what is it

[clintross]

Hello Friends,
Just a question. What is it about the mandolin that started your appreciation/love/obsession. I know all it took for me was seeing the "This Side" music video and Chris Thile's masterful playing and I was hooked

[Tim2723]

For me it was really weird. I'd never seen, played, or even heard a mandolin. I was nine years old and saw a picture of one in the Sears catalog. My mom bought it or me (for $25!). I fell in love because it was small and looked soooo much cooler than a guitar. Half a century later I earn my living with it. Just destiny, I suppose.

[Mike Bunting]

Frank Wakefield with the Greenbriar Boys, 1964.

[Ron Thomason]

Bill Bolick got me going in the mid-50s; by the early 60s Monroe and Wakefield had sent me off the deep end. RT

[Nick Royal]

Someone gave me a mandolin to see for them; I started playing it, and enjoyed it. (and also gave up trying to play 5 string banjo) Bought her mandolin, and then later on went to Gryphons, in Palo Alto, and traded it for a really nice old 1918 Gibson A mandolin.
Nick Royal

[Earl Gamage]

When I was in my 20's I played in a bluegrass style gospel band. We had a fellow about 70 at the time who played fiddle and mandolin. I thought his mandolin playing was great (I think the tremolo hooked me) and I wanted to play it. I just got around to getting one last year and I am now 53.

Thanks Howard!

btw, I'm getting to where I can tremelo kind of like I remember Howard doing it.

[hank]

I was looking for a resonator to take my finger picking to the next level but just couldn't find one that I really liked the sound of. Out of frustration I started plinking on a Tacoma M-3. The rest is history, I went home with the Tacoma and started the crazy journey down the mandolin rabbit hole. Now years into this I can't imagine playing anything else. I am still absolutely spell bound with these little jewels. It's an obsession I never anticipated but am happy to have found.

[Mike Bromley]

Louis Benoit playing "Daybreak in Dixie" (or, at least the same structure) at the 1975 Nine Mile River Bluegrass Festival in Nova Scotia. He was playing with his late father Gervais, and I believe it was with David MacIsaac & Andrew Russell and a bass player whose name escapes me.

Oh, look what you have wrought, Louis. Thanks!

[allenhopkins]

Loved bluegrass, after hearing some good bands (Osborne Bros. w/Bennie Birchfield, e.g.) in college coffeehouses. After getting out of the Army, wanted to start a band with a banjo-playing friend. I had two mandolins, Gibson A-1 and Victoria bowl-back, found in my grandfather's attic. So I was the mandolin player. This all occurred in 1970 or so.

[Douglas McMullin]

Interesting question. I think a number of things through the 1990's started getting me interested, but the final straw was actually the Johnny Staats - Wires & Wood CD in 2000. I was/am not a big bluegrass fan, but the mandolin on that recording really sucked me in. I got my first mandolin, a Weber Gallatin, a few months later.

[pinky57]

I got my first mandolin after hearing Josh Turner on his song "Would You Go With Me?" I was hooked, never had played any instrument in my life, now I have 4 mandolins and play 3 of them everyday!

[JEStanek]

I had always appreciated acoustic music but it was a cross of a colleague giving a presentation at work about learning an instrument when you were older, having a non-conformist bent that kept me from guitar, and hanging out after the show with Chris Thile and Matt Glaser that sealed the mandolin for me.

Jamie

[R. Kane]

Heard Ry Cooder's Blly the Kid in 1973 or so, Grisman on Old and in the Way not long after, figured my fingers couldn't move that fast, and forgot the manolin until 2003, when I had hand surgery and needed an activity to get them moving again. It was mandolin or knitting, and I chose mandolin. Lookout world!

[JeffD]

In high school, a kid hands me a bowlback, tells me where to put my fingers.

Changed my life.

[Jill McAuley]

When I moved to the States I discovered that my tenor banjo was too loud to play in an apartment building unless I wanted to incur the wrath of my neighbors, so I picked up a beater mandolin just to have something to practice tunes on....and I couldn't put that thing down! Now I have 4 mandolins and a rather neglected banjo.

Cheers,
Jill

[catmandu2]

For me, it was another instrument with strings..

[Ivan Kelsall]

Ralph Rinzler's Mandolin intro.to "I Cried Again" from the first Greenbriar Boys LP in 1962. It still blows me away even now. I think that he's possibly the most under-mentioned / rated Mandolin player ever. I hardly ever see his name on here anyway,
Ivan

[Mandolin Mick]

Back in the mid `80's I used to listen to the super AM station KXEL out of Waterloo, Iowa late at night. They would play Bluegrass Gospel and I was drawn to the mandolin. I traded a guitar straight up for an A model because I had no money at the time.

Anyway, if KXEL played an album, say "Flatt & Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys Sing Songs of Glory" they announced the artist and name of the album. But, if they played individual cuts, they said nothing.

Then one night, I still have this on tape with static because I live in Wisconsin, they played a mandolin instrumental. It wasn't Bluegrass but kind of sounded like Bill Monroe. I tried to play it, but it sounded like the guy was bending strings or something. Most eerie sounding song ever ...

I decided it was my favorite song of all time but didn't know who it was by or it's title. So, I called it "Ghost Mandolin".

Years later I found out ... it's "My Last Days on Earth" by Bill Monroe. Tuned G#G#-C#C#-G#B-C#E. No wonder I couldn't figure it out. Got it now ...

[bigbike]

For me it was Amy Ray and her use of the mandolin in various IG and rock music. My first love is banjo and always will be. I hate conforming to what everyone else does. My love of accoustic instruments goes back a long time. My ex was an accomplished quitarist and could have made a very nice living with playing, BUT EVERYBODY and their brother or sister plays the guitar and guitarists are a dime a thousand. Great guitarists are a dime a dozen. Non bluegrass musicians using instruments traditionally played in bluegrass are reaching across boundries and affecting people who never before had an interest in mandolin, banjo, bouzouki, jews harp, even autoharp and mt. dulcimer.

For me it is a shame music has been taken out of schools and away from kids. So it is up to us who do play or even toy with various instruments to show kids and teach kids other uses other than kindlin for our accoustic intruments.

[Randi Gormley]

For me, a combination of the cool way a bowlback looked (kind of like a small lute) and the fact that it was small enough that I could reach the strings (unlike guitar) and I found a book where I could teach myself how to use it. And the fact that nobody I knew had ever played one (I grew up in northeasten Ohio) or even knew what it was.

[David Thompson]

For me it was this cute young girl that played mandolin in her family bluegrass band from north ga , She taught me soooo much.

[Caleb]

...having a non-conformist bent...
Jamie

I would think most mandolin players have this, at least to a degree.

[fishtownmike]

I don't know. For about fifteen years I had an old Epiphone hanging on the wall with my guitars and one day I just gave a serious try at it and stuck with it. Where as the guitar was getting a little boring to me after almost 20 plus years i found the mandolin fun, exciting and challenging to me.