In post-World War II America, many Appalachian people were frustrated by the lack of economic opportunities in their home communities. Some migrated for better paying work, and Ohio, particularly southwest Ohio, was a leading destination. Bluegrass music was a part of the culture these migrants brought with them. Industrial Strength Bluegrass is a welcome pool of chapters that provides details on the resettling of Appalachian people and bluegrass music in southwest Ohio and on how the music developed in southwest Ohio, which became an important bluegrass location.
The book, well-planned by editors Fred Bartenstein and Curtis W. Ellison, serves both scholars and fans of bluegrass music. It opens with a succinct, twelve-page chapter by Phillip J. Obermiller that sets the Appalachia-to-southwest Ohio population-movement in a wider context of American internal migration. These migrations have generally been south-to-north, motivated by prospects for economic gain. Once settled in Ohio, Appalachian transplants noted cultural differences between themselves and the Ohioans with whom they lived. The Appalachian migrants viewed bluegrass music as an aspect of a shared cultural inheritance.
The Obermiller chapter documenting the internal migration segues neatly into a chapter documenting the experience of one of Ohio’s most famous bluegrass musical migrants, Bobby Osborne. Bobby and his brother Sonny are widely known as the core members of one of the most successful groups in bluegrass history, the Osborne Brothers. In the chapter co-written with Joe Mullins, Bobby Osborne, born in 1931, tells colorful stories about his original home in Leslie County, Tennessee. Bobby recounts homely details of the poverty he experienced growing up; according to Bobby, he saw his first motor vehicle at the age of ten.
Industrial Strength Bluegrass tells many colorful stories about bluegrass figures and situations. But the book presents much more than a series of local-color anecdotes. Anecdotes are woven into the narratives inside the chapters, and communicate something of the personas involved and situations that indicate how participants in the musical community viewed their community. After the chapter about the life of Bobby Osborne, the book devotes chapters to important locations for bluegrass music in southwest Ohio, including venues, radio stations, and record labels. Daniel Mullins writes about his grandfather Moon Mullins, a pioneering bluegrass broadcaster and bluegrass fiddler. The chapter tells us that Moon became a bluegrass broadcaster because, when behind a radio microphone, he did not suffer from the stage fright that gripped him in live performances. It goes on to tell of Moon Mullins’s radio personality, one that endeared him to listeners for decades. More than one chapter references the typical setting for bluegrass music, the bar, which was frequently a rough place. Larry Nager’s chapter, “Early Bluegrass Venues in Southwest Ohio,” contains many colorful stories about brawling barrooms.
Following Larry Nager’s chapter about bluegrass venues, there are two telling pieces reflecting on gospel bluegrass. Fred Bartenstein’s contribution, “Using My Bible for a Roadmap: Sacred Bluegrass Music in the Ohio Valley,” shows how gospel bluegrass in southwest Ohio was a musical entity related to but separate from secular bluegrass music. Then comes a bluegrass gospel case study, “Lily Isaacs, Green to Bluegrass: Reflections on an Unlikely Musical Career.” Lily’s gospel music career was unlikely because she was the daughter of Jewish holocaust survivors. Lily became a folkie songwriter who fell in love with bluegrass gospel musician Joe Isaacs. She became a Christian and had a lengthy career leading the Isaacs, a well-known bluegrass gospel band.
In southwest Ohio and nationally, the early bluegrass audience was largely Appalachian. However, people representing other cultural backgrounds found out about bluegrass and adopted the style. John Hartley Fox’s chapter, “Buckeyes in the Briar Patch: Southwestern Ohio Bluegrass in the 1970s,” describes the influx of non-Appalachians into the bluegrass audience. General audiences caught the music in barrooms that were loud and frequented largely by working-class people, though Hartley tells readers that these bars, in contrast to those of a few decades previously, had bathrooms that worked, good sound, and virtually no threat of violence.
At about the time that non-Appalachian people were discovering bluegrass music, government programs were being developed to preserve the cultural heritage of Appalachian people. Banjoist Rick Good contributes “The Living Arts Center’s East Dayton Roots,” about an arts center that connected students with Appalachian culture.
By the 1970s, Appalachian people were long-established in southwest Ohio communities such as Cincinnati and Dayton. The Appalachian-based culture in Ohio cities had evolved from its roots but bluegrass was still thought to represent it. Nathan McGee, in “Bluegrass Music and Urban Appalachian Identity in Cincinnati,” discusses how musicians developed strategies for locating themselves with respect to Appalachian culture, and how representations of Appalachia appealed to Appalachian people and others.
The final chapter in the Industrial Strength Bluegrass collection is Ken Krakauer’s “Distinctive Qualities of Southwestern Ohio Bluegrass.” According to Krakauer, the din of southwest Ohio barroom performance spaces stimulated a distinctive performing style. While all bluegrass banjoists favor the staccato approach pioneered by Earl Scruggs, Krakauer notices a certain tautness in the approach of many southwest Ohio banjoists, who never expressed the “mid-range depth” of Earl Scruggs’s playing. In addition, Krakauer notes that, while performing in Ohio, Jesse McReynolds brought out a mandolin style modeled on Earl Scruggs’s banjo style, and that Bill Napier and George Shuffler did the same on the guitar. All bluegrass is played with intensity, but Krakauer states that southwest Ohio was home to innovations that responded to the need to play louder and with a timbre to make instrumental playing stand out in noisy barroom venues.
As this reviewer was reading Industrial Strength Bluegrass, he could not help but think that certain of the findings actually represent broader trends. For example, the Krakauer chapter about distinctive properties of southwest Ohio bluegrass finds that the music was played in a way intended to cut through barroom chatter and clatter. However, this characteristic was and is reported widely. Hartley’s chapter about non-Appalachians “adopting” bluegrass music and in the process, changing it, is also a national phenomenon. I was thinking about the usefulness of concepts relating to regional bluegrass, since over the last hundred years, with radio, recordings, television, and the internet, a major story has been standardization. These thoughts are the result of stimulation. If you believe that a purpose of volumes such as Industrial Strength Bluegrass is to stimulate thinking about a subject, then Industrial Strength Bluegrass serves its purpose well.
Because it presents insights from so many areas of the southwest Ohio musical culture, Industrial Strength Bluegrass will be very useful to teachers. The book touches on both secular and sacred bluegrass, the evolution of the music and the communities supporting the music, attitudes of fans and players, and business interests that helped develop the industry. Different writing styles are present, but none of the chapters are written in a style that would challenge too greatly the patience of a casual reader.
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[Review length: 1151 words • Review posted on April 29, 2021]