Bluegrass Kentucky
Posted on 12. Oct, 2009 by admin in Highlights
Kentucky is as home to the rolling bluegrass hills as the footstomping bluegrass beat, a kissing cousin of country music with roots easily identified in old-style English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish folk and even west African music.
Sound kinda odd? Well then let the founding father of Bluegrass, Bill Monroe, explain it better:
“Bluegrass is Scotch bagpipes and ole-time fiddlin’. It’s Methodist and Holiness and Baptist. It’s blues and jazz, and it has a high lonesome sound. It’s plain music that tells a good story. It’s played from my heart to your heart, and it will touch you. Bluegrass is music that matters.”
Got that? No? Well, just refer to the Coen Brothers’ movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?, an apparent homage to old time bluegrass music, starring Kentucky local boy, George Clooney.
Or check out Bluegrass legend Earl Scruggs on iTunes, Grammy awardwinning Alison Krauss, or even comic actor Steve Martin, a big convert to the banjo and bluegrass, mastering the instrument on his first solo album, called The Crow, with guest vocals by music legend Dolly Parton.
Martin loves the banjo, to him it’s a “high lonesome sound … generated nostalgia for experiences I never had, joy I was yet to experience, and melancholy that was yet to come”.
Thousands of devotees agree, flocking to the annual bluegrass celebration known as the River of Music Party (aka ROMP) in Owensboro every June, at the genre’s dedicated centre, the International Bluegrass Music Museum.
http://www.bluegrass-museum.org/riverofmusic/. Or if you have a phone, dial 1-888-mybanjo
