There is another important component to the definition of bluegrass that has not been mentioned yet, and in many ways it defines the genre today.

Bluegrass is much more than just about music. Bluegrass is really a lifestyle. It's about hundreds of annual music festivals around the U.S. and other countries, about jam sessions in people's living rooms and back yards, internet discussion lists, folksy local newsletters and national magazines like "Bluegrass Unlimited," taking up an instrument as an adult, camping out on a mountainside farm with 10,000 other "pickers," participating in a music for all ages, and bonding with a circle of similar-minded family-oriented "bluegrassers."

Some of the best music of all is the field-picking at the campsites. If you go to a festival, you will find jam sessions everywhere, at all hours around the clock. And you will hear instrumentalists, vocalists and harmony as good as or better than that on stage. Quite often, stage performers join in the field-picking after their show. Bluegrass performers are accessible off-stage, unlike performers of many other kinds of music. They sit at their booths selling recordings and talking to the fans after a performance. Many of them pick all night in the field, unless their bus whisks them off to the next concert stop.

It's a music genres where young, old, and everyone in between are evident and welcome. The old-timers welcome new listeners and pickers, eager to draw youth into the culture of this music they love, to keep the music alive and growing. It's a genre where young people dazzle listeners with flash and energy, while also respecting and learning from the musicianship and traditions of the older musicians. Groups like Nickel Creek and Yonder Mountain String Band perform on the same stage as Ralph Stanley and Del McCoury. Families attend the festivals with babies and grandparents. Teens form their own "sessions" and play music all night, as do their pickin' parents!

Many folks go to listen and eventually end up participating. It's very much a participative sport, and often people are surprised to find themselves taking up one of the traditional bluegrass instruments as an adult. It's the kind of acoustic music where beginners can easily join in, yet virtuosos abound.

Folks who meet at a bluegrass festival become like family. They return each year to meet and greet people from all over the country, and friendships flourish along with the music. We have good friends in all the northeastern states and Canadian Maritime Provinces, people we met camping at bluegrass festivals. It's a joyful reunion each year when we see them again during the summer and share a few days of music. We're like a roving band of musical nomads, forming our little RV cities in a different state each weekend, setting up the grills, tuning up the instruments, renewing the ties that bind us to each other and the music, and finding new friends and new songs.

There are bluegrassers (like us) who take their vacation time in long weekends, hoarding the precious days so they can go to a festival every weekend during the warm months. There are others who plan a vacation around a special, distant festival, such as Jekyll Island New Year's Bluegrass Festival in Georgia or Telluride in June in Colorado.

It's more than just music; it's a lifestyle.

Sorry for being so wordy. I take my bluegrass seriously.