Bluegrass -- the beginnings of jazz/R&B?

[GoodSpeak]

These guys know improvisation....backward and forward.


Hopeless hick music or the roots of Jazz and Rhythm and Blues?



It's your call, y'all.

[Lenny D.Guitarist]

Goodguy, what's up with all thes polls? You ain't Poll-ish.

[GoodSpeak]

Originally Posted by Lenny D.Guitarist

Goodguy, what's up with all thes polls? You ain't Poll-ish.

Jus' keepin' outta trouble is all.

[GoodSpeak]

Got that High Lonesome Sound....

[RedJazz]

I used to be something of a bluegrass fan, not so much because of my own affinity but rather because of that of friends of mine, also because of its link to the folk music craze of the late 50s and early 60s (Flat and Scruggs actually did an album of Woody Guthrie songs!).

The Everly Brothers did a wonderful bluegrass style album entitled Songs Our Daddy Taught Us and reissued as Folk Songs by the Everly Brothers to capitalized on the folk music craze. It's available on CD from Rhino. They were accompanied on the album on accoustic guitar by their father Ike Everly, in a wonderful old timey proto bluegrass style. Among the songs they do is a version of the English ballad Barbara Allen, which is pretty clear evidence of the influence of Appalacian folk songs on early jazz, though they did take different if parallel paths early on.

Also in that vein are a couple of sides that county music pioneer Jimmy Rogers did backed up by Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines.

I recall reading a review of the first Newport Folk Festival in the Saturday Review when bluegrass was a novel aural experience to an urban audience. In it the reviewer compared counterpoint of a bluegrass front line to that of a dixieland band. Ever since then I always thought it would be interesting to hear a bluegrass band play dixieland and a dixieland band play traditional bluegrass tunes, more or less like the experiments in the late 40s with bop band playing dixieland tunes and vice versa. Though not much along those lines has been done excepting perhaps banjo licks on Bugle Call Rag and a couple of things like that.

[RedJazz]

Another link between bluegrass and jazz is through jug band music as jug bands featured an instrumentation that was part string band and part primative jazz band and a lot of the blues based material they chose was similar. Yet another link (seen in the recent PBS Dylan special) was Dave Van Ronk who started by fronting a dixieland band but ended up as a single playing mostly accoustic folk blues.

[GoodSpeak]

I agree.

I also hear a whole lot of good old fashioned Gospel music in Blue Grass.


This is why I, personally, make a connection to Jazz/Blues/R&B.

[Tom Storer]

I think bluegrass has many elements also found in jazz, in particular improvising melodic solos over hot rhythm and respect for virtuosity. But it certainly wasn't among the "roots" of jazz, given that the style didn't develop until sometime in the 1940's, defined by Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys. Connection yes, roots no. Hopeless hick music, certainly not! It's great stuff.

[Gary Sisco]

Jazz is a considerably older music than bluegrass, which has only been around since the 40s, when Bill Monroe and his boyz invented it.

Great stuff, but I prefer the original generation of players, though there are several excellent current ones, I know.

Like all of American popular music with the exception of hip hop, it's rooted in the blues and bospel, and, very often, structurally, the songs are a blues. Few have been bluer than Monroe.

[clinthopson]

Boooring

[groover]

Tony Rice combines jazz and bluegrass on his album "Backwaters". He calls it "spacegrass".

[Pete C]

Gary is right. Bluegrass cannot be the "beginnings" of music that preceded it. Tim, do your homework before you start a poll. Also, if bluegrass appears to be related to these forms it is because of the black music strain (i.e. the blues) that is an unacknowledged core element of many variants of American country music.

[GoodSpeak]

Originally Posted by Pete C

Gary is right. Bluegrass cannot be the "beginnings" of music that preceded it. Tim, do your homework before you start a poll. Also, if bluegrass appears to be related to these forms it is because of the black music strain (i.e. the blues) that is an unacknowledged core element of many variants of American country music.

I thought I asked if BG was the root of Jazz not it's beginning, but that would be a semantics argument, I suppose. You see, my feeling is all music comes to us from many roots just like a tree cannot exist without all of it's roots.

If you are telling me Jazz was first, how about taking it from that angle then? Seems to me that the improvisation alone allows us some latitude for discussion, one genre compared to another. Don't you think?

It doesn't much matter to me how it all came about, I'm just asking if there are any plausible connections or links, however faint they may be. Make sense?

[Pete C]

Originally Posted by GoodSpeak

I thought I asked if BG was the root of Jazz not it's beginning,

It's neither, but the poll title, which I assume you wrote yourself, used the word "beginning."

As far as plausable connections or links, yes.

[GoodSpeak]

Originally Posted by Pete C

As far as plausable connections or links, yes.

OK.

Then let's run with that concept.


In my World, it's all about the discussion.

[Xavier]

Seems like jazz has had an influence on bluegrass but I don't think much the other way around. Someone like Dave Grisman is influencing bluegrass but not jazz -and Django seems to be one of his major influences. The chronology of development of the two genres would also support the jazz to bluegrass stream of influence.

[Gary Sisco]

What they both share in common with most forms of American music is:

1. The blues, both in harmonic structure and, often, thematic content.
2. Swing.
3. Improvisation.
4. Gospel.

Real C&W from the days also shares these same elements (not the crap being pumped now, which is what we called soft rock in the 70s, given a cowboy hat) as does the original forms of rock and roll from the South (rockabilly and so forth).

Actually, Southern origin is another thing shared by all American popular music forms with the exceptions of disco and hip hop.

The blues in its many variants is so common in American music, it's what makes you "feel" how a song is going to move, before you've heard it through the first time -- as in playing with someone for the first time or listening to something on the radio for the first time, or whatever.

The mythic "three-chord" rock and roll song, and country song, nearly always use a variant of the I-IV-V. 'S what makes them so easy to learn. And sing. And they're handy because there is an apparently infinite number of ways of using them and melodies to set to them.

Real bluegrass swings like crazy and the best players improvise on a very high level, given the simplicity of the harmonic content, and at death-defying speeds.