Have you ever longed to be a bluegrass eccentric? Sure, you’re a professional bluegrass musician, some of your strait-laced friends with real jobs and pensions and things might regard you as someone who lives life on the edge, maybe you’ve stayed up late after a show somewhere, and maybe you’ve even picked ’till sunrise at a festival, but you still feel relatively buttoned-down compared to some of the colorful characters in our music. You know the ones: the kind who’ve baked their instrument in an oven, walked through a motel wall, or poured moonshine on cornflakes and called it breakfast.
Being a bluegrass eccentric is not to be confused with being a bluegrass nerd. A bluegrass nerd wears a high Homburg hat to a dentist appointment and can tell you which rivers flow through Bessie Lee Mauldin’s hometown. A bluegrass eccentric often fails to show up to a dentist appointment at all because “it just didn’t feel right to go,” or “that was today?”
It’s also not to be confused with being a bluegrass jerk. Those are the ones who leave band members by a desolate roadside in Indiana in the middle of the night, break other people’s instruments on purpose, and troll and attack other musicians on social media. They often end up either quitting the business, or in extreme cases, faking their own death. It’s best to shun that path.
But can you train yourself to become a bluegrass eccentric, or is it something you need to be born into? There’s no doubt that the natural-born eccentric will have an inherent advantage in overall quirkiness, especially at the deeper level, but you can still acquire some impressive eccentricities yourself through some simple lifestyle and appearance changes. Immersion and open-mindedness are the keys to cultivating authentic bluegrass weirdness, and here are a few pointers to get you going:
- Refer to yourself in the third person, especially with your own family
- Wear long johns in July (I might have done this once)
- Live for an entire month on a diet of pork rinds and Perrier
- Fill up a bus with diesel, then attempt to barter with the gas station and pay with the twelve fish you caught the day before. Also try this when renewing your driver’s license
- Give yourself a colorful nickname like “Beezer,” “Half-tone,” or “Cue-ball” for men; “Dizzy-lou,” “Mink-mop,” or “Queen of Canada,” for women
- Wear two neckties at all times
- Go down the highway for nine hours saying nothing except blurting the occasional line of a song, like “The plans we made have gone astray,” “The she-hounds call him a has-been,” or “Me and Bill from Britain, mad dogs in the sun”
- Develop a few strange phobias, like a fear of socks, Honda CR-Vs, or cantaloupe
- Add some unique items you’re allergic to as well, like lettuce, water, or the sun
- Become an obsessive fan of an obscure college team you have no personal connection to, like the Franklin Pierce Ravens
- Start speaking nothing but Pig Latin, eventually working up Little Bessie (long form) in the language
- While on the road, listen only to Bad Bunny and the Goins Brothers in an endless playlist shuffle
- Release your next album on 8-track, avoiding all digital platforms
