High note

GEORGE — The air around George will be filled with a different sound this week, emanating from fiddles, banjos, mandolins and dobros. It will be high, it will be lonesome, and it will be played from the heart.

“It's simple in a lot of respects, and in some respects bluegrass is way more complicated than pop music,” said Stan Hall, who plays guitar with the bluegrass band Heartbreak Pass.

The George Bluegrass Festival is entering its 15th year, and it looks to be a good one, said organizer Debby Kooy. There are six bands from around the Northwest, as well as workshops, “learn ‘n share” sessions and good old down-home fun.

“It's not huge, and it probably never will be numbered among the really big festivals,” Kooy said. “But it's a good little small-town festival. At the peak, which will be on the weekend, we usually have about 150 people. It's not huge, but it's for everybody.”

People began coming in on Monday to set up camp and get started jamming. The festival really gets underway on Tuesday with an all-day jam session for anyone who wants to sit in.

Wednesday morning starts with the Gospel Pancake Breakfast. You can’t buy your meal with money at this one; the price is either to sing a gospel song or to listen to one.

“That is a kick in the pants,” Kooy said. “It's very fun. It's put on by a couple who have been longtime attenders of our events, they're from Everett actually ... We just have a circle of chairs set up near where the breakfast is being served, and people just bring their banjos around their necks or whatever, mandolins, and sit down and play a song and then get in line.”

Kooy herself performs with The Rocky Ford Band, which is based in Moses Lake. She plays rhythm guitar while her husband Elliot plays banjo.

“I don't pick tunes or anything, I just bang along with the chords,” she said. “In bluegrass the guitar is a percussion instrument as well as doing melody and harmony. So the guitar and the bass both kind of drive the rhythm of the song.”

On Thursday there will be a field trip for children from George Elementary School, and a workshop led by Ron Taylor of the band Corral Creek. Taylor will give tips for performers on how to style the patter between their songs to keep the audience interested. There will also be a couple of open mic sessions that afternoon.

The serious performances begin on Friday, with sets by Rocky Ford Band, Roosevelt Road and Heartbreak Pass. There will be more open mic sessions, followed by a homemade pie and ice cream social on the lawn.

Saturday morning will be taken up with “learn ‘n share” workshops, in which fiddle, bass, banjo, dobro, guitar and mandolin players share their techniques and collect tips from each other.

“We love those,” Kooy said, “because it just gives you a chance to improve your skills and sharpen things up and get kind of peer review in a way and get good advice on your instrument … And sometimes the bands that come in and perform will say, ‘hey, we’ll do workshops, we'll teach harmony singing or we'll teach some new bluegrass guitar riff’ or something. And it's always extremely profitable to just sit in on a class and learn things.”

There’s no charge for any of this, Kooy said. Donations are accepted, but everything is free to the public.

George is a great venue for a bluegrass festival, Hall said.

“It's a long drive from northern Idaho where we are located, but well worth the drive,” he said. “ I grew up, at least till I was a teenager, south of Fresno, California in a very small farming community. George, and Quincy even, those towns remind me of where I grew up in California, kind of being flat, (with) a lot of farmers. A lot of the songs that I write are about the memories that I have from the farm days, because both sides of my family were farmers down there. And so those songs that we play seem to really strike a chord with the audience.”

Bluegrass music has its roots among the Scottish, Irish and English immigrants who settled the Appalachian Mountains in the 17th and 18th centuries, according to the Bluegrass Heritage Foundation’s website, with influence from the blues music of Black people in the Mississippi Delta. In the 1930s Kentucky native Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys brought the traditional music to a national audience, and the “bluegrass” name stuck. It was further popularized by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, best known for the theme song from “The Beverly Hillbillies,” and more recently by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and the soundtrack from the 2001 movie “O Brother Where Art Thou?”

“I found a part of me that was missing,” Hall said of his discovery of bluegrass. “And it was like a missing piece of the puzzle. And for some reason, maybe just the kind of the organic nature of bluegrass and the simplicity of it, the acoustical part of it just really grabbed my soul. And I've hung on to that for all of those same reasons.”

Joel Martin can be reached via email at jmartin@columbiabasinherald.com.