Z•E•S•T
FOR LIVING
Daughter’s violin playing brings
family musical group together
PHOTOS BY VERONICA YANKOWSKI The Knotts family, (l-r, above) father Tim, Kiralee, mother Beth and Jake, jam in their living room.
Music begins right after breakfast in the Knotts household. Each morning, while teeth are being brushed and lunches are being packed, four young musicians take turns on fiddles and banjos and passages of bluegrass music perk up the morning rush.
"They practice every morning before school, one at a time, and I sit and listen to what they’re doing and give them pointers," explained Beth Knotts.
"Mom wakes us up at 5:45 a.m. so we can play our instruments," offered Jacob "Jake" Knotts, 13.
"The fact of the matter is that after breakfast, they’re fresh. They practice for 15-20 minutes," explained Beth Knotts. "They’ve gotten into a routine."
Knotts, along with her husband, Tim, and their four children — Jake; Sierra, 11; Eilea, 9; and Kiralee, 7 — comprise Tied Up in Knotts, a bluegrass band that is, at its heart, a celebration of indigenous American music and shared family values.
"One of our core values is time together," explained Tim Knotts. "All the things we do are designed around us doing activities together, whether it’s music, scouting or hiking.
"That’s what Tied Up In Knotts is all about," he said, tracing a circle in the air to encompass his family. "It ties us together."
The bluegrass band has its roots in Beth Knotts’ guitar playing, a penchant she’s continued from girlhood, through a career as a park ranger and on into motherhood.
Eilea (top) plays her cello while Sierra ties their musical effort together with her violin.
"The guitar has always followed me," explained Beth, who met her husband when both were park rangers at Yosemite National Park.
"I was doing campfire programs," she said, "I worked all over the country at six large national parks, and I would always have my guitar with me."
"When I met her, I started playing again," added Tim, who plays the mandolin in the family band.
In 1985, the couple gave up their jobs as park rangers to return to the town where Beth grew up.
"We had to get real jobs, real lives," Tim explained of the decision to move East before starting a family.
They settled into a vintage farmhouse owned by Beth’s parents and, to their surprise, found their new lifestyle a perfect fit.
"We moved in and never dreamed we’d stay," Beth said. "We’d been traveling with the park service for years. It was hard to even imagine staying in one place."
Once the children arrived, they were introduced to bluegrass at festivals, and as soon as each could read music, lessons began.
Playing together was a shared pastime until a visit four years ago to the family’s cabin in the Catskills.
"We were at a bluegrass festival that we went to every summer for years," Tim recalled. "A couple camping nearby heard us playing and said we should get together and play at Albert Music Hall in South Jersey."
"We were playing together as a family because it was a fun thing to do," said Beth. "We weren’t a band."
"There’s a big difference between learning to play an instrument and playing together as a group," noted Tim. "We’ve learned how to do that over the last four years. That’s a skill that requires listening to what everybody else is playing at the same time you’re playing your instrument. You have to remember the music and the words and sing and play at the same time. For the children, that’s probably the hardest thing to learn."
Sierra’s parents credit her musical talent with fostering the family’s shared love of music.
"Sierra was the one that brought music to the entire family," said Beth. "We would pluck around on our guitars, but her love for that violin and what she could do with it at her age inspired us."
"She is the heart of our group," concurred Tim. "If she gave up the fiddle or playing the melody for our group, we would fall apart."
"Then Jake started a year after she did," added Beth, "and we said, ‘Hey, maybe we can build a band around this.’ "
A member of the New Jersey State Youth Orchestra, Sierra enjoys the diverse styles her violin lends itself to, and she is equally at ease playing a jig or a classical waltz.
"It has a split personality," she jokes about her instrument.
"Played classically, it’s a violin," explained Beth. "For bluegrass and old time, it’s a fiddle."
"I’m cool with playing the banjo," said Jake, who switched to that instrument after playing drums in the school band.
"I saw mom’s old banjo hanging on the wall and I picked it up, and mom taught me the basics," he said, breaking into a spirited chorus of the bluegrass anthem "Foggy Mountain Breakdown."
"It took Jake a few years to grow into playing the banjo," explained Tim. "Four years ago, he could hardly lift the thing. Now he’s grown into it."
The eighth-grader, who, along with his siblings, generally listens to pop music, said the banjo doesn’t limit him to bluegrass or old-time music.
"I can play classical," Jake explained. "I can play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and it’s also modern."
Eilea quietly pursues playing the cello, an instrument her parents encouraged her to pick up because the bass was too large for her.
"I like the cello because it’s soft," she explained of her instrument’s voice, which matches her own quiet demeanor.
The youngest band member, Kiralee, is learning to play the guitar and enjoys showing off her proficiency with the egg and spoon, two primitive folk percussion instruments her parents introduced her to so that she could play along with the family band.
The family is building a repertoire of old-time and bluegrass tunes, such as "Down Yonder," an old-time, or Appalachian, tune, and "The Crawdad Song," a bluegrass standard.
"We play old-time, bluegrass and ethnic music like Scottish jigs, Cajun and Irish waltzes," said Beth. "We try to find music we can all play."
Why bluegrass music?
"Because whenever I walk in and hear bluegrass or old-timey playing, everybody’s happy; it makes you smile," she said.
Bluegrass, Tim said, originated in the 1940s with Kentucky musician Bill Monroe, who is known as the Father of Bluegrass. The genre is enjoying a resurgence, thanks to a movie soundtrack that became a best seller.
"A lot of people were introduced to bluegrass by the movie Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" Tim said, adding that contemporary bluegrass is tagged "newgrass."
The spontaneity and exuberance of bluegrass suits the family-style music sessions.
"This genre of music is less structured, more spontaneous," explained Tim.
"Everyone takes turns and puts in their own style," added Beth. "The fiddle player jumps in and starts to play, then steps back, and maybe the banjo player steps in and takes over the melody and does it a different way, and then the mandolin player, and so on."
"When you play classical music, it’s not like that," said Tim. "A Bach concerto today is played exactly the way it was played 10 years ago, which is exactly how it was played 100 years ago. There is only one way to play that piece of music, and people strive their entire lives to reach perfection in playing that piece of music. There is no perfection that you strive for in this type of music."
"Just joy," observed Beth. "Our reason for inspiring the children to play is for the joy of it."
Rooted in American folk tradition, bluegrass engenders the homespun values the Knotts seek to instill in their children. For this West Long Branch family, music is a tie that binds.