(bright banjo music) ♪ ♪ (Jack of the Wood" by The Kruger Brothers) ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - It's ironic that some of the best musicians playing southern mountain music are from Europe.

The Kruger Brothers combine elements of classical, jazz, and folk to create a beautifully textured, complex sound.

I first met them in the 1990s when Doc Watson introduced them to me when they were visiting the United States.

Now, they've moved to western North Carolina and tour all over North America and Europe.

You guys are from Switzerland.

- Yes.

- Your parents are from Germany.

- Yes.

When did you start falling in love with American folk music?

How old were you?

- I think I started singing my first American folk songs when I was around eight.

- [David] Oh, okay.

- Nine years old?

- Were your parents musical?

- Both of my parents played.

You know guitar is a folk music instrument in northern Germany where my parents were from, so my mom had a guitar, my dad had a guitar, and we didn't have a T.V.

set at home, so what happened of course in the evenings before we went to bed, our parents would sing with us.

And that was just a normal way of life.

Mom was a Kindergarten teacher, so she had a song for like anything and everywhere we went.

(David laughs) While we were shopping, and cooking and doing the household - Picking berries in the woods.

- Everything.

- She had songs for everything, so for us it was normal to relate life with songs as children, and these were all German folks songs, because our parents were from Germany.

- Uh, huh.

- So, Uwe was born in Germany, and then I was born right after they moved.

So we were actually foreigners, you know, immigrants in Switzerland.

And due to the German history, you know, it was difficult to sing in high German.

It's a different language than Swiss German.

The people would instantly recognize you as a German.

And so singing German folk songs wasn't really that well respected.

- It was so close to the war.

- So close.

And so.

And we wouldn't sing Swiss German folk songs at home because that was the... - Because my parents wouldn't understand anymore.

- Wouldn't understand it.

- It was a language they wouldn't understand.

The difference between Swiss German and high German is like between Dutch and English.

- [David] Wow.

- You know, it is quite.

- [David] So the American music was kind of a melting ground or a common.

- Yes, so American music became sort of the neutral ground for us.

You know, we as children would start singing American folks songs, people were okay with it.

So we always related the American folk music to a place that's beautiful.

You know, good people.

And we dreamed about being part of that.

- You know by the time I was 13 and Jens was 11, we had our first paying gig, - And then didn't you go out on the street after that?

- [Uwe] Oh, that was way after that.

I was 18 and Jens was 16.

- [Jens] Well, I was 16.

Yeah, we left home and we became street musicians.

Which was very convenient, because, you know, we could make money on the streets, we could live, which was nice.

And we traveled around Europe and got to see all the cities and met a lot of great people.

Actually, looking back, I thought it was a very good time to actually see the world without borders a little bit.

You know?

- Mm, hmm.

- Because as a street musician, you, I mean in those days, you know, of course, we didn't have insurance, we didn't have anything.

I mean, we literally just lived from the daily money we made.

- How long did you do that?

- Two years.

- Oh!

- What was really amazing is when we can here to America, we finally met Doc, who was always one of our heroes.

And we discovered, we never really talked much about his street musician thing.

We read about it, but then, when we started talking about it, we found this common ground there with him, because once you're a street musician, there's only one way to go, is really up.

(David laughs) - And he was never ashamed of it.

- [Jens] No, no.

We're not ashamed.

I think we never was because on the street in 1980 actually, a year after we had been on the street, CBS saw us and they gave us a record contract back then.

(David laughs) Actually they produced and then it made us this.

I mean we were these kids, and you know, we were actually well-liked and we had quite a following.

We got a manager and they put us a tour.

And we didn't like that as much as being street musicians, actually, because all of a sudden there were these people again that told us what to do, what to record, what to wear.

- [David] Responsibilities.

And as we were free before that, and so actually we went back to the streets.

- So just walk us through how you actually came, and then ended up living in Wilkesboro, North Carolina?

- We were invited by MerleFest, the big festival here in Wilkesboro.

- That was '97.

- '97 we played.

And we were not expecting to have a return invitation, you know.

We just came and had a good time, you know.

And then actually something interesting happened.

We had written a lot of music in Europe that wasn't that popular music when we played it.

We never played it actually, because we played more traditional folk music and bluegrass music, but music that, you know, we had, that had no room, all of a sudden we played some in America and people said, "Oh, what was that?"

And I said, "Well, it's our old music."

And then people said, "Well, that's what we like.

We like that music."

And so wow, there's a place where people like actually the music we write, and so we started to realize that we could, you know, develop that and be ourselves over here, pretty much.

- And so when did you actually move?

- In 2002, Uwe did move and I moved in 2003, with my family.

Packed up everything and came here.

- If somebody says, "What kind of music do you play?"

what do you tell them?

- I pretty much tell them we play folk music, in a sense, because we play folk music instruments, but we write our own music, which is very influenced by classical music, by song writing, and it's not, you know, necessarily bluegrass really, because we're, we don't have high, lonesome voices.

We don't have the mandolin.

We don't have the fiddle.

We sit.

You know, it's not really a bluegrass band, but... - That has reasons, in Bill Monroe telling my brother to come up with his own type of music, and Doc Watson telling us to keep on going the way we were going.

- Be true to what you're doing.

- We were encouraged by our heroes to do this, and they made a lot of sense.

By not repeating what people have already done, America gave us a chance to reinvent ourselves, and, therefore, actually contribute to the society, to the music, to the culture, instead of just following.

- "Carolina in the Fall," how did that one come about.

- So I had an idea for this thing and I showed it to Jens, and I said "I don't want to do this because it's way too personal, you know.

It wasn't much, but then we put it back together and Jens insisted on recording it.

- Well, it was, you know, we were here in the fall before we went home, and we were at Robert's place, you know, here, friends of us, you know, that our host family here.

And we started writing, you know, the chorus together and had a few things, you know, together, and then went home.

We had a few more ideas and then we were in the studio and finished it off.

It was one of these songs were we all thought, well, this is really from the heart.

This is really how we feel and Uwe can sing this will all his heart.

And, you know, sometimes as musicians, you know, you sing songs they have no relevance to you.

And today we're in the lucky position where we don't have to do that anymore.

You know, we pretty much have all songs that really are relevant to us.

They really tell stories of what we see and what we feel.

And, I think, "Carolina in the Fall" is one of these, you know, pieces, that, uh.

When we wrote it, we knew it is a nice song.

We just hope that people are going to like it.

("Carolina in the Fall" by The Kruger Brothers) ♪ All the places I have been to ♪ All the things that I have seen ♪ Since I left my home to wander ♪ When I was just fifteen ♪ Oh, the travelin' was easy ♪ Still sometimes the road got rough ♪ And by the time that I turned thirty-five ♪ I thought I'd seen enough ♪ But for me to settle down a while ♪ Was not what God had planned ♪ So one more time I left my home ♪ With my suitcase in my hand ♪ And the journey took me far and wide ♪ Across the deep blue sea ♪ And now I know since I've been there ♪ Where I was meant to be ♪ And I've seen sunsets on the ocean ♪ I've seen the desert bloom ♪ Drove the endless highways ♪ Beneath the prairie moon ♪ Yet the picture in the mind I see ♪ When I think about it all ♪ Is the color of the leaves ♪ In Carolina in the Fall.

♪ Now for thirty years I've sang the songs ♪ Doc has taught to me ♪ And the things that he would sing about ♪ I never dreamed I'd see ♪ In the hills of Carolina ♪ Folks have opened up the door ♪ For the first time in my life ♪ I'm not a stranger anymore ♪ And I've seen sunsets on the ocean ♪ I've seen the desert bloom ♪ Drove the endless highways ♪ Beneath the prairie moon ♪ Yet the picture in my mind I see ♪ When I think about it all ♪ Is the color of the leaves ♪ In Carolina in the Fall ♪ Yet the picture in my mind I see ♪ When I think about it all ♪ Is the color of the leaves ♪ In Carolina in the Fall - Joe, you're from New York City and you got to play with the great Milt Hinton, one of the people who's on more recordings than just about any other artist.

- Milt was absolutely a Godsend in my life.

I mean I had just met him when I started going to university my first year, and I'd joined the Jazz workshop, and I walked in the room and there he was, leading the Jazz workshop at Hunter College in New York.

- [David] Playing upright bass?

- Playing upright bass, yeah.

He just immediately took me under his wing and for the next 30-odd years, he became my mentor and my teacher.

What I learned from Milt, one of the best things I learned from Milt, was that music has no color, you know.

Everybody is a musician.

It doesn't matter if you're black or white or Indian or from whatever part of the world you're from, you know.

Music is the universal language, and everybody who makes music together there's no room for discrimination or anything like that.

- There's a lot of musicians watching this and I'm sure they would love to have some tips from you guys.

The one thing I would ask you, Jens, is how do you practice?

How would you suggest someone who wants to get something very complicated and beautiful like you're playing, how would you suggest they practice that?

- I found for me it helps me a lot when I sing along with the melody while I play.

And while I play and actually sing along in my mind, I'm really with it, because I'm actually producing music.

And if I sing along, I can remember it all so much better.

Then, to be that much with your action you're doing is very draining, so after 10 minutes you can be really, really tired.

Or 20 minutes.

But in those 20 minutes you can do more than maybe eight hours of desperately trying to somehow conquer it, you know?

Then, there's a matter of trust, you know I think.

Then you start to know.

Oh, okay.

This is how it sounds when it sounds clean."

And then I can think the same cleanness faster and my body will then automatically just do it and there's a certain trust.

- Well, a lot of conscious intention?

- Yes, really, because then that needs stored.

It needs to be stored really well.

It's like a good picture.

- Oh, that's an interesting way to put it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

How about you?

- I just enjoy discovering the guitar as a texture delivery system, so to speak, where it's so easy just to lock into something and just keep on doing it throughout the whole song, but the guitar is endlessly pliable when it comes to all the different sounds you can get out of it.

You can just touch it some times and just make it whisper, and a second later you play a really loud chord.

And you can dampen the body of the guitar and make the guitar really small or just open it up and let it really glow.

- [David] Hmmm.

- And that's always been a big fun for me to provide some sort of texture between the bass and the banjo.

The banjo carrying the melody and the harmonic structure and the bass carrying harmonic structure and the rhythm in the bottom, for me to fill the middle of the frequency spectrum with the guitar is such a wonderful thing to do.

("Watches the Clouds Roll By" by The Kruger Brothers) ♪ The clover still glistens with morning dew ♪ His feet are all wet in his old leather shoes ♪ He's been fixing the fence since early this morn ♪ It's time for a coffee back home ♪ It's a beautiful day with plenty to do ♪ All is the same and everything's new ♪ He takes off his cap, looks up to the sky ♪ Watches the clouds roll by ♪ Her shift has just ended at the all-night cafe ♪ She takes off her apron and calls it a day ♪ I'll see you tomorrow, it's time to go home ♪ She steps out the back door alone ♪ On a Tuesday night in the middle of June ♪ She stops by the roadside to gaze at the moon ♪ Hears off in the distance a whippoorwill cry ♪ Watches the clouds roll by ♪ His textbooks are covered with things that he draws ♪ While the teacher expounds about natural laws ♪ He's trying to wipe off all the blue on his hand ♪ From the ink of the pen that he wrote ♪ In the last 30 minutes the words that were said ♪ Never quite seemed to make it inside of his head ♪ So he looks out the window, lets his dream fly ♪ Watches the clouds roll by ♪ Fly ♪ Nothin' remains in this world forever ♪ We are all just passin' by ♪ Sharin' our time for a few precious moments ♪ And then we move on like the clouds in the sky ♪ He brushes the leaves off an old mossy stone ♪ Spends a few moments with an old friend alone ♪ Sits down on the stump of an old Cypress tree ♪ And cleans out the bowl of his pipe ♪ Shadows are rushin' through fields that lie bare ♪ There's so many stories by no one to share ♪ Takes off his hat, looks up to the sky ♪ Just watches the clouds roll by ♪ Hmmmm mmmm mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm - When I listened to Doc Watson's music, I always thought there was somebody that was not lying to me.

- Mm, hmmm.

I know.

- And so when I came here, I was terribly afraid that everything that he sang about would be not right.

- Not right delivery.

- It would be wrong.

I was reluctant to come here because I was afraid my dream would be destroyed.

But I actually came here.

And because I had learned Doc Watson's music, I actually understood what people were talking about.

It really is the music from here, about here, from the heart from here.

And so that gives us the strength to be from where we are from.

("The Cuckoo") ♪ There's just one thing that's been a puzzle ♪ Since the day that time began ♪ Man's love for his woman ♪ And her sweet love for him ♪ Whoa, the cuckoo, she's a pretty bird ♪ And she warbles as she flies ♪ But she never hollers coo-coo ♪ 'til the fourth day of July ♪ Gonna build me a log cabin ♪ On a mountain so high, ♪ And I can see ol' Willy, ♪ As she goes rattlin' on by.

♪ Oh, the cuckoo, she's a pretty bird, ♪ And she warbles as she flies; ♪ But she never hollers coo-coo ♪ 'til the fourth day of July - [Announcer] "David Holt's State of Music" is available on DVD.

Music from the program is available on CD.

To order, visit shoppbs.org or call 1-800-PLAY PBS.

[slide whistle and spring boing] ♪