Cherry Lou says:
> I'm on digest so I'm kinda jumping in on the tail end of the whole
> bluegrass hack band stealing jobs from the real guys thing, but it strikes
> me as incredibly distasteful. Should there be a bluegrass INS to keep all
> those outsiders from stealing jobs from our boys? Begin the
> thinning of the herd!! Christ, and people ask me why we (tmp) don't play
> bluegrass festivals. Because no one in any seedy rock club in America is
> going to judge whether we're fit to represent a entire genre. Why are
> people in the bluegrass clique so defensive and insular?
Who said anything about outsiders? Some of the worst examples I've seen are
insiders - like bands with guys in them who promote festivals, and swap out
time on their stages to play on the stages of festivals promoted by other
guys who are in bands. In fact all of the examples I can think of fall more
into that category.
> I hate to be all hippie, but isn't music supposed to be unifying and all
> that? What the hell is with all this snide divisive shit? Let damn Darius
> Rucker play the mandolin fer chrissakes. It's an instrument, not the holy
> grail.
I think it's great for Darius Rucker to talk about liking bluegrass, play
the mandolin (which is as much a country and country-rock instrument as a
bluegrass one, anyhow), and so on. I've been out arguing that The Mountain
is a bluegrass album since long before it came out (Ronnie: "he knows it
not easy to play, and it's not an easy thing to sing"). Maybe I'm insular
about bluegrass compared to some folks, but I'm a lot more relaxed about a
lot of the bluegrass boundaries than a lot of others. I don't think
bluegrass is a matter of lists of forbidden and required instruments, for
instance. But I do think that skill and craft are every bit as much a part
of bluegrass as the more-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder soul and feeling.
Monroe was emphatic about it; he told Gordon Terry, who played fiddle on
"Christmas Time's A Coming," that if he didn't play it just like Tex Logan
(who wrote it), why, he'd have Tex come in and record it - and that's just
one example. Talk to Blue Grass Boys and they'll tell you all kinds of
stuff about his musical demands. Jimmy Martin was the same way. Ralph
expects you to be able to play your instrument to be a Clinch Mountain Boy.
Different kinds of music have different values in different proportions -
I'm not proposing this as an assertion of bluegrass's superiority - and I
think bluegrass values that kind of stuff, bluegrass as it was created and
developed by great musicians who put in just as much hard work as they did
feeling and spontaneity.
That's the short answer.
Jon Weisberger, Kenton County, KY [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://home.fuse.net/jonweisberger
