The Daily Grist:
“For the times, they are a changing” Bob Dylan
Like almost all of you out there reading this today, I love bluegrass music and I feel blessed to have been exposed to it. And I like to share this great music with others who may not have been as fortunate to have been exposed to it. Often I worry that our music may not survive in the cauldron of competing musics which churn in our fast paced modern world. The founders of the bluegrass genre have mostly passed away and people like me who have loved it since its early days are aging fast. What if anything will be left of this music after we are gone too?
I well remember an essay that I had to read in college during the early seventies with the provocative title: Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? The premise of the book seemed ludicrous at the time. The mighty Soviet Union, with all of its ballistic missiles and olympic champions and strict control of everything having to do with its economy, was doomed to fail. Preposterous!
The author of that essay missed the year of the demise by only a few years as it turned out. Sadly, he never witnessed the fulfillment of his prophecy, dying in an automobile accident in 1980.
Bluegrass music is a good thing, unlike the old Soviet system. But can it survive? Maybe that depends on what you consider survival and what you think of as bluegrass music. To some people, bluegrass music is already dead. In the late 1940’s you might frequently hear bluegrass music on the hottest media of the time. How often do you hear anything about bluegrass music on mainstream media today? Answer: almost never. Let’s face it, if you listen to bluegrass music these days you are a fringe element (which I would personally call an elite).
That’s perfectly fine with me. What I appreciate about the music is special to me personally and independent of its popularity in the main stream. Many people say that country music has died because it has taken a different direction. Maybe bluegrass is dying the same death, I don’t know. But bluegrass music owes its very existence to the fact that it changed the musical status quo, doesn’t it? Bluegrass melded old time fiddle, blues, country and whatever else it could sell into an amalgam that we all recognize as a distinct style.
Do styles of music have a certain lifespan? What about classical music? People still listen to Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart. Their music is more than 200 years old. And classical music fans listen to Stravinsky and Prokofiev and half-tone modern composers that I don’t even know the name of too. But is that still classical music? People create the music that speaks to them and maybe to others. That simple fact is never likely to change. Music fans will always play and listen to great music no matter where it comes from.
I was cheered this past summer by the profusion of amazing twenty-something talent at Grass Valley. At sixty two years of age, I rank with the old geeser set that mostly likes the old familiar stuff. But I enjoyed listening to the young eager bands this past summer even more than the established traditional headline bands I went to hear. Some of the old standards I have heard a hundred times sounded particularly fresh and alive when I heard them played by young troupes that respected and honored the music and played it like the masters did when they too had young nimble fingers. My hat is off to all the CBA mentors who nurtured all that fine talent over the years.
Will bluegrass music survive until 2084? You bet it will, at least the soul of it.
