Bluegrass vs. Blahgrass

EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece was originally published on January 25, 2014.

Before I turned my back on the naysayers and self-conscious, middle-class climbers around me to embrace bluegrass music, I was a classical flautist and singer. I played for 22 years, sang for 16 before I burned out on music altogether.

I fell in love again when the bluegrass bug bit, almost 10 years ago now. I wrote reviews and commentary on bluegrass music and culture until just a few years ago, when some serious diagnoses prompted me to turn my attention to caring for my family.

Even now, because of my musical background, musicians come to me for advice. Recent queries have come from pickers with a problem that, I think, may be unique to bluegrass music: Veteran musicians, raised in Appalachia on traditional bluegrass music, hired by bands outside Appalachia, are being told that they just aren’t meshing with the other pickers.

“We’re authentic,” these bands tell their errant members. "Our instruments are made of wood and stuff. We knew Bill Monroe. We play bluegrass. And our audience knows bluegrass music."

Sitting in the echo chamber day in and day out, these Appalachian pickers begin to believe what they’re told. Maybe they’re just following the money. Maybe they can’t tell the difference between sincere admiration and cynical exploitation of their culture by rootless city dwellers who have no culture to call their own. But bluegrass?

I listen to a clip like the one below, and I beg to differ with those citified gatekeepers:

You don’t play for a knowledgeable audience steeped in bluegrass culture. You play for an audience that shares your commitment to eradicating those folkways that embarrass you. You play for an audience who, like you, believes it is entitled to disrupt and dismantle any culture whose socioeconomic profile offends you; to, in fact, shame it out of existence and re-appropriate it as your own – as long as you share, ostensibly, the skin color of that culture’s originators.

You don’t play bluegrass. You play whitewashed, self-congratulatory, fin de siecle slop, palming it off on an equally self-congratulatory – and proportionately-ignorant – audience by selling it as the authentic expression of a brand-name musical genre with considerable cachet.

Case in point: This mercilessly-suburbanized version of Bill Monroe’s great "Sitting Alone In the Moonlight” sounds as if somebody slipped Morticia Addams a couple of Xanax and a pitcher of diet Cosmos.

To those bluegrass pickers suffering from alleged cognitive dissonance, I say this: If the people you’re picking with sound like this bunch when you dream of sounding like this or, well, you know, this, there’s your trouble.