WHAT IS BLUEGRASS?
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A Historical and Practical Introduction to Bluegrass Music!
Just click on the menu options to find out more about any instrument's role in this music, and it's brief history!
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BLUEGRASS is a very specific kind of music invented by Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys. Though the term 'bluegrass' has now come to encompass the entire genre of acoustic old-time country, gospel, Appalachian and 'hillbilly' music, truly the term means a very precise ensemble, consisting of guitar, mandolin, fiddle, banjo, and upright bass. Traditional bluegrass groups sometimes added a dobro, and sometimes other instruments, but mostly that is what 'bluegrass' means.
The genre, 'Bluegrass', however, especially after the 'Brother, Where Art Thou' movie, now encompasses all of the mountain traditions that came well before bluegrass, as well as modern acoustic music and folk.
One of the early traditions now called 'bluegrass' or 'roots' music is called shape-note singing. Emigrants from Britain carried their Protestant hymnals with them, and liturgical composers born in the New World always went back to Europe for musical training, until a special school of composers developed in New England. The new school of composers wrote hymns using 'shape notes', which were assigned four different shapes, and, in their minds, simplified the complex European 7 note notation style. This new shape note music was taught in Singing Schools, and was the rage across the country in the mid 1800s. In Appalachia, the shape-note singing and singing schools were preserved culturally well into the 1900s, and greatly influenced the beginnings of country music, and the first commercial recordings often were taken or modified from many of the shape note hymnals. Many of those hymns, in turn, found their way back into oral tradition through recordings, and through the singing schools, and have emerged as 'traditional' hymns today in the post-O Brother 'roots' music craze (though most have known authors!)
At the same time as the first hymnals came across the sea from Europe, instruments were imported with the immigrants who wandered into this country -- mandolins, guitars, fiddles... Irish tunes and English ballads and hymns, African drums and banjar (on the slave ships)... The slaves attended great outdoor singings during The Great Awakening, a revival of church fervor in the mid-1800s along with white folks, and both populations picked up the lined-out verses to such hymns as 'Amazing Grace' The African-Americans developed an extended, melismatic, singing of a few words over a long period of time, and applied the hymns' melodies and words to their own African polyphonic singing style and rhythmic systems.
At the dawn of the recording era in the 1920s, the African-American and Scotch-Irish versions of religious music, as well as both cultures' renditions of dance tunes and ballads, blended to form an unrecognizable mess. The Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, and Louis Armstrong, among many others, performed hybridized music, borrowed from both cultures. The Monroe Brothers were one of the first groups to receive mass recognition for their bi-cultural music... and when Bill Monroe had a falling out with his brother, Monroe created a style of music that now is considered to be 'bluegrass.' At the same time, many other traditions were created, and all of them are now, however erroneously, considered to be 'bluegrass' as well (when marketed to a mass audience).
To make a much longer story short... 'bluegrass' music really stands for an entire wave of different musical styles crashing together to form the roots of the music we hear on the radio and in churches today. Our modern version of Amazing Grace and Wondrous Love both date to the original version of the American shape-note hymnal, The Sacred Harp, in the early 1800's, and much of our church music and secular music can trace its roots to African-American music.
For more information on bluegrass, google it!