American Roots Acoustic Music
We cannot present the bluegrass without speaking at first of about it “ old-time music ” …
Old-time music"
In 17 ° and 18 ° century, having tried to use the red skins and before turning to the traffic of African slaves, the British colonial companies of the southeast of United States use of the Irish and Scottish workforce. These families were pushed to the exile by the poverty by exchanging the crossing for a contract of employment of 7 years in the plantations of Mississipi. Treated as animals, many will manage to leave before the end of their contract, often further to violent revolts, and will meet in large number in the vast forest massif of Appalachians where they will become hunters and foresters, then farmers and minors.
he fiddle is the ancestral instrument of the Irish and Scottish immigrants. The Appalachian directory is based at first on fiddle tunes then is going to develop in appropriate style. From the American Civil War ( 1861-1865 ), the American 5 strings banjo takes an important place next to the fiddle in the area of Appalachians. We do not indicate it a guitar before the end of 19 ° century, period from which it is going to develop almost everywhere then to come to complete the association banjo-fiddle in the string orchestras of the region (G-string bands). This early music of Appalachians is called the “ old-time ” music today.
Bluegrass
It is at the end of the 30s when Bill Monroe composer, singer and musician created the bluegrass music.
Of stiff appearance and conservative, Bill Monroe (born in Rosine (Kentucky) in 1911) is in fact a sensitive, opened musician and chiefly extremely original. During his childhood, he absorbs all the sounds which surround him: the Irish fiddle of his uncle Pen; the Scottish bagpipe; the polka and the waltz; the religious hymns and maybe especially the black blues of his neighbour, the guitarist Arnold Shultz.
These influences are already widely perceptible in his way to play the mandolin, bluesy and virtuoso, which he develops in his duets with Charlie, his elder brother, with whom he registers under the name of Monroe Brothers.
When he leaves Charlie, Bill appears as a wild defender of the tradition mountain dweller, of Old-Time and G-string-bands in front of the “invasion” of the music by sounds come from the Western Swing and of the electrification of the instruments which he considers as an unbearable corruption. He create small string band : The Bluegrass Boys - The term bluegrass indicates collectively the state of Kentucky where the grass, leaned in mountains, seems blue - and record in 1940 the Jimmie Rodgers's Muleskinner blues (country guitarist of the beginning of the 20th century) in this musical formula. But Bill Monroe's originality is to adapt its string orchestra to the new requirements of the public. In fact, in spite of all the appearances, Bill Monroe is everything except a traditionalist; the bluegrass is also remote from the stringband appalchiens as from the Honky Tonk. The violent and tense singing, the perfect vocal harmonies, the virtuosity of the instrumentalists who succeed one another in soloes where dominate blue-notes make of the bluegrass an improvised music, of very modern way which transcends several juxtaposed traditions. The bluegrass takes back the formula of the small formations of jazz but with mountain instruments a lot: guitar, fiddle, banjo, mandolin, double bass and dobro.
After 1945, Bluegrass Boys will welcome successively almost all future masters of the bluegrass: Lester Flatt ( guitar), Earl Scruggs (banjo), Vassar Clements ( fiddle), Don Reno (banjo), Mac Wiseman (guitar), Jimmy Martin (guitar), …
When in 1948, the other bands form on the model of that of the Bill Monroe, the bluegrass appears as a real musical genre, with its rules and its values.
