Bluegrass Breakdown "The Making of the Old Southern Sound"
by Robert A Cantwell 1984 (A Short Review)Recommended by Mark Clark, a Mudcat member.

This is not an easy book, nor one that can be taken lightly. Bluegrass Breakdown "The Making of the Old Southern Sound" is an insightful tour de force of the world of bluegrass music.

The writing style is deep and probing with terse metaphors and an intellectual grasp of Bluegrass and its leader, Bill Monroe. It begins with Monroe and works back to the minstrel roots and origins using florid images to carry the reader along the journey.

The problem and strength of "Bluegrass Breakdown" is Cantwell's writing style. For the average bluegrasser, you may wade Cripple Creek but "Cripple Creek is muddy and Cripple Creek is deep-" be forewarned, if this analogy to Cantwell puzzles you, then reading the book will leave you, well puzzled…if you can manage to finish it.

Even though Cantwell knows his bluegrass, it ain't easy to figure the man. His tangents and sweeping forays into other realms of the arts (Benton's artwork or Cooleridge or Beethoven) or areas leave me astonished. There are some great glimpses and brilliant lines but there are just as many flights of fantasy which must be read two or three times with bewilderment.

"There ain't no notes on a banjo, you just pick it," is something I understand. Now here's a typical line from Cantwell:

"In a traditional culture, and in other finds of communities such as the family in which beliefs, values, ideas, attitudes, practices, and experiences are conscientiously preserved and shared, in which the individual, perhaps, has neither the opportunity, the necessity, nor the means to formulate his own private and independent sense of life, the artist expresses, in a sense, the imagination of the community as a whole, its sense of life: a condition to which the modern individual artist can only aspire."

Get what I mean, Vern. After reading stuff like this a few times you just have to move on and look at the pictures!

It's not like the whole book is esoteric, just about one third of it. The guy is a genius but his writing style can get heavy. For those who want to delve into the deep- you're not going to find a better or more insightful book on bluegrass, for those who like it easy- all I can say is, "the only song that I can sing is bile dem cabbage down."

-Richie