Recently a good friend, who also loves Bluegrass and the Steep Canyon Rangers, sent me this clip from NPR Tiny Desk. I have purchased the Steep Canyon Rangers new album (featured above), and can't stop listening to it.
For some time now, I have wondered to myself, why I find some forms of Bluegrass so appealing, so heartwarming, and so strangely familiar. Music from home, if you will. I am beginning now to wonder if this affection may be something in my DNA. Is that possible? Can you love a style of music because perhaps one, or two, or three or more generations past, someone in your lineage also listened to and lived with and maybe also loved this music. At this season of life, I'm beginning to think this might be so for me.
Perhaps this has a lot to do with my own lineage, my DNA, and perhaps something of well.... my soul. Over the past decade or so, I have been slowly gathering information about my family heritage in online and some personal travel research.
As it turns out, I am very American - with both sides of my family extending many generations back. Pictured at right is my great-grandfather, Andrew Jackson Norris, who was born on December 4, 1850, in Winston, Mississippi; he married Elizabeth Martha Morrison on December 17, 1878, in Panola, Texas. They had nine children in 18 years. He died on December 21, 1929, in Frankston, Texas, at the age of 79, and was buried there.I like to imagine Andrew and Liz heading to the County Fair, or perhaps a Saturday night social in Frankston, more than 100 years ago. They would sit on the edge of the barn and listen to the local band play music quite similar to the Steep Canyon Rangers play today.
Is there music in our souls? Can something we hear today ignite a small spark within us from many generations before? Maybe it's so.
Enjoy.
