Bluegrass Music: Growth: 1955-1970
Historical context
The concept of bluegrass as a genre hadn't existed yet, but as the country music industry pushed bluegrass to the periphery, the idea of bluegrass as an “authentic tradition" became a dominant narrative in advertising the music. At the same time, new audiences were beginning to listen to and learn the music. Many Southern migrants landed in Maryland, Pennsylvania, DC, Detroit and Boston and these became hubs for local bluegrass music. As a result, this era also saw the growth of community music events such as music parks and festivals. Music parks became weekend destinations for country music fans as well as an important infrastructure for working musicians.1960 saw the first bluegrass show at a college, a sign that bluegrass was becoming popular among folk revival crowds both as fans and as a new generation of players and bluegrass scenes became a combination of these different groups of people. In 1961, Bill Clifton organized the first bluegrass-only music event, and not long after, Carlton Haney organized the first official bluegrass festival in 1967 at Bean Blossom. The Southern Folklife Collection is a great resource for finding recordings and photographs from the music parks and festivals of this era.
The selected albums and personnel included here show examples of expanding regional scenes of bluegrass as well as some of the changing sounds of the genre.
Subject headings:
"Bluegrass music -- 1951-1960", "Bluegrass music -- 1961-1970”
Subject and author search terms:
"Stoneman Family (Musical group)", "Stoneman, Roni", "Stoneman, Donna", "Stoneman, Scotty", "Dickens, Hazel, 1925-2011", "Gerrard, Alice, 1934-", "Country Gentlemen (Musical group)", "Lilly Brothers", "Kentucky Colonels (Musical group)", "Dillards"
Additional musicians by instrument
Bands/bandleaders: Gloria Belle Flickinger, Vallie and Benny Cain, Vern & Ray, Greenbriar Boys, Harry and Jeanie West, Larry Sparks, Del McCoury, Rose Maddox, Red Allen, Strange Creek Singers
Banjo: JD Crowe, Bill Keith, Roni Stoneman
Dobro: Mike Auldridge
Fiddle: Kenny Baker, Benny Martin, Vassar Clements, Bobby Hicks, Scotty Stoneman, Joe Greene, Vivian Williams
Guitar: Bill Napier, Doc Watson, Clarence White
Mandolin: Ricky Skaggs, Earl Taylor, Buzz Busby, Frank Wakefield, Donna Stoneman
Highlighted archival materials
Suggested search terms for the finding aids: "New River Ranch", "Sunset Park", "Bean Blossom", "festival", "music park", and the names listed above.
- Cherrill P. Heaton Collection, 1950-2012While relatively small, this collection contains a lot of live recordings of classic bluegrass performers including Red Allen, Foggy Mountain Boys, Bill Monroe, Reno & Smiley, and the Stanley Brothers at music parks throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
- Ed Solomon Collection, 1952-1979This collection includes recordings of bluegrass musicians at music parks and festivals in the 1960s and 1970s. Look for recordings from the Berryville festival, Bean Blossom and the Culpepper Bluegrass Festival. There are also some recordings of Delia Bell and Bill Grant.
Audio
- Mountain music, bluegrass style. byPublication Date: 1959
- Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard : pioneering women of bluegrass. byCall Number: CD-9502
Reading
Working Girl Blues by
Hazel Dickens is an Appalachian singer and songwriter known for her superb musicianship, feminist country songs, union anthems, and blue-collar laments. Growing up in a West Virginia coal mining community, she drew on the mountain music and repertoire of her family and neighbors when establishing her own vibrant and powerful vocal style that is a trademark in old-time, bluegrass, and traditional country circles. Working Girl Blues presents forty original songs that Hazel Dickens wrote about coal mining, labor issues, personal relationships, and her life and family in Appalachia. Conveying sensitivity, determination, and feistiness, Dickens comments on each of her songs, explaining how she came to write them and what they meant and continue to mean to her. Bill C. Malone's introduction traces Dickens's life, musical career, and development as a songwriter, and the book features forty-one illustrations and a detailed discography of her commercial recordings.
ISBN: 9780252033049Publication Date: 2008-04-02
Capital Bluegrass by
With its rich but underappreciated musical heritage, Washington, D.C. is often overlooked as a cradle for punk, the birthplace of go go, and as the urban center for bluegrass in the Untied States. Capital Bluegrass: Hillbilly Music Meets Washington, D.C. richly documents the history anddevelopment of bluegrass in and around the nation's capital since it emerged in the 1950s.In his seventeenth book, American vernacular music scholar Kip Lornell discusses both well-known progressive bluegrass bands including the Country Gentlemen and the Seldom Scene, and lesser known groups like the Happy Melody Boys, Benny and Vallie Cain and the Country Clan, and Foggy Bottom. Lornellfocuses on colorful figures such as the brilliant and eccentric mandolin player, Buzz Busby, and Connie B. Gay, who helped found the Country Music Association in Nashville. Moving beyond the musicians to the institutions that were central to the development of the genre, Lornell brings the readerinto the nationally recognized Birchmere Music Hall, and tunes in to NPR powerhouse WAMU-FM, which for five decades broadcast as much as 40 hours a week of bluegrass programming.Dozens of images illuminate the story of bluegrass in the D.C. area, photographs and flyers that will be new to even the most veteran bluegrass enthusiast. Bringing to life a music and musical community integral to the history of the city itself, Capital Bluegrass tells an essential tale ofbluegrass in the United States.
ISBN: 9780199863112Publication Date: 2020-01-10
Bean Blossom by
Bean Blossom, Indiana--near Brown County State Park and the artist-colony town of Nashville, Indiana--is home to the annual Bean Blossom Bluegrass Festival, founded in 1967 by Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass. Widely recognized as the oldest continuously running bluegrass music festival in the world, this June festival's roots run back to late 1951, when Monroe purchased the Brown County Jamboree, a live weekly country music show presented between April and November each year. Over the years, Monroe's festival featured the top performers in bluegrass music, including Jimmy Martin, Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, the Goins Brothers, the Stanley Brothers, and many more. Thomas A. Adler's history of Bean Blossom traces the long and colorful life of the Brown County Jamboree and Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Festival. Adler discusses the development of bluegrass music, the many personalities involved in the bluegrass music scene, the interplay of local, regional, and national interests, and the meaning of this venue to the music's many performers--both professional and amateur--and its legions of fans.
ISBN: 9780252095443Publication Date: 2011-05-15
Bluegrass in Baltimore by
With an influx of Appalachian migrants who came looking for work in the 1940s and 1950s, Baltimore found itself populated by some extraordinary mountain musicians and was for a brief time the center of the bluegrass world. Life in Baltimore for these musicians was not easy. There were missed opportunities, personal demons and always the up-hill battle with prejudice against their hillbilly origins. Based upon interviews with legendary players from the golden age of Baltimore bluegrass, this book provides the first in-depth coverage of this transplanted-roots music and its broader influence, detailing the struggles Appalachian musicians faced in a big city that viewed the music they made as the "poorest example of poor man's music."
ISBN: 9780786494392Publication Date: 2015-06-01
Ola Belle Reed and Southern Mountain Music on the Mason-Dixon Line by
Ola Belle Reed (1916-2002) was one of the all-time greatest performers of Appalachian music. Ola Belle Reed and Southern Mountain Music on the Mason-Dixon Line combines Reed's 1960s recordings, some of the earliest she ever made and available here for the very first time, with modern-day field recordings of her descendants and those she inspired within her Appalachian community. This deluxe edition highlights Reed's deep repertoire--folk ballads, minstrel songs, country standards and originals--and traces the impact her music made and is still making today. The two-CD set is accompanied by a luxurious publication tracing Reed's influence and the folklorists who have tracked it: Henry Glassie, who first heard Alex and Ola Belle play in 1966 at the back of the Campbell's Corner general store, and Clifford R. Murphy, who, four decades later, recorded Reed's modern successors in Maryland, Delaware and Pennsylvania.
ISBN: 9780981734279Publication Date: 2016-02-23
Pressing On by
Roni Stoneman was the youngest daughter of the pioneering country music family and a woman who overcame poverty and abusive husbands to claim the title of "The First Lady of Banjo," a fixture on the Nashville scene, and, as Hee Haw's Ironing Board Lady, a comedienne beloved by millions. Drawn from more than seventy-five hours of recorded interviews, Pressing On reveals Roni's gifts as a master storyteller. With characteristic spunk and candor, she describes her "pooristic" ("way beyond 'poverty-stricken'") Appalachian childhood, and how her brother Scott taught her to play the challenging and innovative three-finger banjo picking style developed by Earl Scruggs. She also warmly recounts Hee Haw-era adventures with Minnie Pearl, Roy Clark, and Buck Owens; her encounters as a musician with country greats like Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, June Carter, and Patsy Cline; as well as her personal struggles with shiftless and violent husbands, her relationships with her children, and her musical life after Hee Haw.
ISBN: 9780252031915Publication Date: 2007-03-23
Vassar Clements Fiddle by
(Music Sales America). This volume features exact transcriptions of 16 tunes and breaks by the master of bluegrass fiddle. It includes insightful analysis of Vassar's style including his distinctive fingering and bowing techniques, plus a detailed biography, extensive interviews, notes on all the tunes, a discography, and many never-before-published photos.
ISBN: 0825602238Publication Date: 2008-01-01
Everybody on the Truck by ISBN: 1886371113Publication Date: 1995-06-01
