Bluegrass Music has been running round in the United States a lot in the past century and has reemerged due to the Bluegrass Revival that has been happening over the last couple of decades. So what should you know about Bluegrass music? Here are some facts.
- Bluegrass is a form of American roots music. American roots musicians do not like being lumped in with folk musicians, but they do have a lot of overlap. Bluegrass falls under the American roots category and is related to country music.
- Bluegrass is heavy in British tradition. While we think of Bluegrass as strictly American music, its origins are from the United Kingdom. As immigrants came over from the British Isles during the 18th century, landing in the Appalachia territory, the musical traditions from Britain came with them. The traditions included English and Scottish ballads, Irish reels, and songs directly from the British Isles.
- Bluegrass music has three primary subgroups: Traditional, Progressive, and Gospel. Traditional bluegrass includes musicians playing folk songs and has simple chord progressions. They also only use acoustic instruments. Progressive bluegrass will use electric instruments and has some elements of rock and roll. Gospel is a Christian-based type of bluegrass, with harmony singing and some instrumentals.
- Bluegrass music is usually played completely on acoustic string instruments, including the guitar, mandolin, bass, banjo, and fiddle. Banjo players usually use a three-finger picking method while the guitar players use flatpicking. The fiddle players stick with the third and fifth, which is how bluegrass fiddle music gets its very distinct sound. There is an internal controversy among bluegrass musicians who believe that it needs to have traditional instrumentation to be considered true bluegrass music and departures from the traditional should be called “newgrass” instead of bluegrass.
- The voice is its own instrument in bluegrass music. Part of its identifying feature is that there is specific harmonics between two, three, or four different singers. The singing style is defined as high and lonesome and is very identifiable in music genres because it is drawn out and in harmony. The harmony is called “the stack,” where there is usually a high octave singer combined with a low octave singer. It is usually the middle singer that is the main melody, but that does not have to be the case if there are two male singers with a female. Regardless of the stacking order, that is how bluegrass is identifiable.
- The themes involved in bluegrass music usually are a narrative on the daily lives of everyday people and a first person story from the lead singer. There is, as is common among all folk, country, and roots music, a steady theme about lost loves, but there are also a lot of themes about living the hard life, coal mining, and railroading. As a result, there have been a number of protests regarding bluegrass music over the years as it was shedding light on aspects of the coal mining industry that the mining industry did not want made public. It also made the mining industry look bad, which could have put harm on not just the Appalachian coal mining industry, but the communities that are built around it. Who knew bluegrass was so controversial?
7.The name “bluegrass” is thought to refer to the band Blue Grass Boys that formed in 1939 by Bill Monroe. Monroe is typically referred to as the father of bluegrass as a result. The band’s name is in reference to a type of grass that grows in Kentucky that is referred to as blue grass. But the category bluegrass was not really used until the 1960s since previously it was lumped in with country or hillbilly music.