#HOWCEE Blue Grass Gospel Start Your Friday with Blue Grass Gospel

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6AbdNDQjSifmtzFRnqmw0q?si=66ca9e57c482454a

The surprising history of Bluegrass music

If you’re a member of the Denison community, chances are you’re familiar with the driving, high lonesome sound of American bluegrass music. When you close your eyes and listen to it, what do you see? If you’re anything like me when I first arrived at Denison as a student in 2013, you see seemingly timeless images of misty mountains or ramshackle hillside cabins in Appalachia.

But after four years of studying the history of bluegrass music for my doctoral dissertation, the images I see in my mind’s eye are of radio stations, bars, and community halls in places likes Columbus, Chicago, and Dayton in the mid-twentieth century.

Much more of the history of bluegrass music happened in urban spaces than we tend to assume. How, then, did the former set of rural imagery come to dominate our cultural understanding of bluegrass music? In short, the earliest bluegrass musicians of the 1940s created the music in response to the needs of a group of people navigating movement between rural and urban lives. Only later was the music presented implicitly as a totally “authentic” product of rural Appalachia.