Toast and jam Breakfast with a side of bright-and-early bluegrass By: David Sanderson Posted: 3:00 AM CDT Saturday, Sep. 14, 2024

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This article was published 14/09/2024 (771 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

ANOLA — This should come as great news for anybody who didn’t get their fill of pickin’ and grinnin’ at last weekend’s Banjo Bowl clash between the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and the visiting Saskatchewan Roughriders.

For almost 40 years, a rotating group of musicians has gathered in Anola bright and early every Friday morning to play bluegrass, a style of music developed in the 1940s in America’s Appalachian region. Parked around a large round table inside the Lake Trail Family Restaurant, participants, as many as 18, take turns choosing what tune to perform next for a packed house of onlookers, who are enjoying their bacon and eggs with a side of Foggy Mountain Breakdown.

At a recent get-together, longtime attendee Ken Forbister paused between numbers to say a few words about the shiny instrument resting on his lap.

“There were a couple of things that happened for banjo players that weren’t overly favourable: one was the movie Deliverance and the second was the TV show, The Beverly Hillbillies,” the 77-year-old retiree declared. “For a long spell, people equated banjo players with knuckle-dragging, backwoods yokels, which, as you can plainly see, we’re anything but.” (Hey, speak for yourself, kidded a mandolinist to his right.)

“That said,” Forbister continued, without missing a beat, “the joke remains that banjo players will play for free and will stop for money.”

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Harry McKay, who lives near Dugald, traces the origin of the Anola Bluegrass Jammers (as they’re informally referred to in a Youtube video recorded last month at Steinbach’s Pioneer Days festival) to the mid-1980s.

At the time, a chap named Peter Ilchyna was making a habit of arriving for breakfast at the Anola Village Inn, located at the intersection of provincial highways 12 and 15, with his trusty harmonica in tow. Ilchyna would proceed to play a bluegrass standard on his mouth organ while he waited for his meal to arrive, much to the delight of his fellow diners.

“I was working midnights and used to go to the Village Inn every Friday for breakfast, right after my shift ended,” recalls McKay, 73, who took up the guitar at age 13. “Peter was almost always there and one day we got to talking about jamming together. Before we knew it, there were four or five of us playing there, just for the fun of it.”

Lifelong Anola resident Murray Leonard, 84, was already familiar with bluegrass when he heard Ilchyna, McKay and their various cohorts plucking away for the first time. In the early 1960s, Leonard regularly listened to an AM station out of Iowa he was able to pick up on his car radio, with a format almost entirely dedicated to bluegrass pioneers such as Bill Monroe and Jimmy Martin.

“That got me interested in (bluegrass) big-time and eventually my brother and I threw together a band, the Country Gentlemen, that played the bars along Main Street (in Winnipeg), the good ones and the not-so-good ones,” says Leonard, who, besides playing guitar and banjo, is also an accomplished luthier.

Leonard was working full-time when the jam sessions were in their infancy, but he made a point of joining in whenever he had a Friday off. He became a regular upon his retirement in 2004, only by then, the weekly affairs had become so popular the troupe had started hunting around for a more spacious venue.

“By the time Murray came on board, the hotel didn’t have near as much room as was needed for musicians and people coming to listen,” McKay says.

“There were definitely mornings when there were so many of us playing that there weren’t many chairs left for customers, which the hotel’s owners didn’t always take too fondly to,” Leonard adds with a wink.

Space hasn’t been a concern at the Lake Trail Family Restaurant, the ensemble’s primary venue since 2010. The dining area, which opens at 9 a.m. sharp and is situated directly adjacent to a Petro-Canada service station, has seating for 70, plus an attached lounge serves as a handy storage space for everybody’s instruments while they’re catching up over coffee and toast before the first notes are struck at around 9:45 a.m.

Winnipegger Paul Picard, 70, wasn’t well-versed in bluegrass when a pal of his convinced him to tag along to Anola one Friday morning, about 10 years ago. Nonetheless, Picard, who started playing rock ’n’ roll at age eight on a Gibson guitar belonging to his mother, fell in love with the genre immediately.

“I guess the thing I like most is the variety of instruments that are involved,” Picard says, moments after leading the group through a spirited take of Tennessee 49, originally recorded in 1983 by Ohio-born singer Larry Sparks. “We often have an accordion player and seriously, where else does an accordion fit in with a band, unless you’re doing a bunch of polkas?”

Sporting a colourful shirt adorned with images of guitars, a gift from his father-in-law, Picard says the jams, which generally run about two hours in length, have caused him to expand his musical horizons by seeking out suitable songs, week after week. (Although reworked pop tunes by Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Beatles do sneak in on occasion, it’s generally frowned upon to suggest melodies that aren’t traditional in nature, everybody agrees.)

“No word of a lie, I try to learn a new bluegrass song or lick every day,” Picard continues, mentioning he also belongs to JamKazam, an online platform that allows him to play bluegrass with other enthusiasts from around the world, through his computer. “The jams keep me perky and healthy and really tickle my fancy. I wake up on Fridays and literally can’t wait to hop in the car to go see the gang.”

Tim Vervey is the vice-president of the Manitoba Old Tyme and Bluegrass Society (MOBS), a 34-year-old organization dedicated to preserving and promoting bluegrass music in the province. He acknowledges the Anola affair is the longest-running jam of its kind in this neck of the woods, but quickly notes it’s not the “only game in town.”

“There’s another in Oakbank on Tuesday mornings, there’s one at the Transcona Legion every second Friday and there’s a spot in St. Vital (Royal Pizza) that hosts a regular Hillbilly Night in the lounge,” he reports.

Vervey, 66, says his affection for bluegrass goes back to when, as a 13-year-old guitarist, an adult neighbour introduced him to the banjo. He would pay attention as the fellow taught him songs by the Stanley Brothers and Flatt and Scruggs, then return home to try to emulate what he had heard on his six-string.

“Once I was older, he took me with him to a festival in Boggy Creek (in west-central Manitoba), which was where I met all these other people in the province who were into that style of music. Our group may not be huge — we’re currently at about 80 members — but we make up for what we might lack in numbers with enthusiasm.”

Back in Anola, Debbie Tonner of Selkirk is preparing to follow a stirring rendition of Hank Williams’ I Saw the Light with an original composition of her own, a tongue-in-cheek ditty that touches on an encounter she once had with a certain Canadian music legend who asked her out on a date when she was in her late teens. (“I guess my brush with fame has gone, Gordon Lightfoot has moved on, the boots he liked don’t fit me any more, now I wear a wedding ring, I can no longer have a fling, the only G-string that I have’s on my guitar.”)

Tonner talks about how nervous she was the first time she attended a jam, not just because she didn’t fancy herself “some great banjo player,” but also because she was the first woman to sit in with the group. (On the day we visited, there were four women players, including one on the fiddle.)

“They were all so welcoming and friendly that by the time we finished, I felt right at home,” she says, before letting her chums know she’ll be performing her selection in the key of D.

About 15 minutes later, seconds after tearing through the Desert Rose Band’s Ashes of Love, Leonard slides into our booth to take a much-needed breather, and also to stress that when they describe theirs as an open jam, that’s 100 per cent the case.

If somebody shows up without an instrument, he or one of the others always has an extra guitar they’re more than willing to lend out, he says.

He also indicates it isn’t uncommon for people headed to the cottage or travellers crisscrossing the country to wander in for a bite on a Friday morning, only to wonder what in tarnation is going on.

“We do get some quizzical looks, but I wanna say that within five or 10 minutes, they’re clapping their hands and tapping their toes, the same as everyone else.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca