As you’ve noticed, The Celestial Monochord is on a brief vacation. It will be back very soon, I promise! In the mean time, I’m upgrading my workstation so I don’t have to upload from work, nor from my wife’s computer. I also have two new kittens, and several other distractions … including …
I’m finally reading Robert Cantwell’s first book, Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound. I haven’t read it before because I’m not very interested in bluegrass and when I did read the first two chapters, I found them somewhat peculiar. Now that I’m a little further, I realize the error of my ways. It’s great, a worthy predecessor to Cantwell’s brilliant When We Were Good: The Folk Revival.
Bluegrass Breakdown will no doubt get a lot of airplay here in the future. For now, I’ll briefly commment on the subtitle, “The Making of the Old Southern Sound.”
Bluegrass is not an old music, not an ancient folk form. It did not exist before 1945 or 1946, when it was unleashed by Bill Monroe. It’s the personal style of that one very original musician — but bluegrass was so widely, enthusiastically, and creatively imitated that it came to be seen as a genre unto itself. Monroe invented bluegrass at the same time others were inventing Rock & Roll.
Nor — in certain significant ways — is it particularly Southern. Monroe grew up on a Kentucky farm, but his family sent him north, in 1929 when he was 18 years old. It was during this long removal from the South, living among other exiles from Appalachia, working in a factory washing out barrels using gasoline, listening to Chicago radio stations, that Monroe began to dream of a contemporary sound that would thrive (or help him thrive) in the environment he occupied.
Bluegrass is nevertheless heard by its audiences as both old and Southern, so Cantwell’s book traces “The Making of the Old Southern Sound” — that is, how and why this thoroughly modern music came to be “about” certain times and places from which it did not arise and which it had never actually occupied.