Dick: That has to be right. The "high lonesome sound" was Roscoe Holcomb, if I recall rightly. The disk with "Little Bessie." It don't come more "lonesome" than that!

I'm not sure I'd agree that Ginny and Tracy, or even Hazel, have a "pre-bluegrass" sound. They sound a lot more modern to me than either Monroe or the Stanleys. And although I'm a big fan of all those persons, those wild intervals get overworked after a while. I can't think of any traditional group that used them.

Can anyone identify what the characteristic dissonances in contemporary bluegrass are? I tried asking Ginny and Tracy about it in one of their workshops, and they couldn't say. They said the idea came from Ralph Stanley, but I can't really recall his using disonnances to anything like the same extent.