To the uninitiated, a banjo might not be a harbinger of progress. America’s mountain music evokes a largely bygone era of agricultural subsistence, local autonomy, and a supposedly simpler way of life. Yet bluegrass, the slick younger cousin of string band, old-time, and a myriad of other musical influences, emerged just eighty years ago, and its reach is ever-expanding.
As the genre’s audiences begin to approximate the diversity of the national identity to which it is so intimately tied, the political and cultural fractures that shape American life appear among its listeners. Loyal bluegrass fans are often older, white, Southern, and conservative. In contrast, new listeners responsible for the genre’s growth tend to be younger, more diverse, and farther to the left politically. These demographic divisions also correlate with musical preference: older listeners favor traditional bluegrass, while younger listeners prefer experimental styles.
Since the bluegrass scene’s financial viability relies upon a core group of devoted fans, there is a commercial imperative for musicians to find their listeners by picking a side. And due to the split’s dual nature, that choice goes beyond musical sensibilities, corresponding to a decision between social preservationism and social activism. These musicians thus also join the fray in the conflict over who can claim ownership of and membership in American identity, always hotly contested between progressives and conservatives. Audience pressures compel them to take part in an ideological proxy war — one that could prove more fruitful than today’s bipartisan political debates.
Setting the Stage
While bluegrass has connections to American cultural heritage as a whole, it originated with a single band, Bill Monroe & His Blue Grass Boys. Monroe, a mandolinist displaced from Appalachia by the Great Depression, drew influences from diverse traditional canons to pioneer a new sound. His music was governed by nostalgia for a mountain home, despite the poverty and hardship he experienced there. Bluegrass found commercial success among rural transplants to cities, who related to Monroe’s longing. Over time, his voice became a stand-in for the voices of that entire cohort.
Though bluegrass was a product of individualistic innovation, strict guidelines rooted in Monroe’s stylistic preferences regulated its development. As Dr. Joti Rockwell, an associate professor of music at Pomona College, explains in his article “What is bluegrass anyway? Category formation, debate, and the framing of musical genre,” traditional bluegrass must abide by specific parameters for rhythm, register, and instrumentation. Monroe is responsible for this inelasticity, the article details. Once it became clear his band had unwittingly founded a new genre, he pushed musicologists and musicians to accept his aesthetic predilections as bluegrass’s inflexible definition. Because of Monroe, traditional bluegrass can sound like the product of a time capsule, mimicking music from almost a century ago.
Some self-proclaimed bluegrass musicians chafe at Monroe’s restrictions. In order to establish a new genre, they argue, Monroe himself pushed boundaries; challenging his stringent rules is in the spirit of the genre. That view resonates with Richard Emmett, program director at the Blue Ridge Music Center. His venue has partially shifted its focus toward these so-called “progressive bluegrass” acts even as traditional bluegrass fans lambast their deviations from Monroe’s vision. “Mountain music is a living musical tradition,” Emmett told the HPR. “By presenting these artists, it’s not like we’re doing something that hasn’t been going on … since the birth of the music.”
The rise of these innovators coincided with the midcentury urban folk revival populated by political progressives, to which bluegrass soon became linked. The genre had leftist ingredients: Its themes of dispossession and class struggle played into anti-institutional narratives. “It was a music of the working people,” Emmett underscored. At the same time, urban audiences loved bluegrass because its connection with rural Appalachia provided an escape from daily routine. However, according to Rockwell’s article, they escaped into a culture that bears the hallmarks of social conservatism. To this day, female and queer musicians struggle to find work in the scene. Still, without progressive support, bluegrass likely would have disappeared altogether, reabsorbed by country music.
These contradictions characterize the genre. Its creative sensibility is inherently forward-thinking, and yet by nature, it gestures toward the past. Perhaps the divisions in the bluegrass listening audience should thus be unsurprising.
Hearing the Discord
Many aspects of the bluegrass world undoubtedly reinforce a socially conservative world order. For example, the scene is overwhelmingly male-dominated behind the microphone and in the jam circle. Men playing tunes while wives sit on the sidelines is common at bluegrass festivals. Lyrics often fall victim to the madonna-whore complex, either idealizing maternal figures or recounting domestic violence against adulterous women through murder ballads. In a 2019 article for the Guardian, writer Emma John even claims the competitive culture between jam circle soloists, with “each instrument trying to one-up what came before,” is a form of machismo.
The demographics of bluegrass are also extremely white. While African American music unquestionably influenced bluegrass, industry pressures historically separated black roots, dubbed “race music,” from white “hillbilly music,” keeping black bluegrass performers out of the genre’s commercial space. Musician and activist Rhiannon Giddens’ efforts to correct this erasure are often cited, but even today, few other artists of color are elevated alongside her. The figures are stark: According to the most recent available data from the Bluegrass Radio Network, more than 95% of listeners were white, and all of the more than 50 musicians on Bluegrass Today’s Top 20 chart as of March 20 were white-presenting.
In 2018, white men were more than 50% more likely to vote for a GOP candidate than a Democrat. It follows, then, that the prevalence of conservative bluegrass listeners is widely accepted. “It’s not totally like that,” noted Phil Jamison, music director of the Traditional Music Program at Warren Wilson College, “but there’s probably some tendency in those directions.”
These trends are especially true for traditional bluegrass, which is most popular in the genre’s Appalachian home. “You’re going to find your demographics to be more in the South,” Mark Freeman, the president of traditional label Rebel Records, told the HPR, pointing to the region that accounts for 42% of bluegrass listeners: “Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina.” These areas are predominantly conservative, particularly among older voters; traditional bluegrass fans, who tend to be older, are representative of that correlation.
The subgenre, after all, represents a brand of nostalgia for a past American culture that can be traced to Monroe’s longing for the mountains and is perpetuated by adherence to his strict rules. As social critics have often noted in the era of “Make America Great Again,” access to such nostalgia is unequal. For most members of marginalized groups, the 1940s were a time of greater oppression. Admittedly, traditional artists typically avoid overt political messages. “Folks don’t want to hear about politics,” Freeman asserted. “They want to hear about … all the traditional values that they’ve grown up with.” Still, many on the left claim that language describing those “traditional values” codes for conservative ideologies.
However, bluegrass owes much of its contemporary popularity to the young urban left. Unlike traditional bluegrass listeners, these musically progressive listeners are often scattered around the country. Maya Rubin, a sophomore at Wellesley College and a self-described moderate liberal from New York City, is the lone bluegrass fan among her peers. “If you start playing someone like Béla Fleck … they’re just going to be like, ‘What? What the hell is this?’” she told the HPR. Yet music streaming platforms have enabled such isolated individuals to find bluegrass anywhere.
Most industry experts accept that this cohort favors progressive bluegrass and its offshoots over traditional styles. The undeniable link between mainstream roots-influenced acts like Mumford & Sons and bluegrass has brought more young, diverse listeners into the genre’s less conventional fold. Their aversion to traditional bluegrass may be explained by the correlation drawn between the subgenre and a stereotyped version of Southern conservatism in popular culture. In the words of Gabe Lepak, a bluegrass fan and first-year at St. Olaf College, “There’s this outside view … that it’s all, like, backwater hick towns.” Young liberals and leftists may be scared off by those connotations, leading them to seek progressive artists.
Challenges to Monroe’s regulations necessarily bring challenges to traditional bluegrass’s social nostalgia. The all-female band Lula Wiles, for example, conceptualizes their music as a call to political action, parodying the genre’s frequent idealization of the past with lyrics like, “It’s all history by now and we hold the pen anyhow.” In an interview with the HPR, John Smith, the associate director of their label Smithsonian Folkways, explained that Lula Wiles speaks to a “newer generation” of listeners. “They want to hear what’s happening today, what’s happening from different perspectives,” he declared. In other words, these listeners want forward-thinking music that speaks to current events.
The bluegrass audience’s ardent passion for music snaps its divisions into sharper focus. A special report from Bluegrass Today suggests that the genre’s listeners are 84% more likely to play an instrument than the general public, and that 77% claim listening to music as their favorite pastime. Daniel Boner, the director of Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Country Music Studies at East Tennessee State University, emphasized how much fans care about the music they love. “Bluegrass is serious,” he told the HPR in an emailed statement. “Its listeners … know its history and development like obsessive baseball fans geek out over what type of socks Babe Ruth wore.” Their divergent opinions about the genre, then, are more than preferences: They are principles.
Changing Their Tune
For bluegrass musicians, pleasing such a split audience is a tall order. Having it both ways is near impossible. A contingent of the old guard dismisses progressive bluegrass and bluegrass-influenced rock/pop as opportunistic, while some devotees of the new subgenre reject traditional bluegrass as exclusionary. Besides, not all scholars agree on how the divided audience breaks down. In an interview with the HPR, Rockwell commented, “Many politically left-leaning bluegrass enthusiasts are … the most attached to bluegrass music’s most classic sounds.” Letting the disunity of listeners affect creative decisions might appear risky.
Still, ignoring audience pressures could prove far riskier. Unlike for jazz or classical music, bluegrass crowds are often devoid of wealthy potential benefactors. Without financial support, artists who annoy too many listeners in a genre sometimes off-putting to outsiders skate on thin ice. The general consensus maps musical conservatism and progressivism to their sociopolitical counterparts. Notwithstanding Rockwell’s disagreement, it may be worth it for musicians to gamble on using that paradigm to court a targeted subset of listeners.
Artists choosing to take a blatantly political stance sail through uncharted waters. For Phil Boyce, an amateur musician from Virginia, the absence of self-conscious politics is part of the canon’s pull. “We declare a temporary armistice in the culture wars,” Boyce explained to the HPR in an emailed statement. “I wish more Americans could do it.” Rockwell concurred, noting that unlike folk revival music, bluegrass has rarely been imbued with political function. However, given growing contemporary polarization, neutrality may be a thing of the past.
Especially on the left, some modern acts have taken up the challenge. Rockwell highlighted the last two decades as a period of increasing political activism in bluegrass. String band Che Apalache, for example, blends Latin and bluegrass music to craft topical songs like “The Wall,” which argues against President Trump’s border wall. On their most recent album, the bluegrass-adjacent Avett Brothers sang about gun violence, racism, and misogyny. These new activist voices are a product of — and encourage further expansion of — the genre’s inclusion of artists with diverse perspectives.
The preservationist traditional scene lacks that same potential for growth, to negative commercial effect. “Venues that focus on strictly traditional music and aren’t able or willing to … think a little farther outside the box than that maybe have seen some audiences dwindle,” observed Emmett, linking larger crowds for paid concerts at the Blue Ridge Music Center to more progressive headliners. Freeman was blunter: “A lot of the folks who are into traditional bluegrass are older … and those folks are slowly dying off.”
Furthermore, the themes of progressive bluegrass seem more inclusive of new listeners. Like country music, the specific lyrical content of traditional bluegrass uses a shared vocabulary common to its close-knit community. Progressive bluegrass can sport pop-influenced lyrics, providing a lower barrier to entry for listeners with different backgrounds. In a statement emailed to the HPR, Rockwell mentioned that instrumental bluegrass is especially prevalent in the progressive musical movement; its complete absence of lyrics extends this trend. Traditional bluegrass, by comparison, has resisted lexical change, and may thus be more intimidating to outsiders.
While navigating these tensions, bluegrass musicians must understand that they cannot please everyone. Despite Emmett’s box office success, he noted that activist acts face criticism from traditional fans. Thomas Cassell, the mandolinist for the progressive band Circus No. 9, knows that criticism well. “It’s weird in this music,” he told the HPR. “People are much more likely to tell you what they don’t like than what they do.” Yet he added that “Cool It Son,” the band’s song about climate change, is a frequent favorite on bluegrass radio. For Cassell, creation comes first, and finding the right audience comes second. “We get the backlash,” he admitted, “but … those people aren’t the ones supporting us anyway.”
Looking Ahead
There are no easy answers to questions about the identity of bluegrass because there are no easy answers to related questions about national identity. Who should be the caretaker for a profoundly American cultural form: traditionalists, who look to its history for guidance, or progressives, who see more promise in an unknown future? Many in bluegrass hope to avoid the choice, prizing the peaceful coexistence within jam circles. When musician Chris Pandolfi used his 2011 keynote address at the genre’s business conference to proclaim, “We need to agree to disagree,” the crowd erupted into applause. But under the weight of polarization, the coalition is cracking.
Still, unlike in electoral politics, there need not be a loser if bluegrass splinters. “You have, like, the big tent and the small tent, and the small tent is where … traditional, kind of old-school bluegrass lives,” explained Cassell. “Because it’s a small tent, people think it’s dying. But it’s not, you know? And the big tent is bigger than it’s ever been.” In other words, though musicians cannot garner universal approval, there are enough listeners to go around. The metonymic political discourse within bluegrass, then, has greater potential to be constructive than battles for American identity within strictly political spheres. Without an imperative to defeat their opponents, impassioned bluegrass listeners can meet on the common ground of shared love for the genre. As Bill Monroe put it, “Bluegrass has brought more people together and made more friends than any music in the world.” Perhaps bluegrass’s fissures can eventually be a source of unity.
Image Credit: Pixabay / Andreas Riedelmeier