Mark,

to say that Bill Monroe "considered himself a blues musician" is a little misleading. He ALSO considered himself a country musician, and a bluegrass musician.

I think it's equally wrong to overstate the African roots of Bluegrass as to ignore them. Clearly, there are blues and jazz elements: the soloing, the syncopation, the use of the banjo to name a few. But equally clearly, Bluegrass has roots in oldtime ballad singing, in white hymnody, and in English/Scottish/Irish instrumental music. The fact that Bill Monroe had a black mentor in itself doesn't mean that the black roots of his music were the most important; AP Carter had a black mentor as well (I think his name was Lesley Riddle), who went with him on his collecting trips, where they picked up songs almost entirely from white folks. Although Carter sang a lot of songs that were blues, the ensemble was definitely based in oldtime ballad singing and picking. And further, Bill Monroe's OTHER great musical mentor was his uncle, Pen Vandiver, who was a white fiddler.

The statement "It was the African Americans who began the fiddle traditions that were picked up by the 'old-timey' string bands to form one strand of the bluegrass influences" is also an oversimplification. The mere fact they were playing fiddles, mandolins, guitars, etc makes the European influences on these string bands clear. The further fact that they were often playing for white audiences made it necessary for them to play what whites wanted to hear.

"When we started out in the small town where I was born," Howard Armstrong remembers, "we mostly played for what we called the `good white people.' We'd serenade them, and they'd pay us with money and food."

What remained to be recorded of black string band tradition by the time collectors got to it suggested that Celtic music was indeed a strong influence, with tunes like "soldiers joy" and "give the fiddler a dram."

Most of the scholarship on black string bands supports the ideas that

1) Black slave musicians were intitially purposely trained by their masters in order to provide music that they, the masters, wanted to hear.

and

2) the string band tradition that developed out of this was a shared tradition with roots in both communities.

Here's a quote from the PBS website, which cites Charles Wolfe (a country, blues and bluegrass scholar).

DeFord [Bailey]'s family played tunes that were part of a rich tradition of string band playing shared by both blacks and whites in the early nineteenth century.

"White and blacks would be playing music and dancing at what you'd call a barn dance?you clean the ground off and put sawdust down on it and make it soft where you can dance. Well, they'd look out and see the Baileys and they'd say, ?Here come the Baileys, we'll turn the thing over to them. They would usually have a fiddle, guitar, banjo, harp, mandolin, and drums.?"

During slavery times, musicians were highly valued. In fact, many slaves were sent to New Orleans to train on the fiddle in order to entertain at plantation dances. After emancipation, many of these fiddle players kept their instruments and developed their own playing styles. DeFord's grandfather, Lewis Bailey, was one of these musicians. He was a champion fiddle player, considered "the best in Smith County." DeFord learned much of his style and repertoire from the early influences of his grandfather.

This style of music, which DeFord later called black hillbilly music, started to fade in the 1920's when the record companies came south to record traditional music. For marketing purposes, the record companies segregated music into white and black series. They believed white people would buy only country music performed by white musicians and that black people would buy only blues and gospel music performed by black musicians.

What makes Bluegrass different from Celtic music is primarily the influence of African American musical forms. But what makes it similar is the direct impact of the "Scotch-Irish," and as others have pointed out, English, Welsh, etc, who joined them.