Every October first, people celebrate World Bluegrass Day. It happens this Tuesday but unfortunately you don’t get the day off. Often the date coincides with the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival here in northern California so you might want to take the day off anyway. One way or the other, let’s celebrate!
Bluegrass music is certainly loved the whole world round. While other genres of music are much more popular with fans here in America and elsewhere, bluegrass is here to stay and its followers span the globe. Among my favorite recordings in my library of music are The Country Gentlemen Live in Japan, Blue and Lonesome’s Live From Harrietville (in Australia) and Live in Holland by the Kentucky Colonels, recorded in 1973 just months before Clarence White’s untimely death.
Most bluegrass fans realize that our music reaches far beyond the heartland of America’s southeast but how many appreciate the global reach of the music we love so much? Everybody knows the Kruger Brothers. They came to America from Switzerland to show us how it’s done. Before that Bluegrass 45 from Japan toured the U.S. to huge applause. Just this past summer we heard a great band from Korea, Country Gongbang at Grass Valley. A few years before that we heard G2 from Sweden. I heard a bluegrass band from Argentina a few years ago at Wintergrass, Che Apalache. Their Bela Fleck produced CD was nominated for a Grammy.
It’s a very good thing that our music is being nurtured on distant shores. Within the welcome columns of this web site we have enjoyed input from people like John Baldry from Britain and Ellie Withnall from the Cayman Islands. America is the source of so much great music. It’s great that we share it with the world and that they share it back. Every time I get worried about the ultimate survival of the music we love so dearly, I take solace in the fact that it has such a wide following.
Not long ago some really great jazz musicians, for example Dexter Gordon, couldn’t make a living playing music in their own country. Dexter had to move to France where people loved him. But jazz wasn’t really threatened by other competing musical genres like rock and roll. It had to survive, just as bluegrass did when threatened by the same competition.
What will you be doing to celebrate World Bluegrass Day on October first?
https://www.internationaldays.co/event/world-bluegrass-day/r/recwr3pPuHeCWLu8X
