Surly Bikes
"It's all the things I saw on Twitter today, right here on the news."
-The lovely and obviously very talented Ms.Bloggins
Sun going up, and then the sun it goes back down. As it turns out, banjo virtuoso Earl Scruggs died today. He was 88. Scruggs was, in a "strangely, blues got famous too" sort of way, an American icon. He played a banjo, which is itself for the vast majority of people and places and times an improbable anomoly. But more than that, he played it so well that he helped define a fingerpicking style and sound. A whole way of playing! Not just a song or two, but a whole sound. His is complex music that expresses time and place in a way so accessible you need not be from North Carolina in the 40s and 50s to understand and appreciate it. His considerable talent and a bunch of luck made it possible for him to intersect circles and people and situations that put him in front of a very big audience. It's amazing really. A daily sort of miracle if you will. And even if you won't.
He was old. He died. It's natural. And yet even those not sentimental for the loss of this particular man may know the loss of greater things. In a parallel universe I can imagine that Earl Scruggs is viewed much as we view Mozart. Say what you will.
Anyway.