What Is Bluegrass, Anyway?

EDITOR'S NOTE: Re-upping this piece from November 3, 2017.

It's a question that has perplexed even veteran bluegrass artists, with the possible exception of Bill Monroe, who fathered the genre; a question revisited so often that, in bluegrass circles, it has its own acronym -- WIBA.

What is bluegrass, anyway?

You'll never hear the same answer twice.

Even I, in the relatively-short lifespan of this blog, have suggested different answers.

It might seem strange, but I was pushed to solidify my position on this issue after viewing a superb documentary called "How Britain Got the Blues", which I wrote about here.

The parallels between the way the Mississippi Delta blues gained popularity with British middle class kids in the 50s and the way American college kids embraced traditional bluegrass music just a few years later are striking: White kids, middle class, well-educated, on the liberal end of the socio-political spectrum, with a healthy respect for the original artists, a profound understanding that they had nothing in common with the life experiences of those artists, and the steadfast refusal to act as though they did.

Fast forward to 1996, and award-winning "bluegrass" wunderkind, Alison Krauss, interviewed by Jim Macnie for Rolling Stone in January of 1996.

"You and your band have changed some perceptions about what bluegrass can be and what country is," Macnie observes. 

Krauss: "I think whatever we have slipped by somebody is great. [Laughs.]"

It's hard not to think of Led Zeppelin, who have been sued more than once for ripping off traditional blues artists, and have demonstrated only the most flippant regard for the consequences of their actions. It's interesting to note that Krauss and Zeppelin's Robert Plant were romantically linked for years.

Could it be that what bluegrass is, has do to with morals and ethics?

For me, the answer is definitive: It's how you -- as a fan, promoter, journalist, DJ, publicist, record company exec, or artist -- treat the art and culture of people who have almost nothing but their art and culture to mark their place in the world.

It's whether you seek to redefine or replace that art and culture to entertain privileged, white audiences while reinforcing the idea that they and you are preserving an artistic and cultural expression that is both cutting-edge and authentic.

But, it's the 21st century! If you don't do bluegrass the way everyone else is doing it, how can you do it at all?

Theologian, Eugene Peterson, suggested a better way when he wrote, "The poor are not a problem to be solved, but a people to join."

Regardless of what their belief systems may have been, both Mike Seeger and his half-brother, Pete, exemplified this mindset in the way they collected, distributed, performed, and promoted American vernacular music, and the way they respected its original artists.

Sadly, though there are those who hold similar views today, they lack the prevailing influence on the culture that the the entire Seeger family had. Today's amateur musicologists look to American Idol and Madison Avenue for their promotional strategies, scorning preservation as drudgery, and an impossible task, besides.

If, as many bluegrass traditionalists claim, bluegrass music is dying, it's because the vast majority of "bluegrassers" don't believe they have a moral imperative not to kill it.

The Crooked Gospel Way

 Gospel music has always been a part of bluegrass music and culture; Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass, designed it that way. “It’s got Methodist, Baptist, and Holiness singing,” Monroe said of bluegrass, naming three Christian denominations with three then-distinct singing styles.

Anyone who has an inside knowledge of bluegrass can point to artists, past and present, whose sanctimonious public personas hardly match up to their hell-raising, sometimes addicted, sometimes downright mean private selves.

Some people would like to use that knowledge an excuse to jettison gospel music from bluegrass altogether. After all, if these artists are in such bondage to their socially-conservative culture, shouldn’t we free them — and non-Christian bluegrass fans in the process — from it?

Sure, if you think they’re so ignorant, culturally-unaware, and disempowered that they need you to come in and improve their culture for them.

For those who are still in school learning about these things, that’s called cultural imperialism. It’s just as ugly when upper-middle class white Americans force it on working-class, Appalachian southerners as when the American government forces it on, say, Native Americans.

That said, bluegrass gospel music will be a regular feature here on Uncouth Utterance. Doubtless that will irritate the stuffing out of some of you.

I’m fine with that. Cultural imperialism? Not so much.

This is a very early recording of The Louvin Brothers from a live, local radio show with “The Gospel Way”.

Phony

Source: Amazon

I've been sharing some hardcore bluegrass and country music on Twitter this week. I guess you could say I've been in a mood. But, then, nothing gets me in a mood like the suggestion that soulless, inauthentic tripe is the real, musical deal.

Somebody read my piece on post-millennial music, and decided that it meant I was endorsing, nay, obsessed with that granny in gangsta drag, Jay Z, and his perennially spread-thighed consort.

Ahem!

Years ago, Mrs. Carter appeared on some stage where someone was strumming a mandolin. This, um, effort launched a media frenzy in which it was declared that the first lady of Autotune could now add "bluegrass singer" to her list of presumed accomplishments.

She has since been crowned queen of something or other, because nothing says regal like nylons under a bathing suit.

As for Mr. Carter, whose admiration of "breastesses" renders him as sexually interesting as a full diaper, he is no more a musician than he is a sex god. Like his wife, he has coasted to artistic credibility on the notion that mere proximity to something true, real, and wildly creative (in this case, The Beatles) grants him equal musical status.

It does not.

Talent is a gift. Sweat is a must if you want to develop it. The Carters have neither. And, they don't have the class or the dignity to do anything but steal from someone who does.

Wanna thunder at me about racism? Do your worst, but know this: I spent my childhood in the free states watching black entertainment, sports, and political figures get to the top and do it right.

When these two cheap, sequined thugs have the talent of a Smokey Robinson or an Aretha Franklin, the political will of a Martin Luther King or an Eleanor Holmes Norton, the grace and athleticism of a Debi Thomas or an Edwin Moses, you won't have to tout them, because I'll know.

And, so will everybody else.

Next up: Madonna? Are You Kidding? I've Never Talked To Madonna. Oh, wait! It's basically the same article with different identifying characteristics, and a penultimate paragraph which mentions Eleanor Parker, Joanne Woodward, Kathryn Grayson, Shirley Bassey, Ann Miller, and Cyd Charisse.

In other words, trash comes in every color.

This Is Why We Can't Have Bluegrass Things

I'm supposed to write an arresting opening line here -- one that grabs your attention, and sets the tone for the piece.

But, I am just. so. tired. 

You know, the kind of tired you get when you read self-important drool from what amounts to a major media outlet in your particular small pond. 

I'm speaking of this piece on rock's allegedly uneasy alliance with bluegrass and country music, over on the, um, "Bluegrass" Situation. The inspiration for the piece? "West Coast rockers", The Flying Burrito Brothers, and their groundbreaking album, The Gilded Palace Of Sin.

Uneasy alliance?

Who cares that bluegrass is as much about history as it is future?

Who cares about the rebellious, countercultural energy of bluegrass' first generation when you believe that bluegrass begins with a rapacious suburbanite from Champaign, Illinois? (Long hair, warp speed, hotshot instrumentalists, the high lonesome sound, the sketchy personal lives -- bluegrass wasn't exactly yer grandpa's sleepy string band)

And who cares if that selfsame major media outlet takes the name of bluegrass in vain, just to sell itself "as the authentic expression of a brand-name musical genre with considerable cachet" as I wrote here?

Some megachurch baby has a point to make, and he's gonna make it.

Let's sort this out, shall we?

Just how unlikely would it have been for a bunch of California hippies to ally themselves with country and bluegrass music?

Never mind the huge number of boomers and 1960s kids whose parents played bluegrass and country, live or via radio and records, in their homes. Never mind that this population included not only native southerners, but those who had taken the Hillbilly Highway in search of work. Never mind the bluegrass  versions of songs about that very phenomenon -- "California Cottonfields", "One More Dollar", and "Waitin' For the Hard Times To Go".


Let's instead focus on that most obscure and academic of cultural indicators -- television. 😂😂😂

How antagonistic were them librul hippies to country and bluegrass?

So much so that country and bluegrass artists The Carter Family, Flatt and Scruggs, Doc Watson, The Dillards, and Johnny Cash appeared on the beatnik showcase, Hootenanny. Premiere date? April, 1963.

So much so that country and bluegrass artists as diverse as Watson, Cash, The Stanley Brothers, Cousin Emmy, and The New Lost City Ramblers appeared and jammed with noted union supporter, Pete Seeger, on Seeger's Rainbow Quest TV show. Premiere date? 1965.

So much so that rockers like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Linda Ronstadt -- the last three based in California -- appeared and jammed with country star, Johnny Cash, on his eponymous TV show. Premiere date? June 7, 1969.

For the sake of chronology, let's review the release date for The Flying Burrito Brothers' The Gilded Palace Of Sin:

How easy was that?

I guess you have to know history to Google it.

You should be required to know history before you're  hired to write about it.

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.

Singing Someone Else's Song

It all started with this piece in  The Guardian -- "We Need To Talk About Cultural Appropriation: Why Lionel Shriver's Speech Touched A Nerve".

Unaccountably and instantly, some 15 years after I'd last heard it, this piece came to mind.

In the days I spent tracking down a decent version of it on YouTube, I found a tweet linking to another immensely-gratifying read -- one from the Smithsonian entitled Keeping the Blues Alive. This, too, addresses cultural appropriation, an idea that I first encountered on Tumblr because, you know, I'm a baby boomer.

Between the Smithsonian and The Guardian, I learned something: If social media is the first place you read about a social justice issue, get thee to a library -- or start following accounts whose printed output can be found in libraries. College sophomores and their hive-minded professors are not your best sources, and only real reading of real writing will adequately school you.

Armed with a far more nuanced understanding of cultural appropriation than I'd had previously, I dove into the first two parts of Mike Oldfield's symphonic rock masterpiece, Incantations.

I waited 24 minutes and 39 seconds to get to the part I remembered -- "The Song of Hiawatha". It's based on just a smidgen of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha, and, while it doesn't seem particularly offensive or patronizing, it certainly doesn't encourage Indians to speak for themselves.

Ultimately, that's the problem with cultural appropriation: It hands the microphone to those demographic groups with loud voices and disposable income -- moneyed whites, in other words. Inevitably, these folks get bored just as they get to the place in the story where the cool, brown people's problems get thorny and "impossible" to solve.

Today's purveyors of media and popular art know this. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow did not. Nor did Mike Oldfield and the splendid players and singers he assembled to perform this piece.

You may feel differently, but given what the creators knew and when they knew it, I can listen to Incantations and enjoy it. In the back of my mind, though, I'll always wonder what I'm missing.

Here's Mike Oldfield with Parts 1 and 2 of Incantations. Steeleye Span's Maddy Prior sings "The Song of Hiawatha at 24:39.