Blog #7 by Barry R. Willis March 2026
Friends, I appreciate your attention to this blog which pays attention to matters which are applicable to our music. The following is mostly the introduction to Chapter Fourteen in America’s Music: Bluegrass. I’ve tried to update it for you here as a topic which might be important to you.
As you probably know, my emphasis on bluegrass is the “classic” forms which serve as the foundation of bluegrass music. (A novel I wrote about this music is called The Banjo Pilot. It was published in 2018. It shows my preference for the powerful classic style of bluegrass music).
After the base style was set, younger musicians took the music to new heights and styles which the pioneers couldn’t have perceived as a form of the music they created. But these people did. This chapter/blog will delve into this subject.
The Three Generations of Bluegrass Musicians
As the pioneers of bluegrass get older, their disciples and students carry on their work. These students will then pass it on to others. Based on the presumption that both the masters and the students were of the same approximate age when they began to play bluegrass music professionally, this music culture has evolved to have a sort of hierarchy with the first musicians as masters because they “invented” it.
The first level (or generation) of the hierarchy would include Bill Monroe, Flatt, Scruggs, the Stanleys, Curly Seckler, the Clines, Jim and Jesse McReynolds, and others whose music career began during the thirties and forties.
A second generation of bluegrassers might include Cliff Waldron, Eddie Adcock, Mike Auldridge, John Duffey and those whose music began in the mid-fifties with the presumption that they followed the previous work of the first generation.
The third generation of bluegrass musicians might include those whose music began to develop about the time of the folk boom of the early 1960s and beyond.
As of the 1990s, we were probably in the midst of the fourth generation bluegrass musicians.
The third and fourth generation bluegrass disciples grew up with different social, educational, technological and even governmental influences (wars, depressions, for example) than the first two generations. When a person’s main musical influences on the radio are the Kingston Trio and the Beatles, he/she can’t help producing a music which is different than someone such as Bill Monroe who credits a black blues guitarist as a main influence.
Vince Gill, at the 1993 Country Music Awards Show, He told the audience that country music had not changed through the years, that it had grown. Bluegrass certainly has done both. Because of the different backgrounds of each person who plays this music and write songs for it, they each play it a little differently.
Only Bill Monroe properly plays “Bill Monroe music.” Except for others who love it and copy it as closely as they can (and they call it “bluegrass music” in most circumstances), many want to develop their own style of bluegrass music and not be accused of playing anyone else’s style. Thus, the music has changed. Some might call the “growth” of the music “contemporary” bluegrass.
There is no shame in whatever path a person decides to take—whether a person chooses to be a direct clone of Bill Monroe’s mandolin playing, or to play a more abstract style of mandolin playing such as that of Sam Bush or John Duffey. There is merely a difference in how the person chooses to view the music—his music—each according to his own bias. It’s no wonder that the music is not the same as it was seventy-five years ago.
Because people change, music will change as well; bluegrass music has changed accordingly. Only now, we have a number of varieties of bluegrass from which to choose. Many superlative third-generation musicians brought the influences of rock and roll, or folk music, or modern country music or jazz to the forefront of their bluegrass. Some have even gone beyond that. The following is a discussion of a few of these individuals. Perhaps it will give the reader an idea of not only how the music has changed, but why. Women are excluded from this chapter because there is a chapter devoted strictly to women in this book.
Bluegrass in the 1950s
“The 1950s was a singularly important decade in the history of bluegrass,” wrote bandleader/author Jack Tottle. “Many of the performers, whose names would become synonymous with bluegrass music during the 1960s and 1970s, began their recording careers in the fifties. It was a period of successful experimentation, of new blood, and of growing musical diversity. More top-quality bluegrass material may well have been written and recorded than in any subsequent decade, and these tunes and songs still form the core of the bluegrass repertoire.
“When things were going well, bands worked hard. They would often be playing one or more radio shows daily, and additionally driving to evening performances night after night. The pace could be numbingly intense, but it honed voices and reflexes to a keen edge. The results included a host of classic performances, many of which were preserved on record.”
Beatniks and the Folk Music Revival
“By the late ‘50s, the folk music revival was gaining resurgence,” continues Tottle. “It included bluegrass music and Appalachian styles of old-time music and was concurrent with the rise of Beatniks during ‘the beat generation.’ These styles appeared mostly on college campuses.” [From album cover notes written by Jack Tottle for Rounder’s “Jim Eanes and the Shenandoah Valley Boys—The Early Days of Blue Grass—Volume 4.”]
Five years later, Hippies appeared on the American scene and embraced traditional music, such as bluegrass and folk, as their own, shunning the more commercial types such as classical or jazz.
At a Carnegie Hall concert on April 1959 promoted by Alan Lomax (Folksong ‘59), Earl Taylor and the Stoney Mountain Boys was the sole bluegrass band represented among the other groups, which were predominantly folk. This is a good example of how bluegrass music was being accepted by America’s folk community. This led to a Capitol Records contract for the group. Lomax seemed to always represent bluegrass bands of lesser renown bands (with the exception of the smooth, professional Flatt and Scruggs band) in his promotions.
The “folk boom” was just getting started and was to be a dominant music in American society until the Beatles and the “British invasion” came in 1963. United Artists Records recorded a concert, released in November as Folk Song Festival at Carnegie Hall. In March 1962, Peter, Paul and Mary’s first long-playing album came out on Warner Brothers; Bob Dylan’s first LP came out on Columbia. With the folk boom in full force, bluegrass received considerable recognition from labels such as Elektra, Prestige and Folkways which released bluegrass records and associated them with folk music. Between this action, and the exposure of bluegrass acts at folk festivals, bluegrass bands were able to survive a little while longer until the bluegrass festivals became their salvation and enabled many bands to not only exist, but to flourish.
The Naming of a Genre
An early, perhaps the first, commercial example of the word “bluegrass” by a non-bluegrass musician was the release of two major-label LPs by Walter Forbes. The frailing and two-finger style banjoist, using an open-back banjo, used the word “bluegrass” in the titles of his albums.
One Folkways bluegrass album which was directed at the folk market was Folk Songs from the Southern Mountains by the Lilly Brothers and Don Stover. This long playing, 33 1/3 RPM record included not only songs in the style of the Blue Sky Boys and the Monroe Brothers, but also bluegrass versions of folk songs such as “Barbara Allen” and “John Hardy.” A similar effort was Elektra’s Folk Banjo Styles by old-time music banjoists Tom Paley and Art Rosenbaum as well as the full-blown bluegrass of Eric Weissberg and Marshall Brickman in their own melodic style version of “Devil’s Dream” which Bill Keith had recently made popular when he joined Bill Monroe’s band about this time.
An LP by Ray Charles, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (ABC-Paramount) included Charles’ rhythm and blues version of Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” In April of 1962, Columbia released Flatt and Scruggs’ contribution to folk music with “Hear the Whistle Blow (A Hundred Miles)”/“Legend of the Johnson Boys.”
Friends, feel free to add to the discussion.
Barry R. Willis. banjobarry5@gmail.com