When I was 4 or 5, my mother's sister's family left Pittsburgh to live in North Wilkesboro, NC. Summer trips to visit meant very early starts and a long time in the car. The new Pennsylvania Turnpike got us into the heart of the mountains, and US 19 got us to the Blue Ridge Parkway and on down to North Carolina.

All along the way, the local AM stations were playing "mountain music." Some of it was what we might call "folk." Some was country and country-western, following the play-list of WSM's Grand Old Opry, WWVA, or the local station-sponsored barn dances and jamborees.

But each year more and more featured that hard-driving three-fingered weave of rhythm and melody banjo style popularized by the Bluegrass Boys. Back then, "bluegrass" meant the Monroe brothers, usually Bill, and their bands. The music was probably "folk" or "country" or "mountain," but it wasn't. The vocal lead reached above the accompaniment, each instrument had solo runs, the harmony had an edge. It wasn't my mother singing "On the Trail of the Lonesome Pine."

I grew up with the Bluegrass Boys, Flatt and Scruggs, and the Osborne Brothers -- and never knew it. I couldn't understand why most of the tunes I was hearing had a different sound -- a nasal, whiny, key of C flatness. I didn't realize that the music I liked wasn't folk or country or mountain, so I was lured away by Buddy Holly. He was talkin' to me.

When Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, Lefty Frizzel and Bobby Bare brought me back to the music I had avoided because of rhinestone jackets and hoop skirts, I discovered Hank Williams, Buck Owens and Bob Wills. I was remembering something from my childhood. Something that had been planted by Bill Monroe, brought to adolescence by Buddy Holly and kindled into adulthood by the Outlaws and honky tonk.

It took the local Not Too Bad Bluegrass Band, then playing as the 5:45 Bluegrass Band in an offbeat food, wine, beer emporium and music venue to wake me up. They were playing "my" music. But there was more: New stuff from Gillian Welch and John Prine; some Flatt and Scruggs that I had missed when they left Monroe; old time mountain songs re-arranged to the bluegrass format.

I am now a groupie. And any band that plays Uncle Pen with that wonderful á-capella G run

Late in the evening, about sundown
High on a hill and above the town
Uncle Pen played the fiddle, lordy, how it'd ring
you could hear it talk, you could hear it sing

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