Bluegrass, oh yes, Bluegrass me boys!
When people talk of music they like to refer to certain music as being "cult" movements. That is a style of music which has never (or rarely) broke into the mainstream, but which has maintained a long devoted group of followers whose very lives may revolve around the style and who can tell each other from miles away, like a secret handshake. And various genre fit neatly into this definition - krautrock, hardcore punk, cajun music, prog rock, The Grateful Dead in themselves and so on so forth. But reigning king (and certainly the longest lived) among these is Bluegrass. Perhaps nothing sums it up better than this:
There is a misconception in this post-"Oh Brother Where Art Thou" world that bluegrass and hillbilly music or old-timey music are almost synonymous, which is simply not true. Bluegrass originated in the late 1940's, post-World War II and could perhaps be seen as an evolution of hillbilly music. It took bluegrass to a new level of technical proficiency - a level of musicianship which is perhaps as technical as rural music gets.
Bluegrass is unsually in that, much like DJ Kool Herc with Hip-Hop, its creator can be narrowed down one individual - Bill Monroe.
Now, it would daft to say that Bill Monroe was WHOLLY responsible for bluegrass or that it came fully formed from him - but it almost did.
Bill Monroe started his career long before he became known as the "Father of Bluegrass" - at first in a duet with his brother Charlie. Here's a recording from the mid-1930's of them playing the classic "Banks of the Ohio":
There style at this point was basically like a more religious version of the Delmore Brothers - although Bill's mandolin playing was already reaching a high level of technical skill. In 1939, he put together the first incarnation of the Bluegrass boys, the band's name later giving the genre its name.
Perhaps it's best I now list what Bluegrass actually is and why it's different from old-timey music. As the sound of Bill Monroe's band evolved over the years from 1939 to 1945, eventually a set instrumental template came to rise. The classic bluegrass line-up is guitar, banjo, fiddle, double bass and, often, mandolin. This differs from the hillbilly line-up mainly due to the double bass, but essentially it's quite similar. It's the means of playing that makes the main difference - rather than the synchronised group playing of the old string bands, the various instrumentalists take it in turns to play the melody and variations of the melody up front as the lead instrument - as a musical form, it's very show-offy and perhaps slightly indulgent, but usually its so jaw-dropping you don't care. And the key thing is that essentially anyone can sit in a bluegrass jam and take a round with their instrument - take a look at this video of 59 people playing the bluegrass anthem, "Foggy Mountain Breakdown":
The actual position of Bluegrass music at its origin is somewhat confusing - on the one hand it was a reaction against the heavily eletric country music styles of the time, such as honky-tonk and western swing, with the bluegras boys being entirely acoustic based. On the other hand, there is often noted to be a jazz influence on Bluegrass, with the soloing concept being the most obvious example of this. Although later Bluegrass musicians would occassionally include jazz standards in their repetoires, Bill Monroe never did as far as I know. Still, the music was obviously more modernised than he would probably have liked to admit.
Bill Monroe's most famous song and biggest hit - and one of the few times Bluegrass cut the mainstream - is undoubtably "Blue Moon of Kentucky". The song is probably most famous for having been the first song ever recorded by Elvis Presley (that fella!), but the original's no slouch, from 1946:
In 1945, Bill Monroe made what is perhaps his second-most important contribution to Bluegrass after inventing it - he hired Earl Scruggs as his banjo player.
It's not really possible to put in words how important Earl Scruggs is: almost inarguably the most popular and famous Bluegrass musician of all time, he almost single-handedly revolutionised the banjo.
Before Earl Scruggs hit the scene, the banjo had rarely been used since the end of the 1920's. It was seen as a twee, old-fashioned instrument played by old men on porch swings. Although Snuffy Jenkins was a precursor - and Don Reno developed a similar style around the same time - Earl Scruggs took the banjo away from the old frailing, clawhammer and 2-finger picking techniques that had been popular with hillbilly musicians and string bands in the 1920's and created the 3-Finger Scruggs style, which favour melodic innovation in the form of rapidly played "rolls" involving long series of stacatto notes played really, really, REALLY freaking fast. This pretty much sums the man up:
Since then, pretty much every Bluegrass band has included this style and Earl Scruggs (who's still alive, in a first for this blog) remains as popular as ever to this day.
Presumably realising the potential of Scruggs as a star vehicle, Earl Scruggs and fellow Bluegrass boy Lester Flatt split off and formed The Foggy Mountain Boys.
They were perhaps the most successful Bluegrass group of all time, although it must be said that they were not as much a full-on Bluegrass bands as their predecessors or followers - presumably realising where their key selling point was, Scruggs's banjo playing (and occasional guitar playing) pretty much takes the main lead position with only the fiddle playing as another lead. I must say, I've never been terribly impressed with Lester Flatt's guitar playing - he pretty much does nothing other than play rhythm and his singing is often a bit too maudlin for my tastes. Still, it doesn't really matter when you take into account that their band was perhaps the loudest, wildest, fastest music ever produced. Oh yes. In 1949, Earl Scruggs wrote "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" the most well-known Bluegrass banjo composition of all time. I've already posted it twice on this post, but I have to post the original for consistency:
After this, Bluegrass began to take off like a shot, with groups like the Stanley Brothers (the first band to imitate the Monroe bluegrass style and determine that the style actually existed), Reno & Smiley, Jim & Jesse and more kicked off.
The Stanley Brothers have probably remained the most consistently popular over the years and particularly recently due to their inclusion in the "O Brother" soundtrack. Here's a playing of the traditional "It Takes A Worried Man" from Pete Seeger's TV show:
With the rise of Rock & Roll, Bluegrass, like all country music, faded from popularity. Except that it didn't really - it merely changed hands.
In the late 1950's and early 1960's, the Folk Revival happened and suddenly guys like Bill Monroe, Ralph Stanley and Earl Scruggs were being heralded heroes by a different institution altogether. The actual designation of Bluegrass as "Folk Music" is rather ambiguous. Certainly in the early days of Bluegrass, traditional songs were not that common, even if they did pop up occasionally. But as Bluegrass started being heralded as "folk music" rather than "country music", old-time songs started to feature much more prominently and new bluegrass bands started to focus almost exclusively on them.
Another innovation in the late 50's and early 60's was the rise to prominence of the guitar - since guitars were all the rage in the other forms of pop music, I suppose it made sense for the new generation to bring it up from merely being a rhythm instrument into a lead instrument. The Bluegrass picking style was quite different from earlier forms, though - although influenced by both jazz guitar and the bluesier stylings of honky-tonk, the main focus of Bluegras guitar was recreating fiddle tunes in a flat-picking note-based format. Perhaps the first person to do this was Joe Maphis in the late 1950's. Take a listen to this 1958 or so recording of the fiddle tune "Fire on the Mountain", here called "Fire on the Strings" (be warned, this is perhaps the most insane and fast guitar playing ever recorded...Joe Satriani and his ilk would burst into tears trying to play this):
For a better example of his insane ability to play pretty much every stringed instrument under the sun - and play them better than pretty much anyone else - take a look at this:
So yeah - that's Bluegrass! It's still a massively popular underground music form and one of the great American musical institutions. Of course, due to the influence of the likes of "Deliverence" and the "Beverly Hillbillies", it's become a bit associated with hickishness and down-home simplicity. But don't be fooled - it's one of the great virtuoso genres and worth dipping your feet into...
