Guest wrote:

>I have always found it interesting that bluegrass is one of the most
>important musical developments in the US to emerge from that era,
>yet we don't tend to look at why that particular music offshoot took
>off and captured the musical imaginations of so many Americans who
>had lived through the Great Depression and the war. I'm far more
>interested in that aspect of the music than it's 'origins', which I
>really don't care much about at all.

Thanks for a really interesting thread, Guest.

This article in The Washington Post a while back highlights the major
influence Louise Scruggs, Earl's show booker, business manager and
wife (for 58 years now) has had on the popularity of the genre -
although, interestingly, she always avoided calling it 'bluegrass'.

>> It was Louise who played the crucial role in seeing that Earl's
music reached wider and wider audiences. She wasn't satisfied
with the typical gig in the early days (maybe a one-night stand at
a drive-in movie theater). She pushed until Flatt & Scruggs had
a weekly television show featuring their own music and such
guests as Mother Maybelle Carter and a 7-year-old Ricky Skaggs;
toured university campuses and the Newport Folk Festival; and
contributed to the prime-time comedy of "The Beverly Hillbillies"
and the soundtrack of "Bonnie and Clyde." Most of those settings
were groundbreaking for country music of any stripe, let alone for
its tradition-minded bluegrass wing. >snip>

One of Louise's early insights, long before terms like "branding"
were being bandied about in the music business, was the importance
of positioning the act for broadest impact and growing respect.

"I always called it country; never anything else," Louise explains,
"because if you put things in a corner, you sometimes can't get
out of it. And you couldn't get a bluegrass record programmed
on the radio. By the '60s, they had signs up in radio stations that
said, 'No bluegrass allowed!' " >>

Paul Castle
The Rosinators

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