Bluegrass music
 

I was just listening to bluegrass music (on a station that mostly plays classical), and I was thinking that it has a totally country sound. Very distinctive, and very raw.

I wondered if Europeans ever listen to bluegrass music, and if they do, what they think of it.

When I lived in Germany in the 60's, I went to a concert of African American gospel music, and remember how surprised I was to see how appreciative Germans were of gospel music.

I guess I was less surprised a couple of years ago to hear country music in a taxicab in Ireland. The driver said his favorite country singers were Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers.

Scottish friends appreciate bluegrass because it is derived from Celtic music. Much of the dance music in the Appalachians is exactly what you hear and dance to at a ceilidh, and you can clog to many Scottish fiddle tunes.

The answer is a simple yes.

Many European and Asian Bluegrass bands have performed in the U.S.

This link should give you more than you could ever want.

http://www.ebma.org/

Surprisingly they do. I've met people when traveling in Europe from as far away as Australia. When they discover where I'm from they bring up Bluegrass music and are thrilled that a Grammy winner is my neighbor. They all now who he is.

Country music and Bluegrass music are two different things.

What the ackman sayeth. You'll recognize the rhythms and harmonies in seconds.

What surprises me is the quality of the voices I heard in the singing. Not pretty by any means, but compelling anyway.

Listen to Allison Krauss on Youtube if you doubt the quality of voices.

A French singer I like, Sanseverino, used to do something resembling gypsy swing, but for his latest album he put together a bluegrass band. I saw them in Paris in March with some other friends from this message board who are fans of American traditional music. We weren't sure what to expect, but we all thought they were terrific.

"Gypsy swing" has some connections to bluegrass, both being oriented to string instruments. The jazz style is riding a tidal wave of renewed interest in Europe and North America. Every year at Fontainebleu, outside Paris, there is a huge festival at the end of named for Django Reinhardt, who gave the music its name. Much of the activity is casual and outdoors, similar to summer bluegrass jamborees.
http://www.festivaldjangoreinhardt.c...php?article929

One of my neighbor's albums was "Live in Japan" so I guess they like Bluegrass there also.

http://www.amazon.com/Live-Japan-J-D.../dp/B0000002F2

"you can clog to many Scottish fiddle tunes"

But Dan Leno was clogging in Liverpool in the 1860s, and Charlie Chaplin got his first professional break as a Lancashire clog dancer (I'm not making this up: I mean a performer of Lancashire clog dancing, not a dancer based in Lancashire). Lancashire clog dancing was packing in the audiences in England before anyone had ever thought of making Maggie Valley a tourist centre.

Clogging, and the associated fiddle music, is as much a NW England tradition as Celtic. Though Americans have this myth about the earliest Europeans in Appalachia being "Scots Irish", most of the population of the area the early settlers came from was in Yorkshire, Northumberland, Durham and Lancashire - where there was scarcely a Celtic gene before the Irish famine.

***History of Bluegrass Music

The roots of bluegrass reach back to the music brought to America by immigrants in the early 1600s, including dance music and ballads from Ireland, Scotland and England, as well as African American gospel music and blues. In fact, slaves from Africa brought the design idea for the banjo--an instrument now integral to the bluegrass sound.

As the early Jamestown settlers began to spread out into the Carolinas, Tennessee, Kentucky and the Virginias, they composed new songs about day-to-day life experiences in the new land. Since most of these people lived in rural areas, the songs reflected life on the farm or in the hills and this type of music was called "mountain music" or "country music." The invention of the phonograph and the onset of the radio in the early 1900s brought this old-time music out of the rural Southern mountains to people all over the United States***

This is from the International Bluegrass Music Association.
http://ibma.org/node/164

My neighbor was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2003.
http://ibmaawards.org/node/43