Bluegrass in Blossom

By Roger Wolmuth

It is a sticky, hot night, and several hundred people wait on hard wooden benches. Fireflies flicker, and on a small, lighted stage four country-suited musicians quietly fidget. In their midst stands an imposing figure dressed in white and wearing a broad-brimmed hat. "I once played the mandolin all the way from Fort Wayne to Nashville without stopping!" he thunders into a microphone. "Don't nobody think I can't play all night if I want to!" As the crowd cheers, the big man leans forward and madly strums the opening riffs to Orange Blossom Special. Says a woman in the second row: "I just love it when Bill gets to roaring like that."

The roaring lion is Bill Monroe, 65, the patriarch of bluegrass music for more than three decades. The setting is Bean Blossom, Ind. (pop. 200), a hilly, country village where Monroe has now staged eleven annual bluegrass festivals. The fiddlers, pickers and fans at Bean Blossom are part of a steadily growing phenomenon. Before the year is out, some 500 bluegrass festivals will lure countless thousands of Americans to county fairgrounds, college campuses and places like Cumberland, Ky., Spruce Pine, N.C., and Grass Valley, Calif.

In Bean Blossom, pup tents and trailers were parked at random in the 100-acre park that is owned by Monroe and serves as the festival site. Away from the stage, a concessionaire offered bargain prices on dusty fruit jars, secondhand cookware, some 1950s sheet music and a chipped enamel bedpan. Other vendors sold straw hats, hard-to-get bluegrass records, Martin guitar strings and $1 plates of sausage gravy and biscuits. Red-white-and-blue garbage cans stood under the trees, next to inelegant eight-seater outhouses.

Monroe's twice-a-day stage shows featured some of bluegrass's biggest names during the nine-day festival: the Osborne Brothers, Fiddlers Kenny Baker and Tex Logan, Banjoist Ralph Stanley and Guitarist Lester Flatt. Many of those present, however, were less interested in the stars onstage than in the chance to trade licks with fellow amateurs. Impromptu bluegrass bands sawed and plucked through the days and well into the nights. "Bluegrass is much more an amateur phenomenon than a professional one," noted Tom Adler, 30, an associate instructor at Indiana University's Folklore Institute and a banjo picker who has been coming to Bean Blossom since Monroe's first festival in 1967. "The rudiments are easy to learn--although there's no end to what can be done in terms of technical achievement."

And so Bill Coonrod, a farmer from Monticello, Ind., joined some newfound friends outside his trailer and showed what 40 years of mandolin practice could do. Don Brown, a Huntingburg, Ind., plumbing contractor who slept in his car during the festival's first weekend, opened his trunk and pulled out a five-string fiddle that he had spent two years building. "I played until 4 o'clock in the morning," he said wearily. "That's what the fun of these things is. After the main show is over, everybody gets together and shindigs."

If bluegrass lyrics often lean toward themes of country poverty and mountain isolation, the music itself is anything but sorrowful. Monroe, youngest of eight Kentucky farm children, was influenced early by the lively oldtime fiddling of his uncle Pen. During a five-year stint cleaning barrels at an Indiana oil refinery, Monroe worked as a part-time square dancer and musician, then in the mid-1930s teamed up with his brother, Guitarist Charlie Monroe, with whom he made his first recordings. After forming his band, the Blue Grass Boys, he took it to Nashville's Grand Ole Opry in 1939. The music of the rural hill country had a new sound -- and eventually a new name.

Monroe's music was conservative in its roots and progressive in its reach. It was built around his own voice, a powerful, high tenor that could cut through logs, his virtuoso mandolin playing, and traditional string instruments played at jackrabbit tempos. Bluegrass, which has been called "folk music with overdrive," echoes with the sound of ringing banjos and mandolins, whining fiddles, and quick-picked guitars. "I gave the people a new timin' to the music that they wasn't acquainted with," says Monroe. "It's a dancin' music."

It keeps Monroe hopping. He travels more than 150,000 miles to do some 200 concerts and performs on the Grand Ole Opry's Saturday radio show 20 times a year. Monroe's style remains the model for traditional bluegrass bands to this day. He has, in fact, fathered a musical genre, and by the time Bean Blossom had ended, many of the campers were moving on to the next festival. "I probably travel 5,000 miles a year just to get to this sort of thing," said Don Brown, the plumber and part-time fiddle maker from Huntingburg. "It becomes an addiction -- just like any other grass, I suppose."

Roger Wolmuth

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.