The Country/Bluegrass Concerts of the Redlands Community Church Choir

 

During the '90's (11 years until 2001), Michael Roy and the RCC choir virtually invented this mixed-bag idiom of choral music: authentic bluegrass, country, mountain, and rural church gospel, with a full-fledged versatile chorale, able to sing any choral idiom, as the primary performing group. The bluegrass string band is there to perform instrumental selections, but mainly to accompany the chorale.

 

In these eleven years, the RCC Choir did 9 full production C/B concerts, each one taking 3 months to rehearse. Rehearsals began before Labor Day, and continued into Nov. They were always in the fall, and the only two they missed were the fall of '92: the church was still in ruins due to Hurricane Andrew (August 22, 1992); and the fall of 2001, just weeks before it all ended for the choir series and Michael Roy's tenure at RCC.  One more C/B was given by the Redland Singers in 2002.  Then the mantle was picked up by the Immanuel Singers in 2004, and they, under MR's direction, gave four more C/B's.  Not one of these 14 concerts failed to fill the house. 

 

Below are selections from these initial nine concerts: never before in this area had such diverse elements been paired as to have a well-trained, multi-idiomatic choir side-by-side with a five-string banjo, string bass, acoustic guitar, and fiddle.  The string band even allowed Diane to join in on the pi-ana...due to her extensive experience in playing related idioms: Southern Gospel, revival-time church styles, "old-timey" gospel.  She disturbed nary a note of purist bluegrass grinnin' and pickin'.