Bluegrass gets pick at school
Posted on Saturday, December 1, 2007
Sally Stuart works her way around the circle of students, positioning fingers on frets.
“Do you all want to do it together ?” she asks.
All five nod.
“All right. One, two, ready, go,” the teacher says, setting off tentative G-chord strumming in her Mayflower Elementary School classroom. The first few measures are harmonic, but the music falls into dissonance as curled fingers lose their places on the stringed instruments’ necks.
They are learning to play bluegrass music after school, one chord at a time. By the spring, the fourth- through eighth-grade pupils expect to play a few tunes for family and friends at an outdoor concert.
“Now let’s try D,” Stuart says. “Go to D.”
Stuart, a teacher of gifted and talented pupils, grew up in Clinton around bluegrass music, singing with her sister in her father’s band. Now she plays guitar and stand-up bass with her husband and daughter in a band, New Southern Edition.
A couple of years ago she watched a DVD about teaching children about American roots music. It came from the International Bluegrass Music Association, which also has a manual for introducing bluegrass music to students.
Stuart developed a curriculum to teach bluegrass to her gifted and talented classes. She has been accumulating instruments — mandolin, bass, guitars, Dobro and banjo — of which are her own, while others were either donated or purchased with donations.
She started the after-school club last year for pupils who wanted to learn more. After a year of learning chords and lyrics, they opened at Mayflower City Park for The Faris Family, a bluegrass group from Kansas. Mayflower is in Faulkner County, between Conway and Little Rock.
In October, Stuart received an award in Nashville, Tenn., from the International Bluegrass Music Association for using bluegrass in the classroom. She has also received a curriculum award from Arkansans for Gifted and Talented Education, an organization that tries to improve education for gifted and talented students.
She isn’t a trained music teacher, so it’s been a learning experience for her as well. She separates the children by instrument to learn the basics. She bustles from group to group making adjustments.
As she helps the guitar players, a fifth-grade pupil comes from the adjoining music room.
“Ms. Stuart ?” William Chase Lute asks, “On one of the notes on the banjo, if I just put one finger on it, then it just makes a ‘plop’ sound.”
“Then your fingers aren’t quite on there,” she says. “You’ve got to press down really hard.”
She follows him back to his instrument. On the way, she stops in a small room next to hers. Three fiddlers, led by Stuart’s daughter Whitney Whillock are squeaking out “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
She tells them to practice “chopping,” a method of rhythmically striking strings with a bow.
Next she checks on Devin Mathis, who’s playing the Dobro. He’s learning to glide a steel slide along the strings. Then back to the enthusiastic banjo player: “I want to hear your D.”
“Okey dokey artichokey,” he says and hunches over the strings.
She lifts the neck away from the floor and guides his fingers to the correct strings. He has two banjos at home: one from his uncle, but it only has three strings, and another his parents bought for $ 120. It even came with a case.
“You’ve got to practice taking your hand off and putting it back on,” she says, “So you can do it without thinking.”
Stuart herds the Dobro and banjo players back to the guitar group to practice together.
“What was our song that we learned with G and D, does anybody remember ?” she asks pupils who were in the group last year. They agree on “Where the Soul Never Dies.”
They are rusty. The song quickly falls into cacophony.
She calls out for them to stop.
“It can be chaotic until we start really learning,” Stuart says, “then we can put songs together.”
“We are already learning,” Anthony Mason says from behind the stand-up bass.
Stuart grins and teases: “We do know some songs if we could remember when we change the chords.”
Back to the chords. She summons the fiddlers.
“Y’all get up here,” she says, coaxing the fiddlers into the circle. “This is what you call jammin’ when you are all in a circle, jammin’.”
Lips purse, eyebrows contract and the children strum on.
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