Folk Plus Black
Rosenberg, Neil V.
Folk Plus Black BLUEGRASS by Neil V. Rosenberg University of Illinois Press. 447 pp. $24.95. Neil V. Rosenberg's history, Blue-grass, tells you everything you have ever wanted to know about...
...Even a few bars of tablature, an ancient system of showing strings, frets, and finger positions instead of notes, could have helped to show how bluegrass changed the older white styles to more characteristically black approaches...
...He gives a truly baffling series of tags, including folk (without quotes), old-timey, hillbilly (with and without quotes), traditional, folk-rock, country, country-rock, contemporary, and more...
...Second, that the strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung...
...After a brief introduction he traces the music from around 1938 to the present...
...It was no accident that one of the first to understand the special significance of bluegrass was Alan Lomax, whom Rosenberg associates with "folkies" and "folk-revivalists," both pejorative terms in his lexicon...
...But despite Monroe's Southern politics and his public revulsion to long-haired hippies, he is one of those radical innovators whom Richard Hofstadter defined as central to America's cultural tradition...
...And the same is true for Afro-American traditions like the blues and spirituals, which, while preserving many Africanisms, were created in this country under the influence of popular styles...
...Despite itself, bluegrass makes more sense in Whitman's framework than in Rosenberg's analysis...
...He would like to dispense with ideology (at least of the Left) and is still taking potshots at "romantic nationalism," a code name for the democratic tradition that emanates from J. G. von Herder's folk ideology...
...Rosenberg is characteristically sardonic in his response to leftist ideology but quite neutral about the "traditional values" and conservatism associated with bluegrass...
...has been released by Greenhays/ Flying Fish...
...Neil V. Rosenberg's history, Blue-grass, tells you everything you have ever wanted to know about blue-grass music—and lots more...
...Although the main sources of the style depend heavily on black styles and singing, there has never been a notable black bluegrass musician, and there has been almost no black presence at bluegrass concerts or festivals...
...Like many folklorists, Rosenberg has missed the major connection proclaimed by Walt Whitman: "Concluding with two items for the imaginative genius of the West, when it worthily rises—First, what Herder taught to the young Goethe, that really great poetry is always (like the Homeric or Biblical canticles) the result of a national spirit, and not the privilege of a polish'd and select few...
...Most people use the term bluegrass erroneously to mean everything from folk to country-western music...
...Monroe absorbed much from the frequent contact he had, not just with Schultz—a local black fiddler and guitarist—but with other black people around Rosine...
...It was the style of that band, especially the new five-string banjo style of Scruggs, that basically defined bluegrass...
...And as in other areas of American music, bluegrass, though unique, is a white "cover" of black vocal and instrumental styles...
...Academics still do not acknowledge that all of American traditions have been influenced from the beginning by popular sources...
...Trained at Indiana University's folk institute, Rosenberg takes the academic view that there is a "pure" (but sometimes without quotes) folk tradition that is contaminated by the commercial materials Richard Dorson called fakelore...
...Those are two unthinkables for conventional minds like Rosenberg's...
...The older styles of playing were heard mostly in the string bands of the 1920s, in which the fiddle was the lead instrument...
...The Bluestein Family's Jewish album, "Where Does Love Come From...
...Take only one obvious circumstance that goes unobserved in Rosenberg's history: Since it was brought here from Africa by black slaves, probably as a three-stringed home-made instrument, the banjo has become a superbly crafted industrial product which has experienced at least five different styles, including a major impact from minstrelsy in the 1820s, Southern mountain frailing, and double-thumbing, Scruggs-style, "new grass" and beyond...
...The black musical traditions of western Kentucky spanned a variety of forms, from religious to dance music," Rosenberg notes...
...Along the way there is a huge amount of gossip about who said what backstage at the Grand Ole Opry or at folk and bluegrass festivals...
...Bluegrass is one of the prime examples of the integration of black and white materials in our musical development...
...But Lomax, who called bluegrass "folksong with overdrive," has long been aware that folk in the United States was inherently associated with radical ideologies and observable change...
...In his concern with the details of fan clubs, magazines, and other miscellaneous information, Rosenberg passes over the central meaning of this crucial genre of American music...
...Both Monroe's new style of mandolin playing and the incredible invention rightly called Scruggs-style banjo show the central influence of blues and jazz...
...But at the same time it reveals the continuing segregation of our society...
...Bluegrass is also a string-band style, but very much in the tradition of the New Orleans bands in which each instrumentalist takes a solo turn...
...Bluegrass is another example of the tremendous impact of popular music on all the music Rosenberg likes to designate "folk" or folk revival...
...Rosenberg does not describe exactly what he has in mind, and since there is not one note of music in the entire book, it's easy to forget about the connections...
...Although Rosenberg mentions the main points, little of importance is developed...
...To his chagrin, Rosenberg reports that bluegrass has itself become a kind of underground music like some kinds of rock or the folk movement itself...
...Gene Bluestein (Gene Bluestein teaches American studies, including folklore, at California State University, Fresno...
...It's not too bad to have this in a book as long as the more important ideas and issues are attended to...
...That includes the Anglo-Celtic materials which, from colonial days, showed the impact of composed and pop materials, a development even more notable in the Eighteenth Century...
...If you add to the exclusively acoustic instrumentation a form of gospel singing which also borrowed from the black quartets long popular in the South, you have the main lines of bluegrass music...
...who jumped from one band to another or organized which short-lived record company...
...In fact, it refers to a particular style invented by Bill Monroe around 1938 and completed in 1945 when Earl Scruggs became part of the group Monroe called the Blue Grass Boys, in honor of his home state, Kentucky...
Vol. 50 • August 1986 • No. 8
