Word: bluegrass
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last week in Nashville, Scruggs, Flatt and their Foggy Mountain Boys (fiddle, mandolin, bass violin, steel guitar) were busy taping enough bluegrass tunes to enable them to leave their daily radio show for one of their frequent concert tours. On the road, dressed in black jackets, red string ties and white Stetson hats, they scramble frantically through Foggy Mountain Special, Randy Lynn Rag, Polka on the Banjo, Shuckin' The Corn, giving each piece the knuckle-cracking momentum and the curiously high-pitched, pinging tone that is the mark of bluegrass style. For a dramatic finisher, Flatt may lift...
...couple of hillbillies-Banjo Player Earl Scruggs and Guitarist Lester Flatt-whose musical style on Grand Ole Opry is uncannily like the gassy product they represent on the show. Scruggs and Flatt are the country's leading practitioners of a particularly corny style of country music known as "bluegrass." And, thanks in large measure to the efforts of the twanging pair, bluegrass is enjoying such a boom that it has now moved cheek by jowl with cool jazz into big city supper clubs...
What distinguishes bluegrass is 1) the fact that all instruments are unamplified (folk fanciers have long deplored the siren-wailing electric guitars of less authentic country singers), and 2) the employment of a five-string banjo technique known affectionately as "pickin' scruggs." This technique, which moved one astigmatic observer to compare Scruggs's achievement on the banjo to Paganini's on the violin, involves a clawlike motion with thumb and two fingers that serves to transform the banjo player from a plunk-plunking accompanist into a virtuoso soloist. Nobody has heard anything to equal it, says...
Compounds that contain calcium arsenate, for example, may damage annual bluegrass; those containing dacthal and zytron can harm fescues and bent grasses. Two new chemicals, calcium propyl arsenate and diphenatrile, have yet to be fully proved in all conditions. And as good as they are, none of the killers are 100% effective. Besides, no chemical can control the fellow next door, whose grass crabbed because he didn't use Don't, and as a result the pest inches stealthily across the property line carrying the seeds (about 50,000 per plant) of a monstrous population explosion...
Thoroughbred racing is described as the sport of kings. But the man who has sent far more winners to U.S. tracks than anyone in history has no blue - or even bluegrass - blood in his veins. He was born on Manhattan's Upper East Side and raised in Brooklyn. He cares less about equine lineage than about spotting a well-shaped colt with a cheap price...