Great discussion here.I didn't mean to imply that Doc Watson or Bob Dylan couldn't play bluegrass or even that they never had. I just meant that they aren't primarily regarded as bluegrass musicians and probably wouldn't prefer representing themselves as bluegrass musicians. I think they both might feel that the characterization is too limiting.
Lots of musicians who might not choose to be classified as bluegrass musicians have or had the ability to play bluegrass music. Jerry Garcia comes to mind. He loved bluegrass music and the “Bluegrass Reunion” recordings he made with Red Allen are still among my favorite. Still, Garcia is not primarily regarded as a bluegrass musician. Peter, Paul and Mary are not regarded as bluegrass musicians and yet they loved the music and certainly had the ability to play it—something I believe they were wont to do after hours.
At the risk of making this post way to long, I'd like to include an excerpt from Robert Cantwell's groundbreaking book, Bluegrass Breakdown. Cantwell is one of the first to apply real scholarship to a discussion of bluegrass music.
Twenty years ago Alan Lomax called bluegrass music “folk music in overdrive,” lighting upon a metaphor perfectly suited to the spirit in which Monroe, who once compared playing to putting a motor together, approaches his music. Lomax's brief essay in Esquire magazine, which initiated the intellectual discussion of bluegrass music, is worth quoting at length. “Out of the torrent of folk music that is the backbone of the record business today,” he wrote in 1959, “the freshest sound comes from the so-called bluegrass band—a sort of mountain Dixieland combo in which the five-string banjo, America's only indigenous folk instrument, carries the lead like a hot clarinet.” Taking up the jazz analogy, he goes on:Cantwell goes on to catch Lomax's error in claiming the banjo is indigenous to America and then talks about Ralph Rinzler's role in showcasing Monroe's music. Many in this discussion probably already own or have read Cantwell's book but I thought it was worth the reference for those who may be new to the discussion.The mandolin plays bursts reminiscent of jazz trumpet choruses; a heavily bowed fiddle supplies trombone-like hoedown solos; while a framed guitar and slapped bass make up the rhythm section. Everything goes at top volume, with harmonized choruses behind a lead singer who hollers in the high, lonesome style beloved in the American backwoods. The result is folkmusic in overdrive with a silvery, rippling, pinging sound; the State Department should note that for virtuosity, fire and speed our best Bluegrass bands can match any Slavic folk orchestra.Lomax's brief dispatch from Greenwich Village, written to sophisticated readers at a time when the tiny, politically-inspired folksong revival of the fifties was swiftly growing into a national fad, was designed to secure a place for bluegrass music in the new movement by testifying to its authenticity, while defeating the prejudices against hillbilly music inevitable in the minds of a generation still digging Gerry Mulligan, Thelonius Monk, and Dave Brubeck. “While the aging voices along Tin Pan Alley grow every day more querulous,” he wrote, “and jazzmen wander through the harmonic jungles of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, grass-roots guitar and banjo-pickers are playing on the heartstrings of America.” Lomax spoke with impeccable authority and with memorable succinctness and imagination. “Entirely on its own,” he assured his readers, bluegrass was “turning back to the great heritage of older tunes that our ancestors brought into the mountains before the American Revolution”:A century of isolation in the lonesome hollows of the Appalachians gave them time to combine strains from Scottish and English folksongs and to produce a vigorous pioneer music of their own. The hot Negro square-dance fiddle went early up the creek-bed roads into the hills; then in the mid-nineteenth century came the five-string banjo; early in the twentieth century the guitar was absorbed into the developing tradition. By the time folksong collectors headed into the mountains looking for ancient ballads, they found a husky, hard-to-kill musical culture as well. Finally, railroads and highways snaked into the backwoods, and mountain folk moved out into urban, industrialized, shook-up America....Though its origins were in ancient folk traditions, bluegrass was nevertheless strikingly novel and as thoroughly professional as any modern music. “Bluegrass began in 1945,” Lomax observed, when Bill Monroe recruited a “brilliantly orchestrated” hillbilly quintet which contrasted sharply with the “originally crude” hillbilly orchestras that developed, Lomax suggests, in response to the presence of radio microphones. Monroe led the group with a mandolin and “a countertenor voice that hits high notes with the impact of a Louis Armstrong trumpet,” singing and playing the “old time mountain tunes” which in twenty years of professional music hillbilly musicians had largely abandoned. “By now,” Lomax concluded, “there has grown up a generation of hillbilly musicians who can play anything in any key,” with a revolutionary new music which is “the first clear-cut orchestral style to appear in the British-American folk tradition in five hundred years.”Dicho, I checked out the article and it, indeed, has a lot of substance. I must take issue, though, with the author's statement that bluegrass music preceded country music. Country music was in full commercial swing well before bluegrass came to be.
- Mark