AFAReads discussion

Dear reader,

True confession: As a kid, I attended the occasional bluegrass jam (my dad’s girlfriend was an avid banjo player), and I could not get into it. At the time, No Doubt’s “Tragic Kingdom” was my religion, and I perceived bluegrass as a combo of hokey events and jangly music—a galaxy away from Planet Teenager.

But through Emma John’s Wayfaring Stranger: A Musical Journey in the American South (George Weidenfeld & Nicholson, November 2020), our AFARead’s selection for December, I’ve gained a retrospective appreciation for this chapter in my life.

Through John—a liberal British violin player raised in the improv-squelching world of classical music—we travel deep into the South, and into a musical style born there in the 1930s. Music that, “once you’d hear it, and loved it, you could never mistake it for anything else.”

John’s journey begins in London, where Mumford & Sons fever has taken over the city. At the time, her violin, formerly the object around which her life revolved, sat unused and dusty in a corner of her room—she hadn’t touched it in a decade. When she, too, gets sucked into Mumford mania, and first hears the bluegrass fiddle, something in her flickers to life.

On a whim, she grabs her violin and flies to North Carolina to immerse herself in the music. She actually wrote about this trip in her her first story for AFAR, but her adventure doesn’t end when she returns to London. A few years later, comes back—this time to live in the cradle of bluegrass, determined to become fluent. She joins a bluegrass camp, attends festival after festival, and meets dozens of bluegrass aficionados, young and old, liberal and conservative. Along the way, she begins to remake her relationship with music. Once a source of stress, body-clenching anxiety, and even shame, music, page by page, becomes a source of almost transcendent joy.

It’s unflinching at times. I squirmed when she joined her first jam “clutching my violin case to my chest like a riot shield,” as she sits through jams that are “a sort of Sisyphean torture,” and when she fumbles a solo on stage. She digs into the politics and racial tensions of this part of the world, and her own discomfort with them. There are also resonant portraits of the Appalachian landscape and even more thrilling, of the music. “The melody continually reinvented itself in a constantly shifting soundscape, profound and ethereal, weightless yet sharp as a blade,” she writes of her first time hearing old-time—a precursor to bluegrass—played in a modern style.

John is a funny writer and some of my favorite moments came from her descriptions of cultural clashes—say, her lack of punctuality. In London, it’s expected that you’ll show up a half-hour late. In the South, however, “if I was five minutes late in the South, I’d get a phone call expressing genuine concerns for my safety,” she writes.

Yes, Wayfaring Stranger is a book about music, but it also acts as a wonderful travel proxy: As lockdown began (again . . . ) here in California, I got to live, for 27 chapters, in Appalachia, where the mountains roll in “soft waves, their green turning to lilac, lavender, and indigo,” and explore a style of music that coalesced there. The memoir changed the way I think of bluegrass—so much so that I created a playlist for the book. I hope you’ll hum along.

Happy reading,

Aislyn Greene
Senior editor