[Harp-L] Bluegrass winning popularity contest over blues

["Henderson, Peter" <Henderson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey all,

Not specifically harp related, but interesting nonetheless:

I'm forwarding this to the group and was wondering if y'all have found
this to be true in your neck of the woods?  I certainly have. One might
assume that New York City would offer a bounty of opportunities to play
blues and very few opportunities to play old time or bluegrass ~ just
the opposite. In the month of June I played 14 gigs, 10 of which were
bluegrass or old time.  I'm a white guy with southern roots who started
playing BG and OT when living in West Virginia in the 70s.  I was then
was turned onto the Blues by Ernie Hawkins ( a fine acoustic blues
player from Pittsburgh) who I played with for several years after that.
But after 10 years of playing blues music I got bored and went back to
MY roots.  The music resonated in me even though I grew up with a father
would rather play and sing Josh White music than Buck White music.  My
question is, is the blues dead or alive?



>From the Chicago Sun Times July 3. 
-----------------------------------------------------
Bluegrass winning popularity contest over blues
July 3, 2005 BY STEVE MORSE 

When the bluegrass outfit the Johnson Mountain Boys broke up in the
early '90s, it complained that bluegrass was in much less healthy shape
-- commercially speaking -- than another American roots genre, the
blues. If the group had only known what was ahead, maybe it would have
stayed together. Since then, the two genres have gone in different
directions -- bluegrass to the top of the mountain, blues to the bottom.
Bluegrass has forged new stars from Alison Krauss (who performs
Wednesday with Union Station at Ravinia) to Nickel Creek and King
Wilkie. But the blues has not sustained new talent -- something that's
hard to do when blues clubs are closing their doors. ''The drive and
rhythm of bluegrass was an instant hook for me,'' says King Wilkie's Ted
Pitney, a twentysomething picker who fell in love with the music when
backpacking around Australia with a couple of bluegrass tapes. He and
bandmate Reid Burgess attended Kenyon College in Ohio, where they
skimmed the radio dial to find something different -- and it was
bluegrass. ''There's a swing to it, it's organic, and it's a far cry
from the industrial pop and rock that is out there,'' adds Pitney.
Clearly, bluegrass also received a bigger boost from the success of the
"O Brother, Where Art Thou?" soundtrack (which has sold close to 7
million copies) and ''Cold Mountain'' soundtrack than the blues did from
Martin Scorsese's PBS documentary series ''The Blues'' two years ago.
But that only tells half the story. The rest is that bluegrass is now
perceived as cool and hip, while the blues is often viewed as
old-fashioned. 

''Years ago, bluegrass had more of a hay-bale image, but the level of
sophistication has gone up dramatically,'' says Ken Irwin, co-owner of
Cambridge, Mass.-based Rounder Records. His label has seen bluegrass
sales shoot up (Krauss and her band Union Station sold 70,000 copies of
their
last album in its first week of release), while sales of blues albums
rarely surpass 20,000 copies. 

"Blues records are selling 20 percent of what they were in the late '80s
and '90s,'' says Rounder vice president Scott Billington. ''I played in
a lot of rock bands and was a music major in college and focused on
jazz,'' says King Wilkie's Pitney. ''But bluegrass grabbed me. And we
don't want to pretend that we're Bill Monroe [the father of bluegrass]
back in 1946. We want to translate it into our own time and voice.''
That's what Ricky Skaggs -- who won this year's Grammy for best
bluegrass 
album -- has been doing for years. "I'm 50 years old. If I were 50 in
country music, they'd be putting me out to pasture. But in bluegrass,
you cross into 'legend' status,'' Skaggs says with a laugh. ''Not that
I'm putting myself in that category.'' As commercial country music has
become more about airbrushed artists and less about artistry, people
have gravitated toward bluegrass, Skaggs says. ''Country has been losing
its center and is looking more toward pop and VH1,'' he says. ''It's
more about looking great on camera than it is about music. But with
bluegrass, in order to survive, you have to be good. There's a higher
talent level.'' Meanwhile, the blues world is foundering. ''The blues is
in a rut. There's no doubt about it,'' says Rounder's Billington. ''I
think it's going to take the right artist to fan the embers again.''