A nationally renowned bluegrass guitarist is performing in Saranac Lake on Monday, Jan. 19.
Jake Eddy is known for his guitar-picking skills, which he has been honing since he was a teenager. Eddy lives in West Virginia and has performed at the historic Grand Ole Opry in Nashville four times.
Ahead of his show at the Hootenanny in Saranac Lake on Jan. 19, which begins at 6:30 pm, Eddy will teach a masterclass at 4:30 about flatpicking techniques. Eddy spoke with Emily Russell about what drew him to bluegrass music and why teaching has become an important part of his career.
Emily RussellRenowned guitarist Jake Eddy to teach and perform in Saranac Lake
EDDY: When I was a kid, anytime I would go to visit my grandparents or we would go to a Thanksgiving dinner or a birthday party or whatever, the same way folks play board games, my family would sit around and play tunes, old-time tunes and bluegrass music. It’s a social music here. Anytime you have a get-together, you have people playing. I have some local friends and we get together and have picking parties, and my mom’s a picker. When I think about really positive, fun, good-time memories of growing up, there’s always picking going on.
EMILY RUSSELL: Picking parties. This is the first time I’m hearing of this. Tell me what a picking party is, describe it for me.
EDDY: You’ll love it. You have to come down and see one. It’s so funny because I don’t know what people do at a party, like what would you do at a party? You know, I don’t know what else you’d do.
So we have a picking party, really we just call it a party, but we have our friends over. It’s not like the women aren’t pickers or whatever, but a lot of times it ends up being that the dudes that sit around and pick and the wives sit around and crochet and work on a quilt. My wife is a seamstress and she does quilting and all sorts of stuff and crafts and the kids run around and scream and break stuff and we play tunes and it’s just hanging out.
RUSSELL: When you’re free styling or being a bit spontaneous, whether it’s just you on a stage or you’re in a group of other amazing musicians, what’s going through your mind to know when to pivot and how to keep up and how to keep the tune going?
EDDY: My thing has always been not to second-guess anything, to trust myself as an artist, trust myself as an interpreter of the song I’m playing and if I take a notion to play a certain thing or to go in a certain direction, I just go there. I don’t consider whether it’s possible, will this sound good, is this appropriate? I try not to consider much of that. There’s no real mystique about improvising.
I mean, we’re improvising now, to some degree. You might have these questions written down and I sort of know how I feel about what you’re asking, but only in the music world do people say, “Oh, how did you come up with that?” The joke is that two people are talking on the street on a park bench and a guitar player walks up and says, “That’s amazing. Do you have a script for that?” I think for me, it’s just about being agreeable and trusting my taste and my own judgment and letting it happen and not thinking too hard.
RUSSELL: Folks have described you as a prodigy, a musical genius. Talk to me about how you define skill as a musician, especially in the genre that you play in.
EDDY: I think it’s changed some for me over the years. Like, I think if you’re looking at my technical abilities and when you see those terms like prodigy and those things floating around, I think to some listeners, I was probably better when I was 14 or 15 than I am now.
RUSSELL: And you’re 26 years old now.
EDDY: Yeah. I think at first, when I was younger, it was definitely more about, well, I can play the fastest, I can play the cleanest, I can play the hardest stuff that no one else can play, and that’s what makes me great. And now I think it’s more about how to honor this music that’s so important to me. I think about how to play more stuff that’s more like what I hear in my head and less about what’s flashy or what’s impressive to other folks.
RUSSELL: So you’ve played alongside other really incredible musicians. You’ve played at the Grand Old Opry a handful of times. Why Saranac Lake?
EDDY: I love this question because I love Saranac Lake and I actually had a comment online this past week. I’m promoting the tour and this person says, “Dude, why Saranac Lake?”
RUSSELL: I saw that.
EDDY: Yeah, it’s funny, right? The first time I played there was totally an accident. I had a show in Vermont, and I was visiting friends there, and I had an open day where I was going to be driving close to Saranac, and I think I posted online or maybe Charlie [Reinertsen] reached out and said, “Hey, I put this show together. Maybe you could come play.” And I thought, “I don’t know, why not?” You know, I thought, “No one’s going to come because I don’t know anyone there. Surely there’s no one there.”
Then my wife and I went and were like, “Oh my god, this is an amazing place.” We were only there for like a day or two, but we stood on the lake and watched dogs pull kids on the ice on a sled and all these things that are just kind of romantic in a way. It’s just a great little place, so when I sat down with my tour manager and started talking about this tour and where we want to go and how we want to do it, I was really like, “Can we go to Saranac again?” So I hope to keep coming back. It’s a cool place with some really warm people and I can’t say enough good things about it. I love it, man. I’m happy to be coming up.
RUSSELL: One of the things that you do, I understand, is that while you’re so young, you’re already focused on training the next generation of musicians. I’ve heard that you do home-stays for some people, and while you’re here in Saranac Lake, you’re going to be teaching a class. Why is it important to you to focus on helping others learn the craft?
EDDY: Yeah, it’s something that I’ve struggled with, because I love teaching, but I’m not always really, really great at it. I’m sort of scatterbrained. I love teaching master classes and things and I’ve taught online off and on through the years, but never loved it. But this home-stay thing that I started doing really ignited this love for teaching for me. Basically, I’ve welcomed students into my home and taught them one-on-one for a weekend or a week. I think I’ve done in the 80s or 90s of students over the past four or five years or something like that.
I don’t know that if I love teaching necessarily for teaching’s sake, but I think it’s so important if you know how to play this music in a genuine, authentic kind of way, that you pass it on because there’s questionable instructional material out there for traditional music. And a lot of great players and great interpreters of this music can’t read music or write music, or they’re not super well spoken. A lot of the guys I learned from growing up, like my grandpa — he was a great, prolific guitar player and a super talented guy and couldn’t even really name chords.
So, it’s hard to learn from these really great guys, so I take a lot of pride in being able to show folks- I don’t want to say the real way to do things- but like authentic ways that music has played, and so I think that’s important.
