At the end of each summer, sophomore David Bellet and his family throw a music night for their friends and families in Nashville to enjoy an evening of country, folk, and Americana before packing his bags to come back to school. 

“We park an old Ford outside of our tool shed, and our shed porch becomes a stage,” Bellet said. “We have a lot of families around us that love to play music, so they come over there once you start seeing back-to-school stuff in the stores. Everyone loves to have a little reset before the school year starts.”

For Bellet, the life of bluegrass and country isn’t only a Nashville phenomenon. It also has a place in Hillsdale for those who are open to new and good music. 

Between gigs with his bluegrass band, Theta Epsilon-sponsored events, singing in the Choral Scholars program, solo performances, or staircase jam sessions into the late night, Bellet said he takes every opportunity to bring music to campus and introduce new genres to friends who have never tried them before.

“Hopefully there’s a culture on campus that introduces you to everything all at once, so that you can figure out what genre you want to go to next, whether that’s country, or jazz, or something else,” Bellet said. 

A seasoned guitar player and singer, Bellet said that playing with friends is one of his favorite ways to jump between genres during jam sessions.

“When I’m jamming out in a band room with some guys we’ll be playing ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ and I immediately want to play some Chet Baker trumpet music; then all of a sudden one of my friends will join in with me on his trumpet, and it’s amazing to hear that,” Bellet said. “I don’t think there should be this barrier that keeps everyone confined to a simple and uniform genre.”

While he sometimes performs on his own around Hillsdale, Bellet also plays with his bluegrass band, Hillsgrass, which he began with friends spontaneously last year. The band experiments in mixing genres to produce their own unique covers of popular country, folk, and other songs.  

“I had some friends who wanted to stop using their violins and violas as just classical instruments but wanted to keep up good playing habits, so we eventually formed Hillsgrass,” Bellet said. “We try to blugrassify country songs to make them more palatable for those who don’t like country and for those who want to hear something peppy at a low-key event.”

The band features students on two fiddles, a banjo, a concertina, a cajón, and Bellet on the lead guitar. Hillgrass has played at gigs across town, including Rough Draft and Penny’s, according to Bellet.

Sophomore Lilly Faye Kraemer, a founding member of Hillsgrass, said Bellet’s musical intuition and teaching ability have helped both her and the band.

“Something I love about Dave’s musicianship is that he is very well-rounded in what he knows and how to play,” Kraemer said. “He’s very good at adapting to different levels of musicians and different styles.”

Bellet said while he is inspired by the musicians and different genres on campus, his primary musical influence is his family in Nashville — in particular, his mother, and brother Luke Bellet, who are both singer-songwriters of their own right.

“I grew up and immediately was integrated into a family of people that loved to play. I wanted to make the same sounds as they were making, because I loved the same music that they loved,” Bellet said. 

Sophomore Karol Schlueter, also a guitarist and singer in Hillsgrass, said he finds himself playing music across several genres with Bellet both in the band but also just for fun in their free time.

“We find ourselves playing a lot of quiet and sad songs with one another in the staircase when it’s almost midnight and we don’t want to wake up anyone sleeping,” Schlueter said. “It’s pretty fun because we always happen to choose really good music.”

Schlueter said Bellet has greatly influenced how he plays the guitar, including learning how to make chords on the fly and branch out into jazz guitar.

“Dave has a wide knowledge of how chords work, especially from jazz,” Schlueter said. “He encouraged me to start looking into jazz guitar, because he thinks it helps with general guitar knowledge. He was encouraging me to do that over the summer, and I did a little bit of it and need to do more, because it’s really good.”

Bellet said his ideal musical event on campus would comprise a songwriters circle, followed by an informal jam session, and then a prepared concert spanning multiple genres.

“The songwriters’ circle would be to ensure instead of having a formalized set of songs that you have to perform, people can rather have a sort of conversation between musicians and you can hear a lot of things that make you form other interests in other music genres, and it’s really eye-opening,” Bellet said. “Next, the jam session would have a set of songs that everyone can join in on, with a bunch of instruments. Then finally to top it off, ending the night with a really well-rounded concert, not limited to any one genre.”

Meshing multiple genres together can open students’ minds to other musical possibilities and have even more fun, Bellet said.

“Music’s not this sort of thing where you specialize and then you have to stay there, like a college major,” Bellet said. “It’s much more fluid and people should take advantage of the fact that we on campus have so much talent distributed over so many different genres, that people can learn to love switching between genres and just jamming out together.”