Bluegrass Memories No. 1

 

Wade and Julia Mainer

I'm pretty sure it was in late June 2007 that I witnessed something truly incredible in Owensboro (Kentucky) alongside four or five friends who had come in from all over the country to enjoy ROMP 2007 together. I had driven in from Houston; one of us had flown in from Arizona, another from Pennsylvania; one from New York, and another had driven up from Georgia. Perhaps another had come in from Virginia (not sure). A common interest in bluegrass and country music had made us good friends (and we still are), and this was the highlight of our year, the only time we were able to be together for three or four days. 

It gets really hot and humid in Owensboro's Yellow Creek Park in late June, and you never know if you will be dodging heavy rains from booming thunderstorms or battling potential heatstroke and sunburn. Usually, before the three-day outdoor music festival is over, you will have done both of those things at some point. It was on one of the hot, clear days that we noticed an elderly couple setting up on stage, but honestly, they were just names in a program to most of us when they first started to pick and sing. 

Little did we know that we were looking at a man and wife who had seen up close and personal just about all there was to see in the history of mountain and bluegrass music history. Wade and Julia Mainer were there at the beginning. Wade Mainer, in fact, managed so successfully to bridge the gap between old-time mountain music and what became known as bluegrass music that he has sometimes been called the "Grandfather of Bluegrass Music." Wade was born in April 1907, and here he was in June 2007 sitting on stage in a small chair while he checked to make sure that his banjo was in tune.You read that right, the man was some two months over 100 years old on that day, his wife was 88, and they were preparing to do a 45-minute set on an outdoor stage in June...in Kentucky...in the middle of the day.

And the crowd loved them. Near the end of their show, after they had run through their prepared set-list, Wade decided to take requests from the crowd. Now granted, the requests were pretty much all genre standards, but Wade and Julia nailed each and every one of them, even to never stumbling on the lyrics of any of the songs. It would have been an impressive performance for artists half their ages. 

Only later did I learn these facts about Wade and Julia Mainer:

• Wade left his brother's North Carolina band in 1934 to found the Sons of the Mountaineers.
• He performed with the band until 1953 when his strong Christian beliefs caused him to change directions.
• Wade and Julia next became a gospel music duet and they toured and released albums until the mid-nineties.
• Julia Mae Brown Mainer was at one point in her pioneering career known as "Hillbilly Lilly."
• Wade and the Sons of the Mountaineers were regional radio stars.
• Eleanor Roosevelt and Alan Lomax invited the band to the White House where they and others performed for FDR.
• Bill Monroe, Doc Watson, and Ralph Stanley all cited Mainer as a musical influence.
• Wade was the first to use the banjo (a "satanic" instrument according to many at the time) in gospel music.
• Mainer is a 1987 recipient of an award from the National Endowment of the Arts.

I love to hear Kenny and Amanda Smith do this one, but Wade and Julia Mainer do a wonderful job on "I Can't Sit Down," too.

Wade died in 2011 at the age of 104, but he marked his 101st birthday with a stage appearance. (Julia died in 2015 at age 95 after suffering a fall.) I don't know how many shows the Mainers did between the 2007 and 2008 shows, or how many they did after, but I feel blessed to have seen them on that June day in Yellow Creek Park in what had to have been one of their final appearances. Sometimes you just get lucky despite your ignorance; this was one of those times.