Gotcher attention?

For many years, I ran a folk concert series where I worked. Every once in awhile, I'd book a bluegrass group and I couldn't help but notice that half my regular audience didn't show, and half the audience was people I rarely saw at the series. They'd come because it was a bluegrass band.

At one of the bluegrass concerts, I talked about the fact that half the audience had come just because it was a bluegrass band and wouldn't come again until I booked another bluegrass band.) I asked them if that was the case, to talk to me after the concert and tell me why they didn't come to the folk concerts. Several of them stopped to talk as they were leaving, and the most common comments were that they didn't want to spend an evening listening to someone sitting in a chair, playing guitar and singing protest songs. I thought that was a rather bizarre perception of folk singers, and argued that only a very small percentage of folk songs are "protest" songs. I think that image comes from the 60's, where so many songs written at that time were tied to a movement... anti-war, civil rights, women's rights.. If you listen to the anthology of American Folk Music, or thumb your way through Allan Lomax's books on folk songs, "protest" songs are in the real minority (even counting Down On Penny's Farm, Farm Land Blues and similar songs as "protest" songs.) But, I was speaking to deaf ears. As far as they were concerned, folk singers sit around and bitch to guitar accompaniment.

(I noticed in another recent thread that a Catter commented that most folk songs are political... NOT)

This being Mudcat, someone can flip the title of this thread and make it Why Folk Musicians Don't Like Bluegrass.

But that's another topic.

I know that there aren't a lot of bluegrass fans in the Cat, 'cept for Martin Gibson and a handful of others. But, any comments are welcome.

Does this count as an American thread, Martin? :-)

Jerry