A form of string-band and vocal music with strong ties to Southern folk music traditions. It emerged within country music in the 1940s. Embraced in the late 1950s by folk-music enthusiasts who saw it as modern Southern mountain folkmusic, it was the focus of a revival movement beginning in the mid-1960s that stimulated the rise of bluegrass festivals, clubs, magazines, and related businesses. Now well established as a music culture, bluegrass can be found in a range of contexts extending from full-time international commercial enterprise in the domain of popular culture to part-time local grass-roots involvement in the domain of folk culture. Bluegrass takes its name from the band of its principal architect, Bill Monroe. A member of the influential Grand Ole Opry radio show on WSM in Nashville, Tennessee, since 1939, Kentuckian Monroe assembled a particularly influential version of his Blue Grass Boys in the years following World War II. It included mandolinist and tenor singer Monroe; guitarist and lead singer Lester Flatt, banjoist Earl Scruggs, fiddler Chubby Wise, and bassist Howard Watts (“Cedric Rainwater”). The copying of the instrumental and vocal styles, and the repertoire, of this band of self-accompanied vocalists initiated the development of bluegrass as a musical genre. Today the music is perceived as the result of the intention of Monroe, and of those musicians who played with or emulated him, to modernize the Southeastern string-band folk-music traditions that were known as “old-time” music (although this term is used in other parts of North America to refer to many different local, regional, and ethnic folk traditions). The primary instruments—fiddle, guitar, five-string banjo, mandolin, and bass—as well as the repertoire and melodic structures of bluegrass reflect a continuity with this past. So does the strong insistence by bluegrass musicians that the instruments used be acoustic rather than electric. Modernization, then, occurred in the realm of what might best be termed “arrangement,” as bluegrass developed its own musical rules and traditions concerning the roles of individual musicians in producing its sounds. Considerable emphasis is placed in bluegrass vocals upon the singing of harmony parts, and a number of intricate patterns of harmonic arrangement have become accepted as part of the traditions of the music. Instruments are used to support vocals and provide musical interludes between periods of singing, as in many other contemporary popular forms. But the role of instruments in bluegrass reflects the high proportion of instrumental pieces in the repertoire and a concomitant expectation of instrumental virtuosity. This is accentuated by a stress on speed: Most bluegrass performances are at a brisk tempo that is particularly noticeable in those items of the repertoire that come from other music cultures. Also stressed is the choice of keys for singing that place the singers’ voices in high pitches. Bluegrass listeners often pay as much attention to the musical textures (high-pitched vocal harmonies, dense instrumental patterns) and the instrumental interludes in vocal pieces as to the words themselves. The bluegrass repertoire has, in its general profile, remained remarkably constant. Newly composed pieces alternate with older songs taken from popular sources, particularly country music, and from the oral traditions of the performers. Secular love and story songs (often with duet or trio refrains), gospel songs (generally sung by quartets), and instrumental pieces (usually featuring fiddle, banjo, and mandolin soloing in the jazz mode) all follow the same source patterns. While full-time professional groups are expected to create new and distinctive repertoires, the part-time followers of the music, who constitute the majority of those involved with it, typically perform a repertoire of songs and tunes based on the most popular items in the repertoires of the early influential bands—like “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” by Flatt and Scruggs, “Little Cabin Home on the Hill” by Bill Monroe, “Rank Strangers” by the Stanley Brothers, and “Love Please Come Home” by Reno and Smiley—and the many others more popular in recent times. As is frequently the case with folk traditions of many kinds, the origins and histories of specific items are often not known fully (if at all), and this information may not be considered very important. At the hundreds of annual bluegrass festivals and similar events, informal jam sessions attract as much attention as formal performances on stage. In these sessions, the familiar repertoire facilitates music making between both friends and strangers. In its early years, bluegrass was most popular with rural working-class people from the southern Appalachians and other parts of the Upland South. Its popularity within the folk-music revival of the 1950s and 1960s attracted middleclass youth from outside that region. The bluegrass revival and the growth of festivals in the 1960s and 1970s broadened the audience still further. In the 1990s, bluegrass bands could be found in many parts of Europe and in Japan, New Zealand, and Australia. Like jazz, it is recognized as a musical genre that is characteristically American but also accessible to adventurous musicians from other cultures. And as with jazz and other established musical genres, it has developed its own politics of style, with various combinations of repertoire and performance practices described as “traditional,” “progressive,” “newgrass,” “new acoustic,” and so forth. Until the late 1980s, all of the influential bluegrass musicians were men. By 1990 a growing number of influential women stars were altering that pattern, following the success of singer and fiddler Alison Krauss and her band Union Station. Although bluegrass repertoire and musical style reflect the influences of African American music, there are few Black bluegrass musicians. Neil V.Rosenberg
References
Cantwell, Robert. 1984. Bluegrass Breakdown. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1985. Bluegrass: A History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. See also Banjo; Country Music; Fiddle Music; Monroe, Bill; Revivalism