1. Chapter 1: The Bluegrass Family Tree
   On a Saturday night in early December 1945, Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys take the stage at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville for a Grand Ole Opry broadcast on WSM, and Monroe introduces his new banjo player. Earl Scruggs is twenty-one years old, from Flint Hill, North…
2. Chapter 2: Bluegrass — The Early Years
   On the evening of December 26, 1946 — the day after Christmas — two brothers from Dickenson County, Virginia stepped up to a microphone at WCYB Bristol, on the Tennessee-Virginia border, and went live on the air for the first time. The show was called Farm and Fun…
3. Chapter 3: Bluegrass Grows Up
   On September 26, 1962, CBS aired the first episode of The Beverly Hillbillies. The show became, almost immediately, the most-watched program on American television; for two of the next nine years, it would be the most-watched program of any kind, on any network. Its theme song,…
4. Chapter 4: Bluegrass Finds Itself
   In late January 1975, in a small commercial studio in Silver Spring, Maryland, J.D. Crowe and four sidemen sat down to record an album. Crowe was thirty-seven. He had been bandleader of the New South for almost four years and house-band leader at the Lexington Holiday Inn for…
5. Chapter 5: Bluegrass Comes of Age
   In September 1986, the International Bluegrass Music Association held its first organizational meetings in Owensboro, Kentucky. The IBMA had been founded the previous year. It had no staff, no offices to speak of, no awards ceremony yet — it had a name, a board of…
6. Chapter 6: Bluegrass: The New Generation
   On the evening of February 27, 2002, at the Forty-Fourth Annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, a seventy-five-year-old man from southwestern Virginia walked onstage in a dark suit and began to sing, without accompaniment, a song about death. Ralph Stanley had been performing…
7. Chapter 7: Bluegrass Today
   On a Friday night in February 2024, in Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, the second set opened with a man alone on a stool at the front of the stage, playing banjo. He was Béla Fleck, and the piece was his own “Jazz Odyssey.” When the night’s headliner…

Adjacent Genres

1. Old-Time Music and Bluegrass: A Shared Family Tree
   In the spring of 1965, in Mount Airy, North Carolina, a college student from Chapel Hill knocked on the front door of a sixty-four-year-old retired highway grader named Thomas Jefferson Jarrell. The student carried a reel-to-reel tape recorder and a fiddle case. Jarrell —…
2. Country Music and Bluegrass: A Long Conversation
   The two-week stretch in late July and early August 1927 when the New York record-company scout Ralph Peer set up a Western Electric microphone in a hat warehouse on State Street in Bristol, Tennessee, is the moment country music gets its official founding date. Across those…
3. The Blues and the Roots of Bluegrass
   On October 7, 1940, in Atlanta, Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys walked into RCA's studio and recorded eight sides for Bluebird. The third song they recorded that day was a Jimmie Rodgers number from a decade earlier, "Blue Yodel No. 8," which Rodgers had subtitled "Mule…

Themes

1. Murder Ballads: The Dark Spine of the Bluegrass Songbook
   The song begins with a young man, Willie, courting a young woman, Polly. He persuades her to come walking with him over mountains and valleys. As they go on she grows afraid; she tells him so. He confirms her fear: he has spent most of the night before digging her grave. They…
2. Mining Songs, Black Lung, and the Labor Spine of Appalachian Music
   The man who wrote what is probably the most famous coal-mining song in the American songbook was sitting in his parents' front room in Drakesboro, Kentucky, on a summer evening in 1946. His name was Merle Travis. He was twenty-eight years old, a Capitol Records artist, and back…
3. Rambling, Hobos, and Trains in the Bluegrass Songbook
   For most of the period that the music we now call bluegrass and old-time was being made, the people making it spent significant portions of their lives in motion. Some of the motion was voluntary — railroad work, sailor's work, drovering work, the seasonal migrations of…
4. Gospel, Faith, and the Road Home
   At nearly every bluegrass concert, somewhere in the second set, the band stops being a bluegrass band for ten or twelve minutes and becomes a gospel quartet. The instruments come down. The four vocalists move closer to a single condenser microphone. Someone counts off "Working…
5. Mountains, Home, and the Holler: The Geography of Bluegrass Longing
   Hazel Dickens's signature song — "West Virginia, My Home," recorded for her 1980 Rounder record Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People — was written in a row house in Baltimore, on a back porch in a neighborhood of relocated mining families a thousand miles from the…
6. Outlaws, Prison Songs, and Outlaw Country
   On January 13, 1968, in the auditorium of the California State Prison at Folsom, an audience of inmates in blue chambray shirts waited for Johnny Cash to walk out. Columbia had refused him a prison record for a decade, on the grounds that the audience was unsavory and the record…
7. Moonshine, Whiskey, and What the Drinking Cost
   The recording session is the Stanley Brothers at Rich-R-Tone studios in Johnson City, Tennessee, in September 1948. The song is "Little Glass of Wine," written by Carter Stanley and sung by him over Ralph's tenor harmony and the band's spare arrangement. The story it tells is a…