Bluegrass

Bluegrass sounds ancient and is younger than the electric guitar. It has a founder — Bill Monroe, the Kentucky mandolinist whose Blue Grass Boys gave the style its name — and even a birth date most historians accept: late 1945, when banjoist Earl Scruggs joined the band and his three-finger roll, machine-precise and torrential, completed the sound: mandolin, fiddle, banjo, guitar and bass, unamplified, racing, topped by Monroe’s “high lonesome” tenor (Rosenberg 1985).

Monroe called it “Scotch bagpipes and ole-time fiddlin’… Methodist and Holiness and Baptist… the blues and jazz” — his own genealogy chart. He learned as much from Arnold Shultz, a Black fiddler and guitarist he played dances with as a boy, as from his fiddling uncle Pen; the blues bend in that high tenor is not decorative. The improvised solo-trading owes a debt to the swing bands on the radio (Rosenberg 1985).

Bluegrass’s path through the web has one famous switchback: Elvis Presley’s first single took Monroe’s waltz “Blue Moon of Kentucky” and turned it into rockabilly — the new genre raiding the new-old one within a decade of its birth. The style itself never stopped: festivals, newgrass, and a permanent role as country music’s certificate of authenticity.