Bluegrass music

Bluegrass is a style of American string-band music that developed in the 1940s from the band of the Kentucky musician Bill Monroe, and takes its name from his group, the Blue Grass Boys.^[1:1][2:1] Its best-known traits include:

• an acoustic ensemble drawn from fiddle, mandolin, guitar, resophonic guitar, bass and banjo played in Scruggs style;
• harmony singing in two to four parts;
• partly improvised instrumental solos;
• a driving "boom-chick" rhythm.

Scholars note that no checklist of these features captures every recording accepted as bluegrass.^[1:2]

From the time it emerged, bluegrass has been commercial music and yet closely bound up with ideas of tradition. The folklorist Neil Rosenberg called it a good example of the ways of tradition in mass culture, since the style was defined by its performers rather than by scholars.^[2:2]

Defining the genre

Joti Rockwell argues that bluegrass is not a category that music enters by meeting a fixed set of conditions. Instead, musicians and audiences continually negotiate it by reference to prototypical performances. For some, these are first-generation bands; for others, later groups or studio projects. Many recordings regarded as central fail a strict definition: Bill Monroe's best-known recording of "Blue Moon of Kentucky" (1954), for example, has no banjo. As a result the term means different things in different times and places.^[1:2]

Origins

Monroe drew on several sources in shaping his band's sound:

• the old-time fiddle music of his uncle Pen Vandiver;
• the country blues of the African American guitarist and fiddler Arnold Schultz;
• the singing of Baptist and Methodist churches in western Kentucky;
• popular music heard on the radio.

His 1940s tent show band could cover the whole range of tent-show entertainment, from old-time fiddling and novelty banjo to brother-duet singing, gospel quartets and blues.^[1:1] In the 1930s Monroe and his brother Charlie had been one of many guitar-and-mandolin "brother acts" whose harmony singing anticipated bluegrass.^[3:1]

Although bluegrass is now strongly associated with the five-string banjo, Monroe's first Blue Grass Boys (1939–1940) had none; he called the banjo "about the fifth child that was born to bluegrass". Earl Scruggs, who joined in 1945, brought a three-finger banjo style that soon threatened to become the music's prime characteristic.^[4:1] The banjo had been a Black folk instrument of African origin before the minstrel stage popularized it in the 1840s. Southern folk musicians kept the older minstrel style, now called clawhammer, long after it faded from the stage.^[5:1]

Monroe's band of 1945–1948, with Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, Chubby Wise and Cedric Rainwater, developed a new "sound". Its instrumentalists took turns at solos while the rest of the band supplied rhythmic and melodic backing. Rosenberg dates the shift from this one band's sound to a shared style to the Stanley Brothers' 1948 recording of "Molly and Tenbrooks". It was learned from Monroe's live shows and copied his band's arrangement. By 1949 three bands playing the style were recording for major labels.^[2:1]

Musical style

Instruments and ensemble roles

L. Mayne Smith described the bluegrass ensemble in terms of three roles:

• a lead part carrying the melody;
• one or more instruments that back the lead with contrasting figures without overshadowing it;
• a steady, sharply accented rhythmic and harmonic base.

Each instrument takes all three roles at times, but the fiddle, banjo and dobro are primarily lead instruments.^[6:1] Mandolin players accompany with muted, percussive hits on the backbeat. Fiddlers imitate these with a short offbeat "chop". In 1966 the fiddler Richard Greene developed a more elaborate chop, which later spread far beyond bluegrass, into fiddling traditions around the North Atlantic, jazz and classical string teaching.^[7:1]

Harmony and vocal parts

Harmony singing in two, three and four parts is central to bluegrass. The parts are added to the melody in a fixed order:

• Lead: the melody.
• Tenor: almost always above the lead.
• Third: usually a baritone below both.
• Bass: the lowest part.

At most cadences the lead rests on the tonic, with the tenor a major third above and the baritone on the fifth below. The conventions are fixed enough that a good singer can usually join a song they have not heard before.^[6:2] In 1949 the Stanley Brothers varied the standard trio by adding an even higher third part, the "high baritone".^[8:1] Bluegrass voices are typically high-pitched and tense, and keys are chosen to pitch the voices as high as possible.^[6:3]

The instrumental harmony is simple. Most songs use the I, IV and V triads without sevenths; the most common progression is I–IV–I–V–I, and the relative minor is almost the only minor chord. Under melodies close to the pentatonic scale, the triad on the lowered seventh degree (♭VII) is added.^[6:4] Smith traces bluegrass part singing to shape-note polyphony, filtered through earlier hillbilly music and influenced by African American gospel singers.^[6:5] Bluegrass bands also borrowed repertoire and quartet singing styles from southern gospel.^[9:1]

Rhythm, meter and form

Bluegrass uses two basic meters: triple meter, more often for ballads and religious songs, and duple meter. As a whole it is faster than other hillbilly styles. Voices and lead instruments take turns at the melody, typically about eight times through a piece. Vocal solos carry the verses and harmony singing the choruses, and a performance usually lasts about two and a half minutes, a length probably fixed by 78 rpm records.^[6:3]

Instrumental breakdowns and fiddle tunes typically consist of two repeated eight-bar strains in AABB form. Musicians call tunes with extra or missing beats "crooked". Rockwell analyses crookedness as the disruption of an expected pulse, as in the extra beat in the second strain of Ralph Stanley's "Clinch Mountain Backstep".^[10:1] Compared with the older old-time music it grew from, bluegrass keeps some metrical irregularities and straightens others. Extra time is still often added between instrumental breaks and verses, but the faster tempos and larger ensembles make disruptions of the basic beat rare.^[10:2]

Tradition and the folk process

Bluegrass bands drew constantly on one another. Musicians moved often between a limited number of bands, carrying repertoire and techniques with them. Rosenberg describes this as "a kind of oral tradition within the style", in tension with the commercial need for original material.^[2:3]

Conservative audiences and imitative newer bands made bluegrass stand for tradition, even though it was a constantly changing commercial form. A successful performance of a traditional song keeps its familiar text and tune while adding a stylistic innovation. The Osborne Brothers, for example, gave the fast dance tune "Cripple Creek" a slow introduction in three-part harmony. Rosenberg calls this balance between conservatism and innovation a modern version of the folk performer's struggle to wed tradition and creativity.^[2:2]

Since the mid-1960s, weekend outdoor bluegrass festivals have been central to the music. On festival stages, local and regional bands often aim to reproduce a canon of earlier performances and recordings. The formal stage show is balanced by the informal jam session, in which musicians move in and out according to rules of etiquette. Drawing on earlier scholarship, John Bealle treats the contrast between the participatory jam and the stage show as display as fundamental to bluegrass.^[11:1]

Revival, media and later styles

Rock 'n' roll damaged bluegrass's commercial fortunes in the later 1950s. The folk revival then embraced it as folk music because:

• it avoided electric instruments;
• it recorded many traditional songs;
• its instrumental styles, above all Scruggs's banjo, were seen as exciting developments of folk styles.

From 1959 bands played folk festivals, colleges and coffee houses.^[2:4] From the early 1960s bluegrass, especially the banjo, also became a film and television soundtrack convention for chases, slapstick and rural themes. Its three best-selling records all came from soundtracks: "The Ballad of Jed Clampett" from The Beverly Hillbillies (1962), "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and "Dueling Banjos" in Deliverance (1972).^[12:1]

From the late 1960s new strains appeared:

• Progressive bluegrass: brought in contemporary songwriting and arranging while keeping traditional timbres and ensemble roles. It later became the template for mainstream bluegrass.
• Newgrass: dating from John Hartford's 1971 album Aereo-Plain, it added extended jams over vamps, new grooves and occasional odd meters.
• "Dawg" music: pioneered by David Grisman, it mixed bluegrass with swing, modal jazz and Gypsy jazz.^[1:3]

Wikidata: Q213714