Lowell festival pays homage to piano's folk roots

Like a banjo at the opera, the piano can seem strangely out of place in American folk music. Guitars come to mind as folk instruments, along with fiddles, banjos, mandolins, and perhaps the occasional dulcimer. So why is the Lowell Folk Festival, the most traditional of regional summer fetes, toasting the piano?

''Instruments don't belong to any particular form of music," says Joe Wilson of the National Council for the Traditional Arts, which programs the music for the festival. ''They're neither classical nor popular nor folk. Pianos, like all other instruments, have taken on regional styles in this country, played in different ways by the ordinary people whose music we celebrate at Lowell."

In a special homage to American folk piano styles, the festival is presenting Chicago blues and boogie-woogie whiz Daryl Davis; dizzyingly quick Appalachian keyboardist Jeff Little, and Old West virtuoso Dave Bourne, who plays the Gem Saloon's piano player in the HBO series ''Deadwood." Also appearing are brilliant Celtic supergroup Solas, bluegrass songbird Dale Ann Bradley, the hypnotic Mamadou Diabate Ensemble of Mali, and Quebecois stars La Bottine Souriante; along with a typically rich sample of polka, Cajun, Korean, Greek, klezmer, Mexican, and other ethnic and regional roots musics.

Little says it's often news to people, even in his native Blue Ridge Mountains, that the piano played an important role in Southern mountain music.

''In the 19th century," he says, ''pretty much anyone who could afford a piano had one. They were very common rhythm instruments in early string bands."

Bourne has become an avid scholar of the piano's rise and fall in American folk music, just as he has in the melodic style of Old West saloon music. He has complained to ''Deadwood" 's producers about their historically inaccurate use of guitar-driven, bluegrass-type string bands. Those kinds of bands did not exist in the 1870s, when the show is set; though larger saloons might have had a small ensemble featuring piano and fiddles.

The piano was also a mainstay in American homes -- and not just wealthy homes, Bourne says. ''In the 1860s, '70s, '80s everybody had a piano in their parlor. There were 4,000 piano manufacturers in this country alone. It was such an all-encompassing instrument; you could play anything on it."

So what happened? In a word, guitars.

Guitars were not an indigenous American folk instrument. They were always played a little in the Southwest, but mostly by Hispanics. It wasn't until the 1890s, when Sears and Montgomery-Wards offered cheap, sturdy guitars in their catalogs, that it was taken up by itinerant blues musicians, cowboys, farm workers, and other creators of American folk styles. It was much more portable than the piano; and as guitars got bigger, better -- and louder -- they began replacing the piano as a dominant rhythm instrument.

Still, the piano was increasingly regarded as either more of an elite instrument -- for classical or highbrow parlor music -- or more aligned with commercial music. ''It began to be seen less as a people's instrument, more of a high-toned instrument," Davis says. ''But the piano definitely has a place in American roots music."

Lowell Folk Festival, today-Sunday, downtown Lowell. Free. 978-970-5200, www.lowellfolkfestival.org.