In The Portable Community: The Quest for Community in Bluegrass Festival Culture, author Robert Owen Gardner brings to bear fifteen years of formal research, as well as long-term participation in and reflection about the culture of bluegrass festivals in the new west.
The new west is viewed as a social, cultural, and economic landscape characterized by record population growth, as well as by economic expansion, including the information technology sector, extractive industries, and commercial and residential development. This combination accounts for difficulty in achieving rooted community life (8).
The major focus of the book is on the portable community that forms around bluegrass music in new west settings. According to Gardner, bluegrass festivals in the new west are locations where participants enact activities they regard as more authentic (truly representing the values of participants) than those in the increasingly commercialized, privatized, and mobile world.
The book begins with the author’s telling of arriving at the annual Telluride (Colorado) Bluegrass Festival. After driving through rural Colorado with bluegrass music playing inside the vehicle, the author describes encountering an old friend and talking about mutual interests. Participants called “welcome home” to each other, and sampled an alcoholic beverage considered traditional at the event. Participants were enacting a portable community they valued greatly.
Page 8 of the introduction includes a five bullet-point description of what is meant by the expression “portable community.” The bullet-point description is concise, but too lengthy for this space. With apologies to the author for any misreadings and incorrect emphases, I’ll summarize by saying that a portable community is one that persons, united by a common interest, self-elect to belong to. Activities of a portable community recur and are managed by participants. Participants hold their actions to be authentic and meaningful, and actions between members reflect the values that members share. The introduction gives additional examples of portable communities, including other recurrent, temporary events such as other outdoor music festivals, conventions, football tailgating, and professional conferences.
Gardner restricts his observations and conclusions to the new west. However, to this reviewer, they ring true for many festivals in the Midwest as well.
The sequence of chapters in The Portable Community: The Quest for Community in Bluegrass Festival Culture is logical, and demonstrates how participants, through personal and electronic communication, create connections between themselves, as well as build a community that represents shared values.
Chapter 1, “Bluegrass Breakdown,” grounds bluegrass music and bluegrass communities in social history. Gardner views the era beginning with the end of World War I as one of change and displacement in Appalachia. Working people in that region were dealing with increasingly pervasive and evolved forms of transportation, communication, and technology, and many left their home regions in order to find work elsewhere. The messages of Appalachian traditional music carried shared values that reflected a prior time. The old songs as well as the bluegrass music that came into existence in the mid-1940s were comforting to both those who stayed in Appalachia and those who left, helping them cope with change.
The United States folk revival of the 1960s and beyond served as a mouthpiece for regional cultures in danger of being overwhelmed by combinations of mass media and mass marketing. The folk revival included bluegrass music as part of its mission, and the earliest bluegrass festivals also positioned themselves as championing a music style that required committed participants in order to survive. Some new west bluegrass festival participants learned of bluegrass through the folk revival.
Many new west bluegrass festival participants view their feelings of social estrangement as a variation on the post-World War I Appalachian displacement. They also view bluegrass music new and old as an expression of earlier and better times. Throughout, Gardner demonstrates that expressions reflecting shared values are frequently refigured aspects of Appalachian bluegrass and Appalachian culture.
Chapter 2, “What Have They Done to the Old Home Place: Family, Home and Kinship in the ‘New’ American West,” shows how new west festivals build on concepts evident in southeastern U.S. bluegrass festivals. On page 43, the section, “Tradition, Kinship, Family,” tells how new west festivals adapt the aesthetic of homespun community from other bluegrass festivals. Examples include artifacts located in the festival space, traditional craft demonstration, reenactors, and words chosen to describe activities. The expression “old fashioned fun” (43) is a telling example. Many times, new west settings seem to use Appalachian bluegrass festivals as a model. New west progressive bluegrass settings reflect the same homemade aesthetic as in other bluegrass festivals, but items displayed at progressive festivals might be made of hemp.
Chapter 3, entitled “Welcome Home: Building Place in the Bluegrass Festival Camp,” shows how festival participants and communities of participants set in motion behaviors that to festival-goers become traditional. For example, many participants camp in the same places year after year and there are certain camps which are themed. Gardner tells of a “Midnight Bacon” camp which is known for cooking and consuming bacon daily at midnight.
Chapter 4 builds on chapter 3. Titled, “Welcome Home II: Building Place in the Vernacular Village,” it shows how the various new west festival camps, all impermanent, are built and rebuilt over the years. There exist stories about how some of the sites acquired their ironic names that reflect community aesthetics and traditions. At any time of year, participants frequently take to social media to inform each other of changes to sites. To participants, actively managing the setting and sharing information about the sites create distinct and meaningful senses of place.
Chapter 5, “Inclusion, Intimacy, and Simplicity in Bluegrass Festival Life,” describes the codes of behavior for new west bluegrass festivals and how knowledge of proper behavior is transmitted among festival participants. The ethic of inclusion is a great example. Beginning on page 110, Gardner commits several pages to a subtlety that encourages the expansion of the new west portable bluegrass community. He notes that these festivals, along with those representing a range of other styles “are designed along consistent and well-established though flexible and informal sets of ‘rules’ and norms that produced a predictable and inviting scene environment across multiple settings” (114). The familiarity facilitates participants’ moving from one festival community to another and experiencing meaningful, communal interaction in multiple locations.
Chapter 6 is called “The Festival World is Much Better than the Real World.” Gardner shows how new west bluegrass festivals are spaces for retreat as well as stages for individuals’ displaying roles and values that participants cannot maintain at settings other than festival settings.
Lyons, Colorado, is the home of the bluegrass festival known as Planet Bluegrass. Lyons suffered severe damage from a 2013 flood. Chapter 7 depicts efforts to revitalize the town, including the work done by members of the bluegrass festival portable community. Gardner views the portable community’s reaction to the flood as “a stage to convey their deep emotional connection to place as they struggled for the town’s identity and soul” (197). Perhaps Gardner included this chapter to demonstrate that although portable communities lack permanent locations, to participants, membership is not frivolous. On the contrary, membership can motivate significant social action.
The Portable Community: The Quest for Community in Bluegrass Festival Culture is an important book for bluegrass because it tells of a contemporary culture surrounding bluegrass music. The author, Robert Owen Gardner, is professor and chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon, and a bluegrass festival participant. This combination equips him well to study the community of new west bluegrass festivals. Through participant observation at several new west bluegrass festivals, notes taken after conversations overheard and participated in, and observations of activities in bluegrass festival settings, Gardner convincingly depicts the forces motivating new west bluegrass festival portable communities.
Frequently cast in roles as advocates of underappreciated forms, folklorists engaged in bluegrass-related work have often focused on telling the stories of those most likely to attract attention to the genre, in other words, the stars of the idiom. There has also been a lot of impressive work on the stylistic evolution of bluegrass music. However, Gardner’s great contribution is in providing a model of investigating the meaning the music has for a contemporary community. Gardner’s insights and methods could be used to investigate other aspects of the bluegrass community. For example, in many places, the bluegrass community includes not only players and audience members but also centers of interest such as serving on committees that manage bluegrass festivals, operating commercial venues presenting bluegrass, writing about the music, and serving on governing boards of nonprofit groups that perpetuate and present bluegrass. As with the activities surrounding new west bluegrass festival participation, all of these activities take place in local places across the American (at least) landscape and are motivated by a combination of affection for bluegrass music and a desire to participate in a community.
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[Review length: 1479 words • Review posted on October 28, 2021]