Industrial strength bluegrass: in the pipeline

RICHARD Thompson on Bluegrass Today reports that the University of Illinois Press plans to publish Industrial strength bluegrass: southwestern Ohio's musical legacy, edited by Fred Bartenstein and Curtis W. Ellison, in January 2021. Most of the fourteen contributors have years of direct personal knowledge of this important regional bluegrass scene.

This book should nicely complement Tim Newby's Bluegrass in Baltimore: the hard drivin' sound and its legacy (2015) and Kip Lornell's Capital bluegrass: hillbilly music meets Washington, DC (2020) in covering the major centres of bluegrass activity during the formative years of the music.

On 14 Feb. this year Bluegrass Today published Sonny Osborne's judgment on why this area was a bluegrass hotbed - incidentally, he also recalled the first time he heard someone call the music 'bluegrass'.