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TRADITIONS IN BLUEGRASS
By John Uhl
Bluegrass entered the popular imagination about four decades ago, when the first bluegrass song to hit #1 on the country charts was the theme to THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES, "The Ballad of Jed Clampett," performed by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. Broadcast on CBS in the fall of 1962, it was probably most Americans' first exposure to bluegrass. Aware of this to some degree, Scruggs's wife and manager, Louise, had approached the project with skepticism, not wanting to promulgate a hick-music stereotype. According to Earl, they changed their minds when they realized "it would be about hillbillies, but common-sense hillbillies." Nevertheless, this show and others on CBS (GREEN ACRES, PETTICOAT JUNCTION, and HEE HAW!) cemented an association between bluegrass and an exaggerated kind of backwoods yokel.
In 1924, the NATIONAL BARN DANCE radio program debuted on WLS in Chicago to provide country music for rural and urban listeners who had recently moved to the city. WLS' sponsor, Sears, Roebuck, complained about the show's "disgraceful lowbrow music" until it became obvious that the program was immensely popular. A year later, a station in Nashville, WSM, convinced WLS' announcer, George D. Hay (Judge Hay), to work for their Saturday night BARN DANCE radio show. Judge Hay would later dub WSM's program the GRAND OLE OPRY. These shows reached millions of homes across the eastern half of the continent, their popularity coalescing into what was arguably rural America's first attempt at self-expression on a national scale. This fledgling community soon gave way to country music's first bona fide star, Jimmie Rodgers, who made his initial recordings in 1927 in a warehouse in Bristol, Tennessee.
Bill Monroe and his brother Charlie got their start as dancers on Chicago's WLS BARN DANCE. Soon Bill and Charlie were known around the Southeast as the Monroe Brothers, a couple of fast-pickin', high-singin', professional musicians with an affection for flashy white suits and derby hats. By 1939, the Monroe Brothers had broken up and Bill had a new band, the Blue Grass Boys, which he auditioned for an appearance on the GRAND OLE OPRY. Judge Hay later recalled their audition performance as "a sample of folk music 'as she should be sung and played,'" a quote that belies Hay's belief in the OPRY's duty to present "authentic hill-country music."
By the 1930s, country musicians had long since been incorporating nontraditional elements into their sound. At the time, Hawaiian-style steel guitar (a predecessor of the pedal steel guitar now commonly associated with country music) was all the rage, working its way into the music of everyone from Bing Crosby to Duke Ellington. Jimmie Rogers often recorded with steel guitar. Rogers was also fond of Dixieland horn arrangements, and in 1930 he recorded with Louis Armstrong.
Ironically, it was during the 1950s and '60s, when Nashville was pumping out slick, production-heavy pop tunes by the likes of Patsy Cline, that bluegrass truly blossomed, in no small part thanks to a great segment of the country music audience that wasn't so keen on pop radio, fans who craved music with that old-time feel. Former members of the Blue Grass Boys had gone on to start their own bands: Jimmy Martin, Don Reno, Sonny Osbourne, and, most notably, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, who had their own radio show on WSM in 1953 and, in 1956, joined the cast of the OPRY stage show. In the meantime, the Stanley Brothers and Jim and Jesse McReynolds had begun to emulate Bill Monroe's sound (which initially perturbed Mr. Monroe to no end). The first of many bluegrass festivals was held in 1965. Two years later, in Bean Blossom, Indiana, Monroe started his own annual festival, which continues to this day.
Certainly, this is what Judge Hay saw in Monroe at that prophetic prewar audition: an individual who not only embodied his vision of what country music should be but also had the potential to secure that tradition, or at least a part of it. As Hay once said, "Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys are true representatives of our show," the OPRY, which Hay's voice adorned for 25 years. Today, bluegrass sounds so "traditional" that television programs and movies, like BONNIE & CLYDE or O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? use the music to summon the spirit of historical eras that predated it.
Top banner photos: Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, and the Three Pickers (Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, and Ricky Skaggs). |
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Ricky Skaggs had already performed with bluegrass giants Bill Monroe and the Stanley Brothers by the age of 10. |
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The dobro, an acoustic guitar commonly used in bluegrass music, has a metal resonator. |
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