Notes
Ellen and John Wright are faculty members at Northwestern University who play and sing old time music--or 'timeless music,' as they prefer to call it. He is the author of 'Traveling the High Way Home: Ralph Stanley and the World of Traditional Bluegrass Music'; she is has just completed an as-told-to biography of Roni Stoneman, 'First Lady of Banjo' and 20-year star of 'Hee-Haw.' 'We sing songs we've known so long we can't remember not knowing them,' the Wrights say. 'In part it was our families, in part it was our schools, in part it was America that taught us these songs.' Though they have never attempted a scientific survey of the question, it appears that this lifetime acquaintance with their material is shared by most of their audience-and of course this is just what the Wrights are aiming at when they put their shows together. A bit of background: John Wright became involved with banjo-playing and singing while an undergraduate at Swarthmore College during the great folk boom. He was the lead singer for an old-time band called the Crum Creek Valley Boys & Girl, which actually recorded a self-produced LP-a rarity in those days (a copy is archived at the college). He put aside the banjo while pursuing his academic career, and when he took it up again years later he was delighted to discover that there were all sorts of music publications that hadn't existed back when he first started playing. He was particularly taken with one of these, Hub and Nancy Nitchie's 'Banjo NewsLetter,' for which he soon became a regular contributor, writing a monthly column on the music of Ralph Stanley called 'Clinch Mountain Banjo.' Interviews for this column eventually became the heart of his book on Ralph Stanley, a book which won him the International Bluegrass Music Association's Print Media Personality of the Year award in 1994. At the same time he became involved with songwriting and recording, working with such Stanley sidemen as Junior Blankenship, James Price, and the late Curly Ray Cline. (Click 'John Wright' in the 'Try This' box on the left.) A year or two after the publication of 'Traveling the High Way Home,' Ellen Wright suddenly said to her husband, 'I want to learn to play the guitar.' He tells the story as follows: 'I dug up an old student guitar our daughter had left behind when she went off to college and blew the dust off it. I literally had to tie a knot in one of the strings to get it working. I can't play the guitar, but I understood that the chords out of D are the easiest ones to start with. We looked up those chords in our daughter's instruction book. Ellen then took that guitar up to her study and worked on it, night after night. When she came down a month later she was a guitar player. The rest was just details.' Ellen regards this as rather an exaggeration, but the fact remains that when they made a demo tape a year or so later, bluegrass professional Charlie Sizemore reacted to it by saying, 'She knows everything you can't teach,' and the well known musician and instructional expert Murphy Henry said, 'Those bass notes are right where they ought to be.' The Wrights started performing together a year or so after Ellen began the guitar. They have appeared from Cape Cod to California; perhaps their most memorable appearance was in New York City a couple of weeks after 9/11. A few months before that New York show a friend of theirs invited them to meet Roni Stoneman, who was staying in the Chicago area at the time. Roni was looking for someone to help her write her life story, and the original notion was that as the author of the Stanley book John would be the one to do this. But as soon as the Wrights met Roni it became clear that Ellen was the one to take on this job, and this book, along with the just-released CD 'I Shook Hands With Eleanor Roosevelt,' have been the big family musical projects over the past year or more. The Songs 'Little Liza Jane,' despite it's antique sound, is the most recent song on
