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TRADITIONS IN BLUEGRASS
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Much of bluegrass' lyrical content is traditional, or at least written with the spirit of tradition in mind. Which is to say that most bluegrass songs evoke an idealized sense of family and the old-time country home place, as in "My Cabin in Caroline" by Flatt & Scruggs:
Someday she'll be my wife
And we'll live a happy life
In a cabin in the hills of Caroline.
In BLUEGRASS: A HISTORY, Neil V. Rosenberg refers to this quality of the music in terms of what D. K. Wilgus calls the "urban hillbilly" -- the social dilemma of rural southerners who have recently moved to the city: "Instead of dealing directly with the problems of urban life, bluegrass responds to them by offering contrasting themes and tunes from down home, this happier, simpler existence."
In this sense, bluegrass becomes a kind of antimetaphor to combat the travails of modern-day life, the bucolic charm of the family farm reminiscence canceling out the newfound alienation of the city, a nearly voodooish hex that is often augmented by the persistent use of religious material in which the singer promises a heavenly form of restitution ("I've gained the reward of the land where we never shall die").
Yet the use of fictionalized symbolism to distract from everyday reality is, if nothing else, indicative of more deep-seated issues at play. Consider the titles of a few Bill Monroe songs: "I'm on My Way to the Old Home," "It's Mighty Dark to Travel," "Heavy Traffic Ahead," "The Dead March," and "On and On" (with its telling opening lines, "Traveling down this long lonesome highway/I'm so lonesome I could cry"). One gets the distinct impression that Monroe's running from something. As the first title indicates, one way to regard all this journeying is as a quest to find that old home or the feeling of belonging that such a place inspires, and in this way the man-on-the-run metaphor denotes the displacement experienced by a generation of so-called urban hillbillies. And though each of these songs was written by Monroe, they were all no doubt composed to recall, if not rearticulate, the themes of traditional songs like "Long Journey Home," which predate 20th-century urbanization and probably tap into much older feelings of restlessness, perhaps those of the ancestors who first migrated to America. In this sense, then, the songs are about an eternal pursuit, a search for the Holy Grail, some greater truth or meaning.
Literally, the singer is often in pursuit of a wayward lover or running from a bad breakup, which seems to connect the music's skepticism of an urbanizing America with the complicated nature of romantic commitment. This probably has something to do with all the songs about settling down with a good woman and having the kinfolks over for supper -- the naïve dream of a song like "My Cabin in Caroline," in which the male singer practically locks his bride up in some mountaintop shanty, no doubt to keep her put so the two of them can raise a family like they're supposed to. Just as the sound of bluegrass is intent on preserving a sense of musical tradition, so too do the lyrics of certain songs, such as Monroe's oft-rendered "The Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake," bear out the continuance of a patriarchal social paradigm that is at least partially responsible for bluegrass being an almost exclusively male-practiced music.
More recently, an era of political "equality" has helped facilitate the success of bluegrass's first significant female musician, Alison Krauss, whose popularity in the 1990s was so immense, in fact, that she almost single-handedly kept the word "bluegrass" an essential part of the country music vocabulary. In any case, it's not a fear of change or the shaking up of the social order, per se, that's implicit in the allusions of this music as much as a fear of something else, something darker that is invoked whenever such paradigms shift.
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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