Re: [ARSCLIST] Bluegrass

["Steven C. Barr" <stevenc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: Dick Spottswood
For everyone's elucidation, bluegrass is the name given to the branch of
country music that Bill Monroe created in the mid-1940s on Columbia records
& the Grand Ole Opry.  Normally the instrumental components include virtuoso
mandolin (a la Monroe), banjo (a la Earl Scruggs), fiddle, guitar and string
bass.   Vocally, voices are pitched high, and choruses are sung using
something close to hymnbook harmony.  Topically, the subjects stay close to
death, mother, Jesus, and dysfunctional love.  Sentiments of alienation from
home, God, a loved one etc. are common.
Artists closely associated with bluegrass since the 1940s include Bill
Monroe, Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs, the Stanley Brothers, Jim & Jesse, Mac
Wiseman, the Lewis Family (gospel), the Country Gentlemen, and  the Osborne
Brothers.  Current bluegrass (and near-to-bluegrass) acts include the Isaacs
(gospel), Ricky Skaggs, Alison Krauss, IIIrd Tyme Out, Blue Highway, Nickel
Creek, Rhonda Vincent.  Recently Dolly Parton has recorded memorably in the
bluegrass idiom.
Which is fine as far as it goes...but "bluegrass" was nothing more or less
than a term intended
to revitalize (and, by extension, increase the sales) of a genre which had
been around for years,
if not decades! Listen to any of the Gennett recordings of "folk" music
(other than commercial
artists such as Vernon Dklhart)...and tell me that isn't "bluegrass!"
...stevenc