31 Dec 2024 Five-Oh-Ones to Watch 2025: Aaron Farris

Posted at 6:42 PMh in Five-Oh-Ones to Watch by

By Dwain Hebda

Every day, Aaron Farris performs magic for a living. As music teacher for grades kindergarten through fifth at Chicot Elementary in Conway, his brand is less the rabbit-out-of-a-hat variety as it is unlocking the beauty and artistry of music for his young charges. 

Photo by Mike Kemp

“It’s pretty cool,” he says of his day job. “It really is a lot of fun. What’s neat to see with those guys is to them it’s still like magic. We blow into this instrument and it makes this sound; we strum these strings and it makes this sound. And not only does it do that, but they can learn how to do it too. They can learn how to make that sound. They’re like, whoa, that’s awesome.”

Outside of school, Farris applies the same principles to his other profession, as a performer and advocate of the Americana roots music bluegrass. He’s a driving force behind the art form, from hosting open jams in the community to performing with the band The Gravel Yard, through which he gratifies current fans and turns on new ones to the genre.

“Bluegrass has been a predominantly white older-folks genre,” he said. “If we perform at a bluegrass festival, predominantly the audience is going to be older folks. But for whatever reason, bluegrass is making a comeback. It’s kind of taken a little bit of a hippie turn, and there are younger folks who are starting to hear this and wanting to learn how to do it.”

Bluegrass traces its roots to European settlers who brought their instruments and musical traditions to the mountains and hills of Arkansas, North and South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee and especially Kentucky, eventually to be known as the Bluegrass State, from which the musical category gets its name. These settlers and their descendants sang songs about their daily existence on themes of love, loss and times both hard and fine. 

According to the Bluegrass Heritage Foundation, the point where modern bluegrass first came into its own is a matter of opinion. Some say it is thanks to Bill Monroe’s appearance at the Grand Ole Opry in 1939 that did it; others say it was Earl Scruggs, who got his start in Monroe’s band where his three-finger picking style on the banjo brought audiences to their feet.

Whoever started it, the art form was all around Farris as he was growing up in Mountain View, arguably the state’s hotbed for Ozark roots music, which still celebrates folk and bluegrass. Not that the youngster really paid much attention to it at the time. 

“When I was young, I wasn’t really into music, other than being the drum major in high school and stuff like that for the band,” he said. “A lot of people associate me playing bluegrass with being from Mountain View, but I actually didn’t start that until much later.” Little did Farris know that bluegrass was lying in wait for him when he arrived at Lyon College in Batesville with no real idea what he wanted to study. A survey class in music changed all that.

“I got into a music class and it was a lot of fun. It was tons of fun,” he said. “In college a lot of my friends were playing acoustic guitar and stuff like that, and I got into the bluegrass genre through those friends.

“I was like, I’ve been around this my whole life. I should really learn how to do it, which is what they were saying. They’re like, ‘Man, you’re from up there. You should know how to do this.’ When I started playing with them I had a group of guys and they were like, we need a banjo player. And I was like, I’ll try it. I was actually pretty good at it naturally, and it just kind of took off from there.”

Farris said what sets the musical genre apart for him is the team element where each person in the ensemble has an equal load to carry.

“Of all the music I’ve played, bluegrass is the most fun because it’s so technical, and it’s so fast. It’s challenging,” he said. “In a rock band or in a marching band, the percussion section carries the rhythm and everybody else plays over it. In bluegrass, everyone’s responsible for the rhythm simultaneously. Everybody has their own rhythmic element that they have to add in and if one of them is out, it won’t sound right. It all fits together like a puzzle. 

“On top of that, you get to sing; you can sing lead, you can sing harmony or you can sing all of the above. It’s the ultimate team activity, I guess.”

In addition to guitar and banjo, Farris is accomplished on standup bass and mandolin, as well as trumpet from back in his school band days. He’s also currently learning the fiddle, which he calls the hardest of all the instruments he’s mastered so far. 

Back at Chicot, Farris is also behind a new program to teach the art form to a new generation of students, bringing a new genre to students of color, who have traditionally been underrepresented in bluegrass. 

“I applied and received a grant to teach my students here in an afterschool program,” he said. “We slowly started bringing in instruments thanks to lots of donations from the community, which brings that magic I talked about. A lot of these kids are not familiar with this type of music, but when you start doing it, they’re like, ‘This is really cool.’ It’s really fun to see that.”

Dwain Hebda
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