Titbits from the bluegrass media

In memory of the late Bobby Osborne the staff of the Bluegrass Situation (BGS) present a 2022 podcast interview with Bobby by radio presenter Tom Power in his 'Toy heart' series. The interview covers many episodes from Bobby's career, including his combat service with the US Marine Corps in the Korean war. A note to BGS staff: though Sonny Osborne retired and died before Bobby, he was not Bobby's older brother, but nearly six years younger.

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Also on the BGS, Rachel Baiman (past-visitor and almost-visitor to Ireland) talks to Tim O'Brien about the themes of his latest album, Cup of sugar, about writing songs from the perspective of animals or other people, the way in which his own writing has developed over decades, and more. The interview includes four songs from YouTube.

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Justin Hiltner presents BGS's 'favourite albums of 2023 (so far)', and there's a strikingly high proportion of bluegrass and bluegrass-related material among them, including Rachel Baiman's Common nation of sorrow, Michael Cleveland's Lovin' of the game, Ashby Frank's Leaving is believing, Haas by Brittany and Natalie Haas, Brennen Leigh's Ain't through honky tonkin' yet, Darren Nicholson's Wanderer, Nickel Creek's Celebrants, Mighty Poplar's Mighty Poplar, and City of gold by Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway. Videos of songs from each of these albums and a corresponding Spotify playlist are in Justin Hiltner's feature.

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As the BIB mentioned on 11 June, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings are celebrating the 75th anniversary of the founding of Folkways Records by reissuing many classic Folkways LPs on vinyl, including The New Lost City Ramblers with Cousin Emmy (1968). Smithsonian's e-newsletter says the album 'rekindled traditions of southern mountain music, introducing them to wider audiences'. By 1968 the Ramblers had been a performing group for ten years and this was their twentieth album, so it seems likely that they were already doing a reasonable job of rekindling traditions.

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The July issue of the Bluegrass Standard, which can be seen online, has a subtitle to the cover, 'Preserving the tradition of bluegrass music into the future'. This is not an inward-looking message, as is shown by several articles about Folk Alliance International, the International Council for Traditional Music, Mari Black, the 'multi-style violinist', country singer Marty Falle, and the Center for Traditional Music and Dance.

© Richard Hawkins

Tradition and technology

Jake Blount (left), Aaron Jonah Lewis (right)

[...] we are not learning from long-dead musicians when we study recordings of them. We aren’t learning from musicians at all. We are learning from electromechanical reproductions of musicians — limitlessly replicable acoustic automata that repeat the same few minutes over and over again, for as long as they endure.

This is quoted from 'SPOTLIGHT: Jake Blount on traditional music’s built-in science fiction', published on No Depression on Monday (26 Sept.), and well worth reading in full for the several issues it raises. Jake Blount's points have much in common with what Aaron Jonah Lewis said at his fiddle workshop on 28 May this year at the Ulster American Folk Park about the limitations put on us - without our knowing it - by learning from recordings, especially older ones.

Perspectives do change with the passage of time. One of Jake Blount's first sentences - 'Our instrument [the banjo] is firmly entrenched in the American consciousness as a symbol of cultural and political conservatism' - might have puzzled a reader sixty years ago, when the banjo player best known to the public was Pete Seeger, and when the 'melodic' revolution was beginning to transform bluegrass banjo playing.

© Richard Hawkins