Chapter 1 #3
She was one of those weirdos—I say that very fondly—who would break out into song during recess or sing to herself while she was at her locker.
This did mean, unfortunately, that she was the target of more than a few unkind comments.
But she generally let that roll off her back.
And here’s the thing—she had the talent to do so.
I remember we had a middle school talent show, just an informal thing, and Ryan brought the ukulele she’d gotten for Christmas. I saw the faces of some of the other girls when Ryan walked up to play, like, Oh boy, here we go.
But where anyone else at that age would have strummed simple chords and sung Alanis Morissette or something, Ryan fingerpicked the most delicate, haunting melody.
It was one she’d written herself. It was never published, but I remember it.
I always thought she should try to rework and record it: Meet me under the willow, the willow / When the full moon is high / Hear me call on the air when the wind blows / I’ll be there by your side.
Eleven years old. She wrote that. Near rhyme and all.
A lot of the people who criticize Ryan now don’t listen to her music.
It’s easy to look at her fame, which—let’s be honest—is almost obscene, not that she can really control that.
But if you actually attended her shows, listened closely to the lyrics, understood what she was doing and the musical tradition she’s rooted in—she proved herself every time.
The girls in our class stopped making fun of her after that day. I know for a fact that Stacy Hiester asked for a ukulele for her birthday the very next week.
But, of course, Ryan’s instrument of choice was the banjo.
For more on that, you’ll want to talk to Frank.
Frank Greenfield, Ryan’s first teacher
Oh, Ryan. She was a whiz on the banjo. I’ve been thinking of her lately, just as I’m having my grandson help me clean out the studio before I move into assisted living at Gardner Park.
He tells me I could sell any of my instruments for a fortune now that people know my name. I say, what do I need a fortune for?
He says, Well if you wouldn’t use it, I could.
He’s a good kid.
But I couldn’t part with any of those instruments—not for money, anyway.
Probably donate them. I’ve got guitars, banjos, ukes—used to own a shop after my old jug band broke up, you know, and I dealt to plenty of folks out in New York and all up and down the seaboard.
Not to be mystical about it, but every instrument carries a little piece of its player.
Ryan understood that. She had a real respect for that banjo she received on her eleventh birthday. It was her mom who bought it; she came in the shop and told me she had a little girl who was killing it on the uke and ready to branch out to something new. Well, guitar is the next clear choice.
But no, Barb said her girl was a little different.
Thought she’d like a banjo. The two of them enjoyed listening to a lot of bluegrass and jam bands together.
So I showed her the models I had, and I always offered a free lesson with the purchase of any instrument—so long as it was one I could play, anyway.
Ryan came in that very next week. This waify ginger girl carrying this banjo that was almost as long as she was tall.
But she had this determination to her I rarely saw.
Most kids, they’re just playing for the fun of it, yeah?
Not Ryan. She was bright and bubbly, all right, don’t get me wrong.
But when we sat down to it, she approached the chords and hand positions with all the focus of a concert pianist down at Carnegie Hall.
I remember thinking, What’s your plan, kid? Because you could tell she was in it for the long haul.
She seemed to like the lesson well enough; she kept coming back for more, and her mom signed her up for a regular schedule.
We worked through all the basics quickly.
She’d managed to teach herself everything she knew about the ukulele—not impossible, but pretty impressive for a kid of that age—and although there were a few hand positioning techniques we had to course correct, she caught on quickly.
In fact, if I was pressed, I’d say that was her one fault: being so eager.
The banjo is not like the guitar. Rather than strumming, the playing is based on fingerpicking, or what we call those “rolls” on the strings to form individual notes instead of chords.
You’ve got to go real slow on the rolls when you start out to avoid any mistakes—because if you make mistakes while you’re building those skills, your brain will have a hell of a time undoing it as you get faster and faster.
Slow down, slow down—that was probably the phrase I said most to Ryan in those early days. And she’d laugh and laugh and just keep going.
But she made it work. Before long, we were picking out songs together for her to try playing. I was surprised by her taste. She really began to nail songs with simpler melodies: “Hear the Wind Blow” or “Little Sparrow.” She’d sing along with them, too, in this light and wistful voice.
And that’s when things began to get interesting. Because Ryan started bringing in her own songs to workshop with me.
Mari
Ryan never shut up about those banjo lessons, I swear. I say that lovingly. She’d always be reading off lyrics to me, bringing them to Frank, asking what I thought about this melody or another.
But I could feel her excitement—all those scribbles she’d had in her notebook were finally getting an outlet somewhere.
It was hard to understand what was actually happening in her creative process to us as twelve-year-olds back then, but I think the mentorship with Frank, someone who knew music and knew what he was doing, forced Ryan to really look at her songs and pick out the better ones from the little-kid ramblings.
Then that batch got refined and refined even further.
I mean, I say all of this knowing she was no major musician at that point.
She was still a kid, just messing around and trying to make something that sounded cool.
It was just that she was taking it more seriously than other kids her age might have, and she was lucky that it was Frank on the other end of her questions about songwriting and performing and working in the music industry.
I don’t call myself a musician, and sometimes I pinpoint that to a third-grade piano lesson when my crabby old teacher told me I had technical skill but no emotion in my playing. I mean, who says that to a third grader?
But Frank was nothing if not encouraging. I went with Ryan to his shop one day. It’s that cute little place on Union, used to be an old barn. And I was just messing around with a secondhand folk harp he had while Ryan was talking to him. I still remember, Frank came over and said it sounded good.
“Is that Pachelbel?” he asked.
“Oh yeah,” I said. It was just something I remembered from piano lessons; I didn’t realize I was managing to play any recognizable tune.
“That’s one of my favorites,” he said. “You’re welcome to play that harp anytime you’re here.”
So I did. I followed along with Ryan on a lot of her lessons and just hung out while she and Frank played, and he’d give me a few pointers at the end.
After a few months of it, I was able to play a pretty decent “Canon in D” just by ear.
And Frank came over and said: “I don’t want to risk this harp going to anyone else after you’ve spent so much time with it.
I think you’d better take it with you today. ”
My parents were up in arms when I got home, but I didn’t know any better.
He said to take it, so I did. They tried to call him to either return or pay for it, but Frank told them it was a run-down old model and I’d been the first one to show interest in it in years; he was trying to clear inventory.
But that harp was in perfect shape. Still is, right over there in the living room.
Ryan was over the moon. “We can play together now!” she’d said.
We had some good jam sessions, but harp and banjo isn’t a common pairing for a reason, and it was harder for me to transport my instrument.
Of course, you’ll have heard me on some of her later recordings, after I had some actual lessons, and you’ll remember that she somehow convinced me to play onstage for “Keep Me” years later—god, I still have stress dreams about that show.
But it became clear that we got very different things out of playing. It’s fun for me, relaxing; if I have a hectic day with North Shore, I’ll come home and just play for an hour or two in the evening. I get a lot of comfort from it.
Ryan, on the other hand . . . I don’t know.
That banjo was like a tool for her, a way to work out all this noise that I gradually realized was constantly in her head.
Her face when she played—it’s hard to describe.
I sometimes thought of it as her and the instrument locked in a wrestling match, with Ryan working the strings harder and harder to see if they could measure up to the song only she could hear, and the strings in turn testing the limits of her skill.
She wanted something out of it, something big, and she was never completely satisfied by what she got.
Ryan improved scary fast. I think even Frank was a little unnerved by it.
Frank
Boy, she was flying. Within a year or two of our lessons, I started to think—at this rate, this kid will outpace me by Christmas.
And you know, younger musicians always have that elasticity on their side; their brains are better wired to pick up a skill, and do so quickly.
But Ryan was a special case even with that in mind, and I knew she’d soon outgrow my dusty little studio and need a better way to challenge herself.
I had a bulletin board in the back of the shop, just a place where local musicians could tack their business cards or band flyers or notices about instruments for sale.
Ryan often lingered by it, I saw. She’d been so fired up to play with Mari, but I know that sort of petered out—I don’t blame Mari.
It seemed like everyone in Hamilton was having a tough time keeping up with Ryan.
What she wanted was to be part of a musical community.
So I was poking around for opportunities to help make that happen for her.
And one afternoon, I opened my mail to find a very interesting brochure.
And I got an idea.