Bluegrass has a close relationship with what, nowadays, is called "old timey" or "old time country" music.
Like country, bluegrass tends to have a simple melody over a three chord progression.
Unlike country, bluegrass features intricate ornamentation - fingerpicked banjo or mandolin, or Celtic-style fiddle - and a vocal harmonic style called "high lonesome" (after one of the founding albums of the genre). Steve Earle (an "Outlaw Country" star who's released a couple bluegrass albums) once gave a great explanation of "high lonesome" harmony as opposed to straight country harmony... I think it involved going up a fifth instead of down a third(?), so that what would be the bass vocal harmony was actually a higher pitch than the main vocal.
Founding fathers of bluegrass include Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers and Flatt & Scruggs. (You've heard Flatt & Scruggs - their banjo/guitar duets are now stereotypical.) Here's more info.
Bluegrass is mainstreaming again, with a little push from the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack and the last couple Dolly Parton albums.
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Willie Nelson comes out of the Western tradition - you can hear a vaguely Mexican influence in his guitar work. I'm not as able to articulate the difference between Country and Western, but there is one. (Or used to be.) I *think* one of the main ones is if you can two-step to it, then it's Western.
Western being "Western Swing" (an iteration of "Texas Swing," featuring country tunes with a big-band influence, borrowing motifs from the jazz of Count Basie and adapting them to rural ranch-hand songs).
The seminal act would be Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.
Texans Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings would be inheritors of/reacting against his sound, while Lyle Lovett was sort of recouping his sound, only with postmodern twists.
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Lyle Lovett (and his bluegrass-loving former roommate Robert Earle Keen) helped lead the "New Country" renaissance in the late 80s. Since the time of Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton, Nashville has really become a sort of pop-factory, heavy on production values and really light on the kind of genuine, simple songcraft that used to set country music apart. So Lyle did a bit of that, but he also wasn't afraid to be funny and to be *smart* at the same time.
(Case in point: his first album was pretty heavy on the heartbreak, and he got some flak from critics for "misogynist undercurrents" or some such. So, on his second album, he recorded a version of "Stand By Your Man." It's a good version, too.)
One of the best albums in the world is Lyle Lovett's Pontiac.
There's some straight up Western Swing, verging into blues, even, some folksy stuff, and some singer/songwriter stuff that'd be equally at home on albums by Randy Newman or Warren Zevon.
Along the edges of "New Country," the early 90s saw the rise of "Rig Rock" - urban reinterpretations of twangy trucker music. New York's Diesel Only Records helped shape the sound and get it out to an audience used to the raw energy of punk rock and the jangly college radio pop of bands like the Connells and REM.
That was the scene that Son Volt came out of, which flowered into the alt.country scene, which had equal time for bands like The Old 97s (Texas country boys with electric guitars) and The Geraldine Fibbers (formerly noisy LA punk band Ethyl Meatplow). There had been an appreciation (sometimes ironic) for country music in the punk/alternative scene for some time - Camper Van Beethoven and Murphy's Law alike did stompy songs in 2/2 time with repeated guitar licks. Folk punk superstar Mojo Nixon made a career out of it. They just didn't worship Hank Williams the way the Diesel Only crowd did.
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Genre-wise, I get confused about Hank Williams. He's essentially THE big name in traditional, straight-up Country, but he yodeled like a damn singing cowboy.
Anyway, he's a good foundation to build out from. I likes him fine.
You'll find a very serviceable description of Country with links to its various subgenres here.
Do NOT confuse him with Hank Williams Jr. (aka "Bocephus" aka "that stinking idiot who did the Monday Night Football theme"), or his grandson Hank Williams III (who looks and sounds a lot more like his grandpa than his dad, is currently touring, and has been known to do a traditional country set followed by a set of speed metal tunes). He's marketing himself as "rockabilly."
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I have to mention Johnny Cash, so here he is. Style-wise, he's a little hard to pin down. He kind of grew out of the original Rockabilly sound, recording on Sun Records alongside Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis & Gene Vincent. But somewhere along the way, he turned his face to Nashville, not Hollywood, and mixed his electric, blues-inflected hillbilly music with the gentler sounds of country, rather than the raucousness of rock and roll. Which is not to say that Cash was any sort of shrinking violet, musically or in his life.
(Excerpt: Cash was arrested in El Paso for attempting to smuggle amphetamines into the country through his guitar case in 1965. That same year, the Grand Ole Opry refused to have him perform and he wrecked the establishment's footlights.)
He raised more than a few eyebrows when he married into the heart of the genre... when he married June Carter, the daughter of one of the biggest families in traditional country music.
And unlike his fellow Sun Records recording stars, Cash is still making kick-ass albums, with his own songs and covers from musicians as widespread as the Louvin Brothers and Nine Inch Nails.
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As a consumer note, if there's a link to it in this post, then it's worth checking out. Yo. |
