“Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you” (Satchel Paige)
Lot’s wife looked back and she was turned into a pillar of salt. Orpheus looked back and he lost his love Eurydice forever. Maybe looking back is a bad thing.
How does that possible wisdom apply to bluegrass music? Should we look back and play the music that defined the music as a distinct genre in the first place or should we branch out and play music that Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs or the Stanley Brothers might never have imagined?
How far can bluegrass music migrate before it’s not really bluegrass any more? Bands like the Osborne Brothers and the Bluegrass Album Band created classics that people classified as bluegrass and still play. Even bands like the New Grass Revival are still considered bluegrass.
Ask yourself, what exactly is bluegrass music? If you have a bass, guitar, mandolin, fiddle and banjo playing does that automatically make it bluegrass? Of course not, but every bluegrass fan has to have their own idea of what bluegrass is and more importantly what they like to listen to.
I have always inclined to the large tent model when it comes to defining what bluegrass music should be. Bluegrass music would never have happened had not creative musicians melded old time country and blues influences into a recognizable form with machine gun banjo rolls, fiddle and mandolin solos and tight harmony singing. Innovation is at the core of bluegrass and there should still be plenty of room for it.
The large tent model works for me but I know many hard core bluegrass fans who don’t want to hear anything that doesn’t harken back to the glory days of classic bluegrass music. Fortunately we still have many great bands playing that great standard traditional stuff and maybe with a new wrinkle thrown in here and there to enhance the already special music.
No self respecting bluegrass band wants to do Bill Monroe covers for their entire set no matter how good it might be. At any bluegrass festival I love to see bands stretch the genre to create interesting new music that is still broadly in the genre of bluegrass. But I also appreciate it when I see some of those bands, who were nurtured on the classics of bluegrass music, pay homage to the tradition by playing at least one tune out of the classic repertoire.
I guess this rambling is sort of an Op Ed from the bully pulpit but I do think that it is important for every bluegrass fan to ask themselves “What is important to me about the music? What is bluegrass music anyway and does it matter?”.
