Thea Austin: Good afternoon.
Thank you all for coming to our first Homegrown concert of the fall.
The October 17 concert.
My name is Thea Austin, I'm the Public Events Coordinator
for the American Folklife Center.   And on behalf of the entire staff,
we would like to welcome you for coming.
Homegrown is a series of performances featuring the very best
of traditional music and dance from around the nation.
The Folklife Center works collaboratively
with the Millennium Stage of the Kennedy Center
and with the many talented
and dedicated state Folk Arts coordinators around the country,
such as Roby Cogswell, who you will be meeting in a second,
who's here to introduce our group.
Today we're going to be presenting the secret steel guitar tradition
of Aubrey Ghent.
I'd like to ask you to just take a second to turn off your cell phones
if you get reception in here and also draw your attention
to the survey that you were handed when you came in.
It would be really great, we would really appreciate it
if you would just take time to fill that out and put it in one
of the boxes on your way out.
So without further ado, here's Roby Cogswell to tell you --
Roby Cogswell: Thank you.
It's my pleasure to be the director of the Folk Art Program
for the Tennessee Arts Commission and I bring you greetings
from Nashville, Tennessee, which is a steel guitar town.
There may be more steel players in Nashville
than any other place on the planet.   And I have the pleasure
of introducing a very special steel player,
who is fairly new to Nashville.
He moved there in the year 2000, and he does not play
in the music tradition that most of our steel players practice.
And Aubrey Ghent has moved to Nashville from Florida,
from the seat of the tradition that he represents in the House
of God Church, which has been labeled sacred steel plain.
And Aubrey in his tradition are testimony to the inventiveness
and the convergence and divergence of roots music in America.
And I guess I'll try to tell you a little bit
about what you'll be seeing, because there are a lot
of things going on in this music.
The Pentecostal religious movement, which began about 100 years ago,
was distinguished from other threads of American religion by a number
of things, but in terms of music, it was especially accepting
of non-traditional threads of religious music,
of popular music influences.
And instruments that often weren't welcome
in other churches became the mainstay
of Pentecostal musical expression.
And I certainly -- Aubrey's instrument
of the electric steel guitar exhibits that.
Let's look at another thing that was going on about 100 years ago,
and that was Hawaiian music and America's fascination
with Hawaiian music as Hawaii became a U.S. territory.
And a number of players came to the continental 48 states
as a part of cultural exhibitions.
Many of them began recording on early phonograph records.
And the Hawaiian guitar is played,
unlike the so-called Spanish upright guitar, played horizontally,
and rather than being threaded, which is the case
with most conventional guitars, the strings are raised up off the frets
and it's voiced with a steel slide, hence the term "steel."
The earliest Hawaiian guitars in fact looked like Spanish guitars.
Subsequently, the Doparo brothers, some inventive folks in California,
came up with the DoBro trademark, which was a metal resophonic cone
to amplify the instrument.
There were schools of Hawaiian guitar.
The Owahu Company trained people to play in this lap style.
Many hillbilly players quickly turned
to Hawairian [spelled phonetically] as they say down in Tennessee --
guitar, and by the 1930s, many bands had this type of playing.
With the steel, the Hawaiian tradition is much more emotive.
You're not going step by step with frets,
but there are much more irregular intervals are possible
and the instrument can actually emulate the human voice much
more closely.
You'll see in Aubrey's playing, chimed harmonics, slides, vibratos,
a lot of really inventive technique.
And then the next development in the history of this particular thread
of music was the electrification of the lap guitar.
And that resulted in further refinements,
the so-called pedal steel guitars that are associated
with country music today and the Nashville tradition of Jerry Bird
and Bud Isaacs and Lloyd Green, all these famous figures in Nashville,
and they have nothing to do with Aubrey's tradition.
Aubrey plays an earlier form of the instrument, which --
it's an electric table, but it was normally played just in the lap.
But the House of God, by World War II,
this African-American Pentecostal denomination,
had begun this incredible tradition of the steel guitar,
essentially as a substitute for an organ
or an organ equivalent playing liturgical music, playing,
as was the case in Pentecostal churches,
not so much earlier traditions of music,
but the new gospel music compositions
that made a joyful noise that were songs of praise and emotion
and energy that were part of the Pentecostal tradition.
A fellow named Willie Eason, who was Aubrey's uncle,
was one of the real early innovators in this tradition,
and so Aubrey comes from royalty.
But the House of God players, mostly in the Atlantic south,
but some in other parts of the country as well,
have a whole tradition of playing this particular instrument.
And as is the case with many forms of folk music, this was music
of a particular community, not very well known elsewhere until as late
as the mid-1990s when a folklorist named Bob Stone
with the Florida Folklife Program began to document players
in this tradition, the R. Hooley [spelled phonetically] record label
put out a very important early record in '95,
in which Aubrey was one of the real features, and suddenly,
the roots music world had discovered this music.
Just in the past ten years, really, but it is music that's been
around for 60 or 70 years.
And it is principally a Florida tradition,
I'll admit that from the beginning, but it's also great
to have Aubrey move to Nashville and become absorbed
in the Nashville music community.
Nashville's music community is very much tied
to all kinds of roots tradition.
We're known as a country music town, but there are lots of other folks
with roots music backgrounds that come there and take part
in this perking stew we have of the commercial music industry
with people coming from lots of different backgrounds.
We have a very strong African-American gospel scene
in Nashville that goes back in the 1930s and 40s.
As a matter of fact, we'll -- if Aubrey's band would like to come out
and get set up, we have some great players from Nashville
that Aubrey has been using as his road band.
[applause] Loris Byrd [spelled phonetically] here, the bass man,
is an old friend of mine.
We came up in 1986, and he was part of the Hemphills gospel group
at that point for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival Tennessee Program.
And it's my duty to return this to Tennessee in some way.
And I was really struck in watching these folks get set and run
over a few things to see that these guys used the Nashville
number system.
You'll see, people don't read from sheets of music in Nashville.
It's in folks' heads.
And the Nashville number system is a code system for chords
that session players in Nashville use
and they were fine tuning an arrangement and arguing
over whether it was a four or a five on that turn.
And it really made me feel at home.
So while we have -- Aubrey's tradition speaks of Florida
and Georgia and South Carolina, Aubrey is still very much a minister
and his music has stayed at the church house.
Some of the Sacred Steel players have been absorbed
into the commercial blues and club scene now, and that's something
of a dilemma as I tried to point out my notes.
Aubrey remains a House of God minister and as you will see,
the exuberance and the emotion and the excitement of the music
and its religious context is still very much a part of his performance.
His wife, Lori, is a wonderful singer and they conceive
of their performance as part of their ministry
and they're here to share it with you.
I give you Aubrey Ghent.
[applause] [music/singing] [applause] Aubrey Ghent: Thank you.
This song is called "That's All Right, Long As I Know I Have A Seat
in the Kingdom, That's All Right."
[music/singing] [applause] Aubrey Ghent: Some years back,
there was singer who was quite popular.
His name was Sam Cook.
How many of you have known about Sam Cook?
[applause] All right.   He often liked to sing this song.
[music/singing] [applause] Is that all right?
All right.
We're going to speed it up with an up tempo a little bit.
This is an old fashioned gospel song, and it's called "Glory, Glory,
Hallelujah, Since I Laid My Burden Down."
You want to clap your hands?
I want you to clap your hands, all right?
Come on, clap your hands.   All right.
[music/singing] [applause] Roby Cogswell:
Excuse me, just a minute, Aubrey.
We'll let everybody catch their breath from that number.
But we have a special guest with us.   Also, I failed to mention earlier
on that Aubrey has a great Web site, AubreyGhent.com.
Those of you interested in his music, please visit that.
But we're delighted to have
in the audience today Congressman Jim Cooper from Nashville.
Jim is from my hometown of Shelbyville, Tennessee.
Had to get that in there.
And I'm proud to say that we've got a Congressman who's very,
very knowledgeable about and committed to our music traditions
and our cultural heritage in middle Tennessee.
He's a banjo picker himself and he admits it
in public, and that's good.
And he was -- he's just gotten back from a vote on the Hill.
He intended to be here earlier, but we certainly wanted to welcome him
and have him make a couple of remarks.
[applause] Jim Cooper: Thank you, Roby.
I know ya'll didn't come to hear me talk.
I am so honored that Aubrey Ghent and friends are here
in the Coolidge Auditorium in the greatest library on the world.
And I'm proud to be one of Aubrey's friends.
He is an American original.
This is awesome music and it's just one
of the many features we have in Nashville, Tennessee.
So if ya'll get a little time off, come on down to Nashville.
Thank you.
[applause] [music/singing] [applause] Aubrey Ghent: Thank you.
I've got a feeling that everything is going to be all right.
[music/singing] [applause] Aubrey Ghent: I've got a feeling.
Lord, we'll make our way somehow.
[music/singing] [applause] Aubrey Ghent: Yeah.
"The Lord Will Make A Way, Somehow."
You know that one, don't you?   Oh, When the Saints Go Marching In.
[music/signing] [applause] [music/singing] [applause] Aubrey
[music/singing] [applause] Aubrey Ghent: Train don't leave me.
Thank you.
Lori Ghent: If you like our music, you can see us
at the side of the front stage.
We just want to send you home on this one.
We love our country, we love the President and his Cabinet,
so we're going to dedicate this last number to our men and women at war
and to the Senator, as a dedication of prayer.
[music/singing] God bless America, land that I love.
Stand beside her, and guide her, through the night
with the light from above.
From the mountains, to the prairies, to the oceans, white with foam.
God bless America, my home sweet home.
God bless America, my home sweet home.
[applause] Lori Ghent: Thank you so much.
Thank you.   We love you, Washington.
Thank you so much, Senator, Library of Congress,
We've got Julius Fisher on the keys, Jeff Pagus [spelled phonetically]
on the drums, Loris Byrd [spelled phonetically] on bass.
I'm Lori Ghent.
And we love you.   Thank you so much.
If you like our music, see us right down here at the front of the stage.
Thank you.
Thea Austin: Thanks again for coming.
Join us next month on November 15 for Dallas Chief Eagle
and his daughter, Jasmine.
They'll be doing hoop dances from Sioux reservations in South Dakota.
Thanks. [end of transcript] LOC - 071017afc1200 1 5/7/2010