Tradition Bound

The music performed at this weekend's Telluride Bluegrass Festival often strays a long way from bluegrass. That's fine for those who want to see bluegrass move into the mainstream, but purists say the music will survive nicely without adding any glitz.

Denver Post Sunday Magazine
June 20, 1993
Original draft, by Tom LaRocque

When Bill Monroe squints down from the stage at this year's Telluride Bluegrass Festival, he may see as many puzzled stares as appreciative smiles. By bluegrass fans, Monroe is revered as the music's founding father, even its inventor. At 81, he is accustomed more to adulation than apathy. But as he and his four-man band make the rounds among the hundreds of outdoor bluegrass shows throughout the country this summer, Telluride may seem peculiar.

Preceding and following Monroe's act during the four-day fest will be other mainliners of the music: the Seldom Scene, the Bluegrass Patriots, and Del McCoury, who once played in Monroe's band. Also sharing the stage will be the likes of the less traditional but bluegrass-rooted John Hartford, Peter Rowan, and Tony Rice.

But Friday evening will bring Strength in Numbers, a jazzy band of former bluegrassers who have taken the music so far afield, little of it remains but its acoustic instruments. Friday's last act will be John Hiatt, jamming until midnight, apart from his most recent project, rock band Little Village. Other Telluride performers with banjoless bands will include Mark Cohn, Mary-Chapin Carpenter, and the Iguanas. 

To Monroe the mix may seem odd. To the promoters of the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, now in its 20th year, it will be business as usual. "Telluride gives bluegrass that little bit of a glitzy image it doesn't get anywhere else," says festival publicist Dawn Richardson, an amateur bluegrass musician herself. Her employer, Planet Bluegrass Productions, marshalls the Telluride Festival year-round from a chaotic second-floor office on Pearl Street in Boulder.

To many bluegrass fans, Telluride's infusion of glitz is a welcome advance for a music plagued by backward images. Rooted in rural country, bluegrass often conjures visions of toothless hillbillies gathered on a porch for music and moonshine. Such stereotypes were aggravated by the few bluegrass tunes that have found national attention since the 1960s: The Ballad of Jed Clampett, from The Beverly Hillbillies; Foggy Mountain Breakdown, from Bonnie and Clyde; and Dueling Banjos, from Deliverance.

"Bluegrass is not on the cutting edge of anything," says Barry Willis, a Denver airline pilot, part-time picker, and the author of a soon-to-be-published book titled "Bluegrass: America's Music." The book will include interviews of hundreds of bluegrass performers nationwide. Contemporary country music is packaged as something sexy, Willis observes. In no way has bluegrass gone along for the ride. "It still has hillbilly connotations," he says.

Bluegrass music has no precise birth date, but Monroe's first band dates to 1927. As a teenager in Kentucky, he teamed up with brothers Charlie and Birch to form the Monroe Brothers. Their band toured, sold records, and played on the radio thoroughout the 1930s. Bill's own band, named the Blue Grass Boys, played the Grand Ole Opry in 1939. By 1945, the bluegrass sound was fully fused, complete with the driving banjo of Earl Scruggs.

By now, the music has existed long enough to draw fans of at least three generations. The oldest are Monroe's contemporaries; the youngest, teenagers. Bluegrass music's first grammy award, when the category debuted two years ago, went to an album by fiddler and band leader Alison Krause. She was 19.  But at festivals in many other parts of the country, says publicist Richardson, first- and second-generation fans remain the target audience. Telluride's eclectic mix is calculated to draw a younger crowd.

"One of the problems promoters are having, especially in the southeast, is the folks that come and will not sit through any kind of progressive music. That's an older audience, and I hate to put it like this, but they're kind of a dying-off audience. The promoters are caught between a rock and a hard place because if they've got some brand new thing and try to entice the kids there, they alienate their older people."

Telluride's mission, she says, is to respect tradition but also to introduce traditional music to new people. "We had James Taylor two years ago, and some people there probably were saying, "Who's the Seldom Scene?' Now maybe some of those people are buying their records."

Ralph Haynie, 65, owns Ralph's Top Shop, a countertop-making business in south Denver. In its backshop, amid steel saws, bare wood, and bright-colored Formica tops, he hosts twice-monthly jam sessions for local amateur pickers. Haynie plays banjo, guitar, and mandolin—and perhaps speaks for a generation of traditionalists.

"Bluegrass music is almost sacred to me," he says. "I have no objection if Telluride wants to have newgrass or rock 'n roll. I just don't like them calling it bluegrass. I don't like to see them riding the coattails of bluegrass music." Haynie says he has never attended the Telluride festival.

Its name, Richardson says, dates to the inaugural festival in 1974. Then, it was little more than a private Fourth of July party for a few-hundred people. Among them was members of the Newgrass Revival, a progressive band that later grew popular playing rock-inspired bluegrass. Someone called the event a bluegrass festival, and the name stuck. It was never meant to include bluegrass only, she says. Now, too much equity resides in the name to change it.

Ironic, perhaps, is that the label of bluegrass—an art form struggling against obscurity—might be considered a marketing advantage. "The appeal of that name is not necessarily the music," says author Willis. "What they're selling is the idea of wholesome, outdoor family fun." More ironic, Telluride's detractors cite the festival for debauchery—drugs, alcohol, and open nudity—not for wholesome family fun. Richardson says such excesses were more common a decade ago than in recent years. "We're into our thirties and forties, and we're having children of our own. People just don't do that any more."  

Contrary to its rural image, bluegrass music draws most of its fans from cities, according to research by the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA). The nation's bluegrass hotbeds include Boston, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. Denver occupies a "second-tier" of cities in which bluegrass is also strong. Telluride draws a large part of its audience from out-of-state, and reflects the preponderance of young, urban professionals who have overtaken bluegrass.

What constitutes genuine bluegrass is an emotional issue, and one that has divided fans since the start. "With the possible exception of jazz, I know of no other art form where people spend so much time trying to define it," says Jon Hartley Fox, special projects coordinator of the IBMA, based in Owensboro, Ky.

Like many art forms, it eludes definition. Perhaps its most important defining characteristic are the acoustic instruments on which it is played—banjo, fiddle, guitar, mandolin, and upright bass. To disqualify a band or song simply because of one instrument's absence may seem silly. But some traditionalists say, "No banjo, no bluegrass."

Obviously, instrumentation isn't the whole thing. Bluegrass songs have a distinctive, driving sound often propelled by the machine-gun rhythm of the banjo. Its chord patterns are simple, yet the music is complex, encouraging improvisation, like jazz. Bluegrass songs often tell stories about family, lost love, or other home-spun themes.

Ron Thomason plays mandolin in the Dry Branch Fire Squad, a nationally known bluegrass band based in Ohio. Thomason raises horses, and recalls a conversation between two of his stable boys some years ago.

"They were arguing about the difference between Heavy Metal music and Speed Metal music. It was a ridiculous conversation, and I remember thinking how much it sounded like the arguments I'd heard about traditional bluegrass versus progressive bluegrass. That's when I decided I'd never get involved in defining bluegrass again."

To attach a definition to bluegrass limits it, says Fox. "IBMA has been very careful not to assign a definition to it," he says. "I think people who try too hard to define bluegrass miss the point." The point, he says, is that bluegrass will benefit from opportunities to grow. "The idea that the age-old traditional sound needs to be frozen in 1948 is a disservice to the music," he says.

About 100,000 copies of Alison Krause's grammy-winning album, "I've Got That Old Feeling" have been sold since 1991. Previously, according to Fox, top-selling bluegrass albums were thought to have maximum selling potential of perhaps 10,000. Krause's album raised the perceived ceiling, he says. But whether record sales accurately mirror people's tastes is another sticky, emotional issue.

Last year the boom in country music produced sales of at least 60 million compact discs, tapes, and albums. For bluegrass records, one million is a common estimate of the annual total. Heretofore, the recording industry hasn't even bothered precisely tracking bluegrass-album sales. But this will change.

Discs, tapes, and albums are "scanned" at their point of purchase, using bar-code technology. Sales data is collected in this way at all major music chains, most minor chains, and many independent stores. The data is tabulated by Soundscan, the company that tracks record sales for Billboard magazine.

Bluegrass records soon will be tracked in the same way, says Dan Hays, IBMA's excecutive director. This will give the music another shot in the arm. It will enable record companies to prove to radio stations that people are buying bluegrass. The result: more bluegrass on the radio, he hopes, and more record sales.  

Bluegrass music is played on about 1,000 radio stations nationwide, Hays says. But that figure may be deceptively high. Much of the music is played in once-a-week slots just a few hours long, often on public radio stations, often late at night on weekends. Denver's leading bluegrass show airs Sundays from 10 p.m. to midnight on top-rated country station KYGO-FM.

Host Jerry Mills says the show draws a strong, loyal audience. But station programmers exclude bluegrass from conventional daytime slots because they fear it will induce regular listeners to switch stations. Choices of music played on the air are based on research and ratings.  

"Ratings don't necessarily indicate what people would listen to if they had more choice about it," he says. Mills cites a recent Billboard magazine article in which radio program directors commented on the current content of country stations. Even older country artists—Willie Nelson, George Jones, and Ronnie Milsap—are being left out in the push for "new country." In such a climate, he says, bluegrass stands little chance.

Bluegrass is more common in advertising than in the programming content of radio, notes Mills. "It shines for 30 or 60 seconds, and that may work to capture people's attention." Mills plays mandolin in local band Southern Exposure, and has recorded for various radio and TV commercials.  

Music in commercials is a "flavor enhancer," chosen to create an atmosphere or mood, not to draw attention to itself, says Jerry Shereshewsky, an advertising veteran who spent 22 years making commercials for Young & Rubicam. Currently he is vice president of marketing for RCA Special Products, a division of RCA Records.  Shereshewsky has played banjo since 1960.  

Bluegrass in advertising emphasizes the banjo because "it has a machine-gun quality," he says. It connotes speed and motion in a manner reminiscent of Bonnie and Clyde. One example is a current TV ad campaign for Quaker State Oil, featuring Burt Reynolds. But in a non-advertising contexts, bluegrass is considered "quaint," Shereshewsky says. It clashes with the hip, contemporary image cultivated by country music.

Beyond imagery, marketing issues, and the complex interplay between records and radio, bluegrass music's relative scarcity may be due to one simple factor. "It's the sound," admits Peter Wernick, one the music's most prominent spokesmen. Wernick, who lives near Boulder, played banjo in the now-disbanded Hot Rize, which recorded nine albums from 1978-91. Nicknamed "Dr. Banjo," he has written a best-selling banjo instruction book, and directs the Telluride Bluegrass

Academy, a series of workshops staged in conjuction with the festival. "The sound of the fiddle and banjo has a passion and rawness that's too much for some people," says Wernick. The lyrics, likewise, "harken back to rural roots that many people would rather forget." he says. Bluegrass music will never be part of the mainstream of popular culture, Wernick says. "But I don't think bluegrass should measure its worth by how many people like it."

"Elite art and mass culture have always been at odds," says Mills, of KYGO. "Little niche shows like mine are necessary. That doesn't necessarily mean there should be more of them."