I read somewhere that in a national study commissioned by IBMA about a variety of measures exploring the popularity and penetration of bluegrass music there were approximately twenty million people claiming to listen to bluegrass music. That’s a lot of people, and should provide support for continued growth and development of the music. Another statistic I found interesting was that the average bluegrass fan traveled fewer than 100 miles to attend a bluegrass event. I’ve been thinking about what this means and how it affects the music we get to hear at live events, which, after all, is our passion. I guess we’re pretty unusual in that we travel quite widely from New Hampshire to Florida with regular visits to events in Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Ohio, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Sadly, our finances and time prohibit us from traveling further, but that’s really a lot of places. Each year we try to add new festivals, finding attractive lineups and getting to know new bands. Our membership in IBMA and attendance at the annual World of Bluegrass helps us keep a wider, and more eclectic, group of bands on our horizon, broadens our taste, and informs our perspective.
In these travels, we’ve noticed that there are many people who are exposed to a relatively small group of fine national bands which travel extensively. Beyond that, they experience, and often seem to prefer familiar bands from within a relatively small region close to them. They hook up their campers and travel to a few local or regional events in their area, and then get most of the rest of their music from listening to bluegrass on the radio, particularly Sirius/XM satellite radio, which programs a rather restricted playlist of what might be characterized as classic bluegrass plus top forty hits. In any given hour, the playlist is highly predictable, with spins of Bill Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, the Osborne Brothers, Jimmy Martin, the Country Gentlemen and a few other examples from bluegrass’s first and second generations mixed in with mostly conventional offerings from the major recording labels’ latest releases. This pattern tends to restrict the awareness among people who listen to, and claim to enjoy, bluegrass music, keeping them from hearing newer and more adventurous bands. Even ground-breaking bands like the Newgrass Revival and the Sam Bush Band, for example, are only heard in their most conventional examples. All this means that there is little asked of the audience and little risk taken. It also means that bluegrass fans are deprived of hearing and experiencing the best in new and interesting offerings they might enjoy, should they get the chance to hear them.
Recently, I’ve become increasingly aware of a trend serving to narrow and restrict the bluegrass audience’s opportunity to experience excellence. Three or four bands, which shall remain nameless although thoughtful readers will easily be able to identify them, have begun engaging in activities serving to hype their reputations and enhance their incomes by sponsoring festivals in which they then book each other. The bands themselves range from poor and tasteless to mediocre and uninteresting. What each has in common is a noisy and loyal fan base and enough organizational ability to increase their popularity. They do this by holding their own festivals, to which they bring the other bands on a regular basis to play.
Furthermore, they seem to agree to nominate each other for, especially, SPBGMA award recognition, where fan votes count and nominations can be more easily manipulated through photo-copying nomination forms and passing them around to their own fans and fans of the other bands. Sadly, this kind of recognition, and the lower prices their practices allow these bands to charge, work to enhance their reputations, garnering them increased recognition at small and mid-range festivals operating on a shoestring with little flexibility in the B range of their lineup. The bands get more bookings without actually raising the quality of their performances or developing real skill. They don’t gain the respect of their more musically adept peers, but they succeed in attracting enough fans enough fans to keep working. By engaging in these practices, bands cheapen the music while not engaging in the hard and demanding work of becoming truly excellent.
In a recent article at Smithsonian.com, Geoffrey Himes wrote about Bill Monroe’s “radical conservatism,” saying that Bill Monroe’s music was a radical departure from the times, masked by lyrics which spoke to traditional, conservative values of home, family, church, and farm. He noted “the tension between radical music and nostalgic lyrics has pushed at bluegrass ever since.” Think about the important changes that have come about through bluegrass. Monroe added Flatt & Scruggs to his Bluegrass Boys and turned his music from merely popular to national attention. The Osborne Brothers brought distinctive harmonies to the music. The Country Gentlemen and The Seldom Scene added folk and rock flavors to bluegrass songs which have become standards in bluegrass apart from their antecedents. By adding Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, the Beatles, Chuck Berry, and Johnny Cash to the bluegrass repertory, they continued to create new bluegrass music that was still relevant to a wide variety of listeners and reflected changing times and tastes.
Becoming excellent requires hard, hard work, talent, and perseverance. While we cannot expect every group of musicians who come together to create a band to be willing or able to create new paths, or even to find inventive ways to cultivate more traditional tastes, we must reward it where it arises, encouraging innovation and change to flourish, even in this most traditional form of music. By excessively rewarding mediocrity, we degrade a form of music deserving respect and attention. It is certain that many attempts to express creativity will come to naught. This has always been true. However, forming alliances to enhance income and visibility while diminishing excellence and creativity can only hurt our genre.
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tlehmann@ne.rr.com
www.tedlehmann.blogspot.com
