February when, lo and behold, she was offered the job of director of
the Heritage Center. I told her if she got the job, when she went for
the interview, I would support her decision, but I didn’t think she’d
get the job! So I was faced with sudden decisions. I mean, I love the
Augusta Heritage Center, and I love the area, but it’s a tough place to
make a living from. But it’s gorgeous.
Now I work for the center by
coordinating what they call Bluegrass Week in Augusta. Last year was my
first year for doing that. Ironically I was hired a year and a half
ago, and I had no clue I’d later be working for my wife.
Q: How have the members of your band taken your decision to move?
A: For Chestnut
Grove as an entity, this is our farewell performance, as I see it. I’ve
gotten a number of job offers for this winter and next summer, and I’ve
refused them and turned them over to other people. But, you know,
everyone in the band is friends. Some of them are people I’ve worked
with in other ways. Mary Burdette, my bass player, is my assistant
coordinator of Bluegrass Week, and also she works at the Grey Fox
Bluesgrass Festival. She’s the assistant director of that festival, and
I’m the stage manager. Andrew VanNorstrand and Perry Cleaveland have
been two of my best friends for years, so we’ll probably see each other
once in a while, and there probably will be mix-and-match things here
and there.
{mospagebreak}
Q: Are you planning on making any more recordings?
A: Not right
away. I want to get things solidified with the move, and figure out
what the future would be and whether there are new alliances I’ll form
down there or what. Also, it’s time for me to do a solo album. I’ve
never done a total solo album, just me, myself and I. I think I ought
to do that, because I could sell it at any place I play, but with the
economy going the way it is I’m not rushing off to do that yet.
Q: What will you miss most about playing and living here?
A: I’m certainly
going to miss the people I’ve been playing with. Perry Cleaveland is
the best mandolin around here for bluegrass. You’d have to go a long
ways to find a better mandolin player. He has such a deep gene pool of
music, and he can take whatever you throw at him and make something of
it. We’ve been working together off and on, but mostly on, since 1985
in Bristol Mountain. And Andrew, I think of as kind of a close friend,
and in some ways I’ve been sort of a father figure to him. We learned a
lot from each other.
I’ll miss them terribly, but you know
what I’m really going to miss? It’s interesting that Central New York,
Syracuse, is a wonderful springboard to some of the most beautiful
places in the country. I love some of the ecosystems that surround the
region. They’re all incredibly beautiful regions with their own
character, and I’ve played gigs in every little small-town gazebo and
opera house and theater and whatever you can imagine in all these
little towns through the region.
Q: You’ve said to me that bluegrass is a
kind of music that is deeply connected to the places in which it is
written and performed. Do you think Syracuse has had an effect on your
music?
A: It’s allowed
me to be diverse. There are different canons and schools of bluegrass,
just like there are, let’s say, foot-washing Baptists and Unitarians,
you know? There are the equivalent of those in bluegrass so you get all
those subsets of it. I’ve always been free here, so that I could cut my
own path. I’ve always been careful that musicians {in my bands} know
the traditional stuff, but also be able to go out on a limb. I was able
to do that out here. I’d come back here to stay and do my laundry and
hang out with friends, and then I’d hit the roads again.
