Notes on 'A brief opinionated history of bluegrass' 22 Feb 2026

Class offered by Maddie Witler on 22 Feb 2026

• Bill Monroe Opry "Big Bang"
• Prior to record music, banjo was a family of instruments that hadn't been codified into 5 strings, steel strings, etc

1930s

• Emergence of 'country stars', including Monroe brothers
  • Hired to dance on radio show. (Kinda weird :-) ). Apparently live audiences attended as well.
  • Proto-bluegrass sounds: beginning of backbeat emphasis and guitar rhythms, as well as Charlie abandonment of rhythm occasionally to play licks, but no calculated g-run yet.
• Split of music emerges: lineages of modern country music and R&B (and eventually hip-hop) split between "hillbilly" and "race" records.
  • Some artists billed as both, with different names used for personas of different racial/ethnic identities.

1940s

• Monroe split - Kentucky Partners♫ and Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys♫
• Lester Flatt w/ Kentucky Partners
• Sally Ann Forrester playing accordion
• Earl Scruggs on banjo - impact can't be exaggerated
• Scruggs style already in ether - Snuffy Jenkins, Don Reno.
• Early Bluegrass Boys tours heavily influenced by minstrel shows.
  • Town-to-town, set up a tent
  • Played baseball against local teams
  • Bill challenging local men to bare-knuckle boxing
  • Video exists of Bill Monroe carrying band through town? (link?)

1950s

• Musically great time for bluegrass, financially terribly time
• Emergence of Jimmy Martin
  • Transitioned to playing G-shape for G5 sound, away from Capo3 w/ E shapes
  • Big beat 1, carving out space for G-run
• Rock and Roll grows
• Bluegrass imitators, but nobody using the word "bluegrass" as genre

1960s

• Folk revival
  • Nothern college students, especially in Boston and Berkeley, highly engaged
  • Distinction between country, folk, and "bluegrass" - first use of that word as a genre
  • Hippies with privilege gravitating toward perceived authenticity and nostalgia
  • Imitating bluegrass leads to jam approach
• First bluegrass festival 1965, Carlton Haney, students started traveling to attend
• As bluegrass becomes defined, excludes folk, which excludes certain technical pickers, especially women
  • Elizabeth cotton
  • Ola Bell Reid
• Jams form sets of rules to facilitate jams

1970s

• Beginning of bluegrass as an intentional genre
• People who grew up listening to bluegrass starting making own records
  • Engaging with tradition in intentional, calculated way
  • JD Crowe, Tony Rice, Ricky Skaggs, Tony Trishcha, Pete Wernick, Bela Fleck
  • Newgrass revival
• Nitty Gritty Dirt Band - Will the Circle Be Unbroken
  • Genre-defining moment
• Eat My Dust, Bonny and Clyde

1980s

• Heroes / Legends take shape - earlier generation becomes exalted
• Bluegrass Album band, becomes reference for jam learning
  • Leads to Jimmy Martin-heavy and Flat-and-Scruggs-heavy repertoire

1990s

• Polished bluegrass sound
  • AKUS, Nickel Creek, Bela Fleck, etc
• Mash Style - downbeat heavy, no swing at all, ultimate expression of Jimmy Martin removing the 3rd
  • Lineage (70s and 80s): Jimmy Martin forms own band, banjo players (Allen Munde, JD Crowe) -=> JD Crowe and New South gets slightly tighter and straighter
  • Even less major sound, more integrated modes
  • Culminates in Lonesome River Band♫: first bluegrass records recorded to click?
  • Banjo-defining w/ 8th note grid

2000s - 2010s

• O Brother
• AKUS, Nickel Creek hitting new highs
• Crooked Still, Kentucky Thunder, Sam Bush Band, Punch Brothers, Infamous Stringdusters
• "Chamber Bluegrass" - many bands trying to make sounds like Punch Brothers, gives way to "Jam Band Bluegrass"
• Final performances of many trailblazers, first new bands to emerge when founding generation was no longer alive
• Rise of Billy Strings, becomes biggest act in bluegrass history so far
  • Making end-run around labels
• Lonely Hearts Stringband signed with Rounder - "We knew it was a mixed bag, but there wasn't another great option"

Opinions

"What is Bluegrass?"

Concise or big-tent definitions possible

• Following Jazz, we need to find big-tent definitions
• No obvious way to describe Punch Brothers without using the word "bluegrass"
• People might hear rolling banjo in Mumford and Sons and think, "oh that's bluegrass" - best not to tell them they're wrong
• The concise definition has been used insidiously and negatively for a long time to police the genre and exclude people
  • People become trained to say "that's great, but that's not bluegrass"
  • Quintessential definition becomes five white men from the south in the 1940s
  • People with different influences, people of color, people who are smaller / have smaller hands invariably make different sounds on the instruments; concise definition excludes them

Bluegrass is a uniquely American music

• • Mixing of cultures: immigrants who came by choice, slaves who came here not-by-choice (similar to Jazz)
  • Most prevalent factor: banjo. Came from Africa, commodified by capitalism
  • Instruments were more unique to specific luthiers prior to mass-production

Jams

• Important to think of musical spaces you inhabit (difference is audience)
  • Practice
  • Jamming
  • Performance
• Some bands perform in jam-fashion
  • Tends to satisfy spectators who watch as sport
  • Others may regard as bad music

Arbiters of Taste

• Evolved from listeners at record labels who had listened to a lot of music to numbers on social media
• Has forced musicians to be exciting, regardless of whether they're good

2010s Chamber Music

• Flatt and Scruggs Live at Carnegie Hall
• Opinion formed that treating it as chamber music (concert halls, like classical music) was ultimate expression
• Privilege vector
  • Many bands that emerged in this era were music school kids
  • Music that is made for listening might not be accessible - takes years of training to listen effectively
  • Failure of the art to reach a greater audience
• 2019 Chris Thile, Live From Here
• Billy Strings gave people a way in, didn't ask as much of listener
• Similar to 2016 election - failure of left to provide a pathway for people with less privilege

Not disconnected from rise of fascism

• Bluegrass and country provides easier way of romanticising south, past
• "I don't want to be in Kentucky in 1949"
• Nostalgia, but for what?
• Several moments of surge have happened amidst moments of conservatism - 1960s folk revival exception?
• Important to be aware, not just glibly singing songs
• Historically, bluegrass has existed almost in opposition to progressive movements - imagining Jimmy Martin in room making fun of Woody Gutherie

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• Usually, if Maddie is going to listen to bluegrass, she puts on Hot Rize - Radio Boogie (Live at the Boulder Theater, 1996)

• "For every instrument, if you wanted to learn entirely from recordings by women, you can do that, and that's new"

• "The copyright system relies on this false idea of pure creation"

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• Cycles of snap-back-to-tradition, then progress, then snap-back
  • O Brother as snap-back
• New bands are acting like Billy - plugged in and shreddy - snap-back may be coming
• Rise of AI, which is keen to make polished guitar sound, may prompt appetite for more acoustic instruments

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• Hang out with any bluegrass artist for a day? John Hartford