Jordan Riehm was shocked to hear his name announced as the winner of the 2022 Kentucky State Bluegrass Banjo Championship after not expecting to place at all.
“I was hopeful, but when third place and second place were called, the hope meter went down,” said Riehm, a multi-instrumentalist and bluegrass musician from Bowling Green. “When they called my name I shouted loud as hell and ran down to the stage. I was so happy.”
Riehm has performed all across the country and has been teaching the genre for over 10 years.
Since he was a child, he’s had a love for music. He said he first fell in love with music when his mother would sing him a James Taylor song to help him fall asleep at night.
Growing up, Riehm said his family loved taking road trips to his grandmother’s house in Prestonsburg and singing together on the way there.
“I don’t remember a lot of my childhood, but I know that music has always been important in my family,” Riehm said.
His journey with playing music began when he was a child. He said his first instrument was the violin, but once his father passed away, he decided he didn’t want to play anymore and picked up the guitar instead.
Riehm said he always had a love for acoustic music and the straightforward, honest nature of it.
Jordan Riehm gives a banjo lesson to one of his students, Dillon Meador, on Thursday, Feb. 8. Jordan has been teaching at the Bowling Green Rock Band Academy for over two years. He provides lessons on various string instruments for students ranging from 7 to 60 years old.
“There’s not a bunch of plugins and not a bunch of effects,” Riehm said. “You just get your instrument and play.”
Riehm said he was first introduced to the bluegrass genre while attending the 2012 Romp Festival, a yearly festival where bluegrass bands and musicians meet to perform at Yellow Creek Park in Owensboro.
“I heard someone playing the banjo, and I got high on bluegrass,” Riehm said. “I bought a banjo the very next week.”
According to the Bluegrass Heritage Foundation, Bill Monroe, a native to rural Kentucky, is popularly remembered as the father of bluegrass music. His biggest influence was his friend Arnold Shultz, a popular Black guitar player that performed around the town Monroe grew up in. The name “bluegrass” is derived from Monroe’s band, Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys. The band is credited for creating a new style of traditional country music, according to the foundation.
Monroe incorporated many different musical genres into bluegrass such as stringed music, Black gospel, Black laborer work songs, country and blues music. The traditional bluegrass band would consist of five members playing bass, mandolin, banjo, guitar and fiddle.
This Kentucky-founded genre is now performed all around the world. According to the foundation, the Bluegrass Music Association claims members in all 50 states and in 30 other countries.
Jordan Riehm works inside his bedroom and recording studio on Thursday, Feb. 29. Riehm works for Tunefox, a company which produces video tutorials for playing various songs.
Riehm is a bluegrass music teacher at the Bowling Green Rock Band Academy. He teaches a variety of stringed instruments to people of all ages.
“I’ve got, like, a 7-year-old learning the fiddle and people in their 50s or 60s learning banjo or mandolin,” Riehm said. “The demographic is all over the place for sure.”
Riehm said that working at the academy has been fulfilling for him and is more special than the other places he’s taught at.
“There’s just a lot of love that radiates from that place,” Riehm said. “There’s been several parents that have said things like, ‘My kid was getting bullied’ or something, or you know, ‘He was really withdrawn, and now he’s getting more confident.’”
Alongside the academy, Riehm also works for an online music teaching software called Tunefox. It primarily focuses on bluegrass and provides prerecorded lessons for students to improve their instrument playing skills.
When he’s not teaching, Riehm plays the banjo in a bluegrass band called Kentucky Shine. The band consists of five members and has performed at many venues, including the Bluegrass Hall of Fame Museum in Owensboro.
“The festival where I found out about bluegrass was sponsored by the museum, so playing there was like a big full circle moment for me,” Riehm said.
Instruments adorn the walls of a teaching studio in the Bowling Green Rock Band Academy on Thursday, Feb. 8.
Kentucky Shine was originally started by Steven Stewart, a fiddle and violin player from Leitchfield. He originally grew up performing classical violin before jumping into the bluegrass scene, which is where he met Riehm.
Before starting the band, Stewart said his and Riehm’s first performance together was at a bluegrass mass at a catholic church. Afterwards, Stewart asked Riehm if he wanted to be the banjo player in his new band.
“I noticed right off the bat that he was a very talented banjo player,” Stewart said. “He thought about music in a way that is rare in this area.”
When performing, Stewart said that Riehm is a musician whose emotions come through during his performances and practice sessions. He is very passionate about what he does, Stewart said.
Stewart said that in Kentucky, bluegrass is an easy genre of music to connect with because of its simple melodies that most anybody can learn within the first or second year of picking up an instrument.
Stewart said his favorite thing about bluegrass is the way the instruments on stage have parts of their own, and the ways they come together.
“Bluegrass makes something that is bigger than the individual instruments,” Stewart said.
Riehm has attributed much of his success to his girlfriend, Haley Edwards, a vocalist and poet attending the Master of Fine Arts graduate program at WKU.
Edwards said that she met Riehm one night when they were both performing at Tidball’s, a live music venue in Bowling Green. Once they started dating, they began performing together under the name Buzzard’s Roost.
“When two musicians start dating, they’re like, ‘Oh, we’re gonna start doing music together,’” Edwards said. “It doesn’t always work out for people, but it’s worked out pretty well for us.”
Edwards said that Riehm has such high levels of love and dedication for his craft.
“He practices more than anybody I’ve known to practice anything,” Edwards said. “For some people it feels like work, but for people like Jordan, it’s something he’d rather be doing than anything else.”
Edwards, who attends many of his shows, said that one of the most beautiful things about watching live bluegrass performances is how the players are always improvising when they are on stage.
The band could perform a song one hundred times or one thousand times, and it’s always going to sound different, Edwards said.
“You can tell Jordan surprises himself when something comes out in a way he’s never played before,” Edwards said. “He’ll laugh or he’ll nod his head, and he always has this big smile on his face when he’s playing.”
Riehm said that anyone wanting to learn how to play bluegrass music should understand that it’s important to never beat themselves up over making mistakes.
“The bluegrass community is so welcoming and so humble,” Riehm said. “If you can learn some basics of it, you’re ready to hop in and start jamming with people.”
In the future, Riehm’s biggest goal is to help Kentucky Shine perform on new, bigger stages. He also hopes to continue building his teaching career so he can help more students become successful musicians.
Riehm said that Edwards was the one who pushed him to attend the Kentucky State Bluegrass Banjo Championship after Riehm decided that he didn’t want to go. Winning the competition boosted his confidence as a banjo player and a teacher.
“It’s like, ‘Hey, I know I’m a pretty good player, but now I’ve got this award that says I’m a pretty good player,’” Riehm said.