Word: bluegrass
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Your fleeting reference to bluegrass music cries out for amplification. Bluegrass is not a "polite synonym for hillbilly." It is a highly intricate derivative of the folk and jazz idioms. Both the term and the music itself received their major impetus from Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys. A bluegrass musician is an accomplished and versatile soloist who is capable of achieving a very delicate balance between story and music. Only stringed instruments are used, and these are nonelectrified and unamplified (as opposed to hillbilly music...
PERHAPS your taste runs to the American Heritage. For the pigeonholing mind there are a great many subtle and not-so-subtle distinctions to be made between hillbilly, bluegrass, old-timey, country, mountain, and western folk music. The only way of lumping them together is to point out that all are found in the South. The record-company people disguise themselves cleverly in straw, string-ties, and farmer's boots, and record them indiscriminately...
More in the bluegrass-old-timey-country line are John Duffey, Charley Waller, and The Country Gentlemen, who appear on two Folkways albums. Recommended is the one which contains "Drifting Too Far From the Shore." If you don't change your sinful ways after hearing it, you can console yourself with a perusal of the Folkways liner notes. These are, as always, an education in themselves, if slightly ludicrous. Jean Ritchie sings traditional Child Ballads as they are found, only somewhat changed, in Kentucky, once again on Folkways. If you've thought of the dulcimer as a limited instrument...
...greatest champion of American thoroughbreds died in 1947 and was buried beneath the bluegrass of Kentucky's Faraway Farm. But the truth is that Man o' War never really died. So firmly rooted is his legend that his portrait still hangs in a place of honor in the clubhouse of nearly every major U.S. race track. So storied was his running prowess that today, 41 years after his last race, Big Red's record remains the standard of purity and perfection against which the performance of every other race horse, sooner or later, must be measured...
Both Southern hill boys who have been playing and singing as long as they can remember, Scruggs, 37, and Flatt, 47, met in Nashville, the country-music capital, decided in 1948 to form their own band, were soon the most popular dispensers of bluegrass in the business. They now make nearly $100,000 a year apiece. Their fees are among the highest on the country circuit, but thanks to their sponsor, fans can sometimes get in to hear them at half price: they need only present an opened sack of the sponsor's corn...