Big Family: The Story of Bluegrass Music

NARRATOR: The story of bluegrass music isn’t simple.

It’s old and young, traditional and progressive, heartfelt and technical.

It’s the Appalachian Mountains, the big cities, the whole world.

♪ But everyone agrees with Bill Monroe, the father of this music, that "Bluegrass has brought more people together "and made more friends than any music in the world."

♪ GRAHAM: I think of bluegrass as like one of those very sort of ingrained American things like baseball.

LAURIE: I just fell in love with blueass when I first heard it as a teenager.

NED: When Bill Monroe put his band together, he didn’t make that band to play on the front porch.

SAM: To me, Flatt & Scruggs, were the pinnacle of professionalism.

BELA: On came the opening theme and I was like, "Wow, what is that?"

RICKY: To hear a banjo, a fiddle, and bass back there just driving it, and a guitar, you now.

Man, I was liking that.

ALISON: Bluegrass music is a really unique expression of the American spirit.

Not just in the United States, but people in Japan and Europe, and people that you don’t share a common language with.

RAYMOND: People need it, we relate to it.

It’s part of us.

♪ CHRIS: To think that anything could happen to the work of Bill Monroe at this point, is to underestimate the majesty of his accomplishment.

PAUL: But if I’m gonna try to identify bluegrass in one word, it’s authentic.

KRISTIN: Passionate.

DUDLEY: Soulful.

JUNIOR: Heartfelt.

ARTHUR: Pure.

CHAD: Grassroots.

JESSE: Satisfying.

CHARLI: You feel like a friend.

LARRY: It’s true, it’s real.

ABIGAIL: It’s so special.

LARRY: I feel like it’s a privilege.

JUNIOR: It’s a big family.

♪ That shined long ago where I live ♪ ANNOUNCER: Funding for this program is made possible in part by the KET Endowment for Kentucky Productions.

♪ I’ve always been a long shot baby ♪ ♪ Bettin’ on every chance I got ♪ ♪ Tenbrooks said to Molly ♪ ♪ Now, ain’t you ashamed you come from California ♪ ♪ Just to scandalize my name ♪ ♪ I love you forever ♪ ♪ To the end of all time ♪ ♪ What have they done ♪ ♪ To the old homeplace ♪ ♪ Why did they tear it down ♪ ♪ Oh, the people would come from far away ♪ ♪ To dance all night to the break of day ♪ ♪ When the caller would holler Do Si Do ♪ ♪ They knew Uncle Pen was ready to go ♪ ♪ Late in the evening, about sundown ♪ ♪ High on the hill, an’ above the town ♪ ♪ Uncle Pen played the fiddle, Lord, how it rang, ♪ ♪ You could hear it talk, you could hear it sing ♪ ♪ JOHN: Bluegrass music didn’t have to happen.

It wasn’t destined to be.

It just so happened that ♪ most of the Scots -Irish people that immigrated to the United States came to the Appalachian region.

They had the Celtic music that they remembered from home.

But this was the folk music.

It was the music that the folks in the Appalachian region played.

RICKY: That was such a creative part of American culture, how that was coming into being with our Irish-Scottish immigrants coming in, bringing instruments, bringing songs, bringing their broken heart from leaving their families, you know.

Hundreds of miles, thousands of miles away sometimes.

When I dissect the music and look at it and take it from a scientific place, you can see the immigrant crossing, coming into the hills and African-Americans coming up the rivers, from the south with banjos.

♪ BOBBY: The songs that were written back then, they was written about, they were tragic songs.

They were about people that had lost their life in coal mines and cutting logs of timber out in the mountains and things like that.

♪ ♪ I have no promise of tomorrow ♪ ♪ DALE ANN: The bluegrass approach has always been one of the most genuine that I’ve ever heard, not that others are not, but it came from a place, a demographic, you weren’t trained to do that.

What you felt was just as raw, and how you were expressing it was just as genuine, as picking up a handful of that precious dirt that you planted your taters and corn in.

You know, it was just that precious.

♪ ♪ Why did the cow sing slowly ♪ ♪ And why were they feeling so strange ♪ ALISON: Bluegrass music is a really unique expression of the American spirit, I think.

It expresses, you know, the Southern ties to the land.

It was born out of hard times.

It was born out of the moment when industrialization really transformed the Southern way of life.

♪ CHRIS: I think the music comes from a very real place.

It kept people together, it made them happy when they were sad.

It spoke to people that had left them and who had gone to the cities to work and, you know, left people behind.

These are real struggles, real struggles of real people.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: One of those young men leaving the country for the city was William Smith Monroe.

Born on September 13, 1911, he was the youngest of eight children of James and Malissa Monroe, who lived on a farm near the small Western Kentucky town of Rosine.

Rosine is hundreds of miles west of the Appalachian Mountains, but Bill Monroe grew up surrounded by old-time church music and mountain fiddle tunes.

The kind of music that laid the foundation for what would become country and bluegrass.

NEIL: His mother played the fiddle and accordion and sang, and he had an uncle, Pendleton Vandiver, who was very influential in terms of bringing the music to him.

And when he was young, they gave him a mandolin that only had four strings, because they thought he was making too much noise.

He responded to, you know, being kind of put off on the side with an instrument that wasn’t thought of as being as prestigious as the fiddle by developing really impressive technique in playing.

Speed, he was really good.

And he was in a context in which there was a lot of what we now think of or call "old-time" music being performed.

Dances, social visits of one sort or another and it was a situation in which he, being the youngest, he lived a somewhat solitary life in that sense.

NARRATOR: Malissa Monroe died when Bill was 10.

He began spending more and more time with her brother, Pendleton Vandiver.

"Uncle Pen," as the Monroe children called him, was renown in the region as an old-time fiddler.

Monroe would later describe the sweet sound in a song.

♪ Oh, the people would come from far away ♪ ♪ To dance all night to the break of day ♪ ♪ When the caller would holler Do Si Do ♪ ♪ You knew Uncle Pen was ready to go ♪ ♪ Late in the evening, about sundown ♪ ♪ High on the hill, an’ above the town ♪ ♪ Uncle Pen played the fiddle, Lord, how it rang, ♪ ♪ You could hear it talk, you could hear it sing ♪ NARRATOR: By the time Bill’s father died in 1928, Bill was Uncle Pen’s full-time musical protégé.

He spent his teen years learning from a wide variety of musicians, including the area’s #1 music man, a blues guitarist named Arnold Shultz.

♪ In rural Kentucky, as in most of the nation, blacks and whites lived segregated lives in the 1920s but Shultz, an African American who worked in a coal mine by day was welcome at roadhouses, barn dances and even in the homes of well to do whites.

NEIL: Bill and everybody else that started this music grew up in a deeply segregated society.

And the places where African American and white people could get together on any kind of equal footing were very limited.

One of them was music and music making.

In many communities there were connections between people like Bill Monroe, young white musicians, and people like Arnold Shultz, who was a young black musician who was in demand to play fiddle and guitar for dances.

REX: Certainly, I believe that there were blacks and whites who found ways to move together and engage with one another because they shared an interest in and a love of, not just music, but of particular kinds of instruments.

I think the fascination of music and the fascination of creating music and the fascination of the creative experience in being in the company of musicians, I think is exciting in a way that many musicians took advantage of.

That curiosity overwhelmed any cultural boundary that threatened to stand in its way.

NARRATOR: No recording of Arnold Shultz has ever been found, but even today, around Rosine, he’s touted as the best anybody had ever heard, then or since.

And as an influence on Bill Monroe, Shultz is widely credited with putting the blues in bluegrass.

NEIL: Bill Monroe heard from Arnold Shultz, a different way of looking at harmony and music.

MARIAN: We know that Monroe was influenced by black guitar players and black music and yet today many people think of bluegrass as just being, you know, white people’s music and often white males at that.

And I think that there are still some people who have a little bit of that attitude about blues and bluegrass.

That they’re somehow simple people’s music.

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth in terms of the richness and the complexity of the music itself.

ABIGAIL: Something that makes me love bluegrass and old-time music so much are the voices that created it, that lent to it, that made it what it is.

I think we often, just in every part of life, can forget the roots of where things come from.

♪ NARRATOR: Bill Monroe was barely 18 when he boarded a train in Rosine, bound for Chicago.

Like many other young rural Americans in the late 1920s, he sought a better living.

He left to join his brothers, Birch and Charlie, who were working at the Sinclair Oil Refinery in Whiting, Indiana, just south of Chicago.

They could make $30 a week at a time when a farmer might make $6.

Moving to Chicago broadened Bill Monroe’s musical exposure and ambition.

Jazz was sizzling in the dance halls of the South Side.

Families that had come north looking for work in the steel mills, oil refineries, and factories brought their music with them.

As the country fell into a Great economic Depression, there was nothing like music to take peoples’ minds off their troubles.

And music was easier to hear than ever thanks to the fast-growing medium of radio, where live performances could be broadcast over the air for miles.

RADIO ANNOUNCER: The National Barn Dance!

NARRATOR: Bill and his brothers got their show business start on Chicago’s largest radio station, WLS.

Not as musicians, but as dancers on a popular rural music show called the "National Barn Dance."

They also played music part-time at area square dances and as part of package show tours.

Stations across the country were adding the rural sound, "hillbilly music" it was called, to their schedules.

So, in 1934, two of the Monroes, Bill and Charlie, left their day jobs to become full-time musicians.

NEIL: They worked in around the Chicago area and then they moved to Iowa and played there and then they got a contract that brought them down into Appalachian, down into North Carolina.

They begin working in that region and that’s when Bill really ran across the hillbilly music.

Hillbilly music was used to describe many kinds or many variations, you might say, of the music, the old-time music that people were refashioning to fit the commercial music business.

BLAKE: When bluegrass music and country music started out in its early days, most of the stars started out on radio.

They would get the biggest station they could find and audition and get a job on that station.

That show was usually sponsored by a laxative company or a flower company or some sort of a tonic or remedy or something, and that star would play that show 15 minutes every morning.

That did a couple of things.

It taught people how to sell, to be on time, to run the show, to make it the most effective.

Because, they were selling their products and their pictures and their song books on there.

And they were also promoting the shows they were doing that night.

So, they would work the area of that radio station and play drive-in theaters and courthouse squares and just schoolhouses.

And then they’d come back the next morning and was on the radio five days a week.

NARRATOR: The Monroe Brothers soon stood out, even in a crowded field of brother duet acts.

Their blazing tempos, Charlie’s supercharged guitar playing, and Bill’s innovative mandolin arpeggios gave a new dimension to their repertoire of old-time and gospel standards.

The record industry was growing, too, and in 1936, a talent scout for RCA Victor sent them a telegram.

"We must have the Monroe Brothers on record, stop.

"We won’t take no for an answer, stop.

"Answer requested."

♪ Over the next two years, Bill and Charlie Monroe recorded 60 songs for Victor’s hillbilly and string-band label, Bluebird.

The 54 songs released as 78s included fast and furious old-time favorites, "Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms," "Nine Pound Hammer Is Too Heavy" and "New River Train."

But their biggest seller was the first release, two classic gospel tunes marked by mournful harmonies, "What Would You Give in Exchange for Your Soul" and "This World Is Not My Home."

♪ Many friends and kindreds ♪ ♪ Has gone on before ♪ ♪ And I can’t feel at home ♪ ♪ In this world anymore ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: In 1938, based in Greensboro, North Carolina, the brothers split, each forming their own groups.

Charlie stayed in North Carolina.

After stints in Arkansas, and then Atlanta, where he formed a duet with a talented 19-year old guitarist/singer named Cleo Davis, Bill returned to North Carolina.

He told Davis he was going to expand the band and call his group "Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys."

"I’m from Kentucky, you know, where the bluegrass grows, "and it’s got a good ring to it," he said.

It would be decades before anyone would call the music "bluegrass," but the sound was coming together.

Monroe hired a fiddler from North Carolina named Art Wooten and jug player/comedian Tommy Millard.

He brought in Amos Garen on stand-up bass, an unusual addition to "hillbilly music."

And Monroe, himself, started singing more solos in his high nasal voice.

He was going for his own style, one that blended old-time standards with blues numbers, yodel duets and gospel.

And he knew exactly where he wanted to go with it.

To Nashville, Tennessee, home of the top country music radio program in America.

"The Grand Ole Opry."

♪ DEL: Bill Monroe used to kid me and at the boys in the band.

He’d say "You know WSM?"

The big radio station there Nashville.

50,000 watts, clear channel, man going as far as you can (laughing) envision, you know, on a Saturday night.

That was a big deal back in those days, that Grand Ole Opry, still is, but back then you know it was big radio.

Anyway, Bill said, "You know what that stands for don’t you?"

I said, "No."

"William Smith Monroe, "that’s where they got them call letters."

(laughing) But they didn’t.

(laughing) NARRATOR: WSM stands for "We Shield Millions", the motto of the National Life and Accident Insurance Company, which launched a radio station in Nashville in 1925.

By 1939, when "Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys" rolled into town seeking an audition, the Grand Ole Opry, WSM’s Saturday night country music show, was already an American institution.

It was tough to get on, and a regular spot was by invitation, only for performers deemed worthy of Opry "membership."

JOE: By the time Bill and the Blue Grass Boys made it to the Grand Ole Opry, it was heard on terrestrial radio in 30-plus states and still is on AM 650 from Nashville.

But they were attached to the NBC radio network for many years in those early days, when radio was the king of entertainment, when everybody had that big radio in that living room or that radio next to the kitchen table.

There weren’t televisions and there weren’t phonograph players automatically in every home.

And that radio connected music of all kinds to America and it was powerful when Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys were heard on that radio.

♪ NARRATOR: The Blue Grass Boys opened the Opry program just five days after auditioning.

Monroe turned the band loose on his high-speed reworking of what was already a country music classic, "Muleskinner Blues."

Jimmie Rodgers had recorded the song back in 1930, but Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys gave it a fresh burst of energy.

A cheering audience demanded an encore, and even the stars waiting in the wings backstage took note.

This band sounded different.

They also looked different.

Instead of the homespun costumes many Opry entertainers chose, they wore shirts and ties, a dressed-up look that, like many things Bill Monroe was doing, would soon be emulated.

KELSI: Bluegrass music is a very sophisticated music, I think, much more than what people give it credit.

You know, all the way from the way bluegrass people from the very beginning dressed to I think the way they conducted themselves professionally.

You’ve got Bill Monroe, who never stepped on stage if he wasn’t in a suit.

PETER: He felt that there was a dignity to his music.

And he actually said this to me, he said, "Pete, most of my audience have been farmers.

"They don’t have dress up clothes."

And he said, "If you could come and play for those folks "dressed up like you really cared "how you presented yourself to them, "they didn’t see it like it was a... "showing off."

Bill felt that that showed respect to his audience.

("Original Blossom Special" by Bill Monroe) NARRATOR: A 1941 recording session that included the fiddle showpiece "Orange Blossom Special" was the Blue Grass Boys’ last time in the studio for a while.

A musicians’ union dispute had pretty much shut down the recording industry even before America’s entry into World War II created a shortage of the shellac resin used to make records.

The war also created a shortage of musicians as many young men were drafted or enlisted.

Still, Americans were eager for entertainment, so Monroe and the band kept up a rugged schedule of driving to performances all over the southeast, then heading back to Nashville for their regular Saturday night Opry slot.

Audiences found a way to get to the shows, too.

In 1943, Billboard magazine noted that a family showed up for a Blue Grass Boys performance in Danville, Virginia, in a farm wagon towed by a tractor.

"Gas rationing for pleasure cars has got us," the fan was quoted, "But we can get plenty of tractor gas."

NEIL: The music that Bill Monroe, and many of the others he worked with were playing was based on the traditional music that they’d all grown up with.

But it was what I call a progressive music.

That is, they were trying to add new things to make it new, to make it different, to create a repertoire that was distinctive for themselves, that would draw audiences to them, that would sell their recordings, would make radio stations interested in having them on the radio because they were doing something that was in one way familiar, but in another way new and groundbreaking.

NED: There’s an argument to be made that bluegrass music was originally meant to be a commercial music.

Now there was string band music, there was old-time music that was going on with people entertaining themselves.

But when Bill Monroe put his band together, he didn’t make that band to play on the front porch.

He created that band to go on to put on a show, to play on a radio station, to play in front of people and charge a ticket price.

He would come to town, put up a tent, they would have a revival meeting.

I mean it was a commercial enterprise.

NARRATOR: In 1942, Monroe added a fellow Kentuckian, David "Stringbean" Akeman to the band.

"Stringbean" was primarily a comedian but Monroe also wanted him because he had played semi -professional baseball.

To promote the Blue Grass Boy’s performances, the enterprising band leader had added pre-concert baseball game challenges against local teams.

These barnstorming games continued into the late 1940s, sometimes with minor league or semi-pro players accompanying the Blue Grass Boys to play ball and help set up and take down the music show.

Akeman’s third contribution was somewhat understated but ultimately instrumental to the bluegrass sound.

He played banjo.

This folk instrument, with its origins in Africa, evolved out of the musical traditions of enslaved peoples.

♪ REX: There is a direct correlation between the trans-Atlantic slave trade, especially as it moved from Africa to the Caribbean into North America and the banjo.

Somewhere around 1774, it’s mentioned in Maryland, 1775, it’s mentioned by the Virginia Gazette, in Virginia.

And then in 1781, Thomas Jefferson mentions it in a book that he wrote called "Notes on the State of Virginia" where he talks about the banjo as the "instrument most proper to blacks."

And he says, "they brought it hither from Africa."

It changes in its name, you hear names like akonting, like ngoni, like halam.

Then in the Americas you hear banjar, you hear banjung, so it an instrument that transforms as it moves from one diasporic point to another diasporic point coming finally into the Americas.

♪ NARRATOR: The banjo became a widely used stringed instrument and was especially popular in the Appalachian Mountains and the South.

By the early 20th century, a five-string version was a standard part of old-time music with many regional styles of playing.

The addition of the banjo, along with accordion and a second guitar, gave the Blue Grass Boys’ music a fuller sound when the group went back into the studio in 1945 to record "Rocky Road Blues," "Footprints in the Snow," "Blue Grass Special," and an original Monroe song, "Kentucky Waltz."

Later in 1945, a veteran guitarist and singer joined the group.

Like Monroe, he had grown up on a farm, as part of a musical family.

His name was Lester Flatt.

♪ Linda Lou ♪ ♪ She is a beauty ♪ ♪ Those pretty brown eyes I loved so well ♪ ♪ I’m going back to old Kentucky ♪ ♪ Never more to say farewell ♪ ♪ I’m going back ♪ NEIL: Lester Flatt joined Monroe and he was just one of, you know, a number of country hillbilly singers who had been active on radio starting in the late 30s that Bill knew about.

In fact, Lester worked first with Bill’s brother Charlie, played mandolin with Charlie and sang with him.

So, he’s another example of a musician Bill knew about and the time came when he needed a guitar player and lead singer and there was Lester Flatt.

NARRATOR: Flatt had a smooth, syncopated guitar style and was happy to serve as emcee onstage.

He and Monroe’s voices harmonized well.

But Flatt thought Stringbean’s style of banjo picking was dragging down the group’s fast numbers.

When Akeman left, Flatt hoped the banjo sound would go with him.

However, after he heard 21-year-old Earl Scruggs audition, Flatt told Monroe, "If you can hire him, get him, "whatever it costs."

♪ BOBBY: And I asked Flatt, I said, "What did you think "when you when you first seen Earl Scruggs "and heard him play Dear Old Dixie like that?"

I said, "What went through your mind?"

He said, "I never heard nothing come out of a banjo "in my life like that right there.

"Never heard nothing sound like that."

NARRATOR: Earl Eugene Scruggs grew up in a musical family in North Carolina.

His mother played pump organ, his father played banjo and all five children learned to play a little on the various instruments around the house.

In North Carolina, the banjo was king, and Earl was a prodigy.

He developed a distinctive three-finger technique, and he played fast and flashy.

For Scruggs’ debut on the Grand Old Opry, Monroe chose "White House Blues," a song that showed off the young man’s lightning speed.

The audience went wild.

BELA: It was completely unexpected.

People are just freaking out.

They’ve never heard anything like it.

You can hear some of the recordings and you just hear the audience going bizerk, like it was The Beatles on Ed Sullivan.

That’s the modern reference of an audience going berserk.

Well that was what was going on.

JOHN: Here’s just this very quiet, stayed fella standing on stage, vibrating his hands a little bit and this tremendous new sound is coming out.

But he had been influenced by some of these folks around this area, Snuffy Jenkins and, I guess Pappy Cheryl, and some of these other folks.

BELA: Two finger picks on his first and second finger, he had a thumb pick, and he would rotate them like this.

(pleasant banjo strumming) Sounds pretty fast, but what you realize is that no finger is moving much faster than that if you watch my hand closely.

(strumming tune) Maybe like that.

It makes it possible to play incredibly fast.

He figured out how to do incredible things with that style and the impact was amazing.

All of a sudden, everybody wanted to learn to play like Earl Scruggs.

ALISON: As a banjo player, I’ve always enjoyed pushing the envelope.

To me, there’s a deep tradition of that in banjo to begin with.

And Earl Scruggs, when he kind of coalesced his style and brought that out, that was a huge revolution for the instrument.

JOE: When the announcers introduced Bill and the Blue Grass Boys in 1946 and ’47, they started saying, "featuring Earl Scruggs and his fancy banjo."

I’d say that was the shot heard around the world when Scruggs hit the Opry stage with Monroe.

DEL: The pieces were all there before Earl came and he was the last piece and that was the one they needed for that music.

Because he could play tempos up there with that mandolin, you know.

That fast stuff, hard driving, and all that.

That’s what put the spark in it, you know?

And they should have, they might have patented it, I don’t know.

We oughta look that up, hadn’t we?

(laughing) NARRATOR: Patent or no patent, the Blue Grass Boys instrumental lineup of the late 1940s served as the blueprint for a musical revolution, defining the classic bluegrass quintet sound for generations to come.

♪ I always try to do what’s best ♪ ♪ I mostly done the opposite ♪ ♪ Feeling good, but a little too slow ♪ ♪ Tripping on your doorstep as I go ♪ ♪ MARIAN: So, if you were to use the strict definition of a five-piece bluegrass band with an acoustic, and that has to be emphasized, acoustic bass, banjo, guitar, fiddle, and of course mandolin.

Because where would Mr. Monroe be without the mandolin?

But that is essentially the classic bluegrass sound and the classic bluegrass band.

JON: There’s a three-part division where you have the singer or soloist, who at the moment that they’re singing or taking a solo, is standing right in front of the mic, and then you have a rhythm section, you know, flat top guitar, and the bass kind of furthest in the back providing a bed of sound.

And then in between you have somebody playing back-up, accompanying the singer or the lead instrumentalists who’s taking a solo.

There’s a sort of secondary ornamentation, a variation and support role.

So, you have this kind of three levels.

DAROL: It’s perfectly formed, every instrument in the band has a very set role to play.

When everybody plays together, it’s an incredibly exciting sound.

The instruments combine in a way that it’s just magical.

It makes a huge, powerful sound.

♪ You have the banjo, which is rolling through everything.

The banjo is defining... It’s like, (vocalizing beat) ♪ NOAM: When I hear bluegrass banjo play, it just sounds elemental to me.

It’s just such a perfect sound on the instrument.

Nobody invented these elements.

They were always there, it just took the right person to find them.

♪ Mama talked to me last night ♪ DARLO: You don’t have a drummer, so everyone is playing rhythm all the time in some form.

The guitar is playing this kind of implacable and rolling sound.

♪ There’s more pretty girls than one ♪ DAROL: Bass is like the drum really, it’s a combination of bass, and bass drum is playing, "bam, bam, bam."

Very short notes but that really anchor the music.

♪ MAN: Yeah!

DAROL: The mandolin is usually, if it’s not playing a solo, is being the snare drum.

Is hitting the back beat.

♪ And then the fiddle, of course, is floating over everything, just tying everything together.

It’s like the spackle and paint.

♪ ♪ If you don’t need me ♪ ♪ There’s someone else needs me out there ♪ ♪ She’s kind and tender ♪ ♪ And one day I’ll meet her, I swear ♪ ♪ So set me free while I’ve still got time ♪ ♪ Don’t try to hide your shame from mine ♪ ♪ If you don’t want me ♪ ♪ I’ll dry my tears and move on ♪ DAROL: Vocals kind of remind me of just about every folk tradition where people sing high.

The vocals are high.

You’ve got to sing as high as you can when you sing bluegrass, partly because you’re trying to get heard over this incredible wash of sound.

These instruments are powerful.

People sing high and so you get that nose thing.

You get it up here and you go... (mimicking nasal singing) But if you listen to traditional music from all over the world, when people sing, they’re not trained by anybody.

You sing and you sing up, sing high.

You get up here, "I’m singing."

And that’s beautiful because it really goes back to an older place that people have been doing for thousands of years.

♪ Another whiskey with tears ♪ ♪ Please, Mr. Bartender ♪ BELA: When I first heard bluegrass singing, it sounded kind of like cats being slaughtered.

And that probably wasn’t a smart thing for a Yankee to say, but I also love the singing and came around to a point.

It’s like coffee, when you first taste coffee, and it’s kind of bitter, like hearing Bill Monroe sing sometimes.

It can be like a bitter taste, but once you start drinking it, that bitter starts to get good to you and all of a sudden you need coffee all the time.

Bluegrass can be like that for people too.

♪ ♪ Everybody knows ♪ ♪ You’re leaving me for good ♪ RICKY: There’s a real uniqueness about bluegrass style singing and especially with harmony.

You know, the brothers duets, that’s been around a long, long time.

People were singing that way forever.

A lead vocal then the third above that is the tenor part.

(singing in harmony) Then there’s a third part called the baritone.

And doing this beautiful, just nasty old mountain sound that is just the best of all best.

♪ Some day when my last line is written ♪ ♪ Some day when I’ve drawn my last breath ♪ ♪ When my last words on earth have been spoken ♪ ♪ And my lips are sealed in death ♪ PETER: It has its own tonality.

It’s not like Barbershop parts, right?

It’s like they meld into this sound where you can’t really pick out one voice over another.

It just goes right for the heart.

♪ My spirit, by then, will have fled ♪ EUGENE: I don’t think there’s another music, perhaps jazz in some ways does it, but there’s not another music when you listen to it, that has got such strength with something like the vocals, and light and shade in the vocals.

And then you’ve got the instruments coming in and out and providing strengths and weaknesses and taking leads and stopping and not playing.

So, it’s that whole package of music that draws people in.

♪ ♪ I jumped an open freight car ♪ ♪ Thought that would be all right ♪ ♪ ’Till the brakeman caught me sleepin’ ♪ ♪ In the middle of the night ♪ CHRIS: The bluegrass band, the ensemble, is just genius.

It’s so brilliant.

LARRY: Because there’s no smoke and mirrors in bluegrass music.

You’ve got four or five guys standing on a stage in front of microphones.

That’s it.

JIM: At its best, you really feel something when you hear it.

From joy to sorrow, to an almost mystical religious experience.

GRAHAM: And it doesn’t matter what setting you put it in.

If you put it in a festival, if you put it in a symphony hall, if you put it in a barn, you know, it still...

It still has the same immediacy to it.

Which is what really hit me first with bluegrass, is just those instruments and the voices just right there, there’s a real person playing it, and they’re bearing down and giving it everything they’ve got.

♪ CHRIS: What we love about bluegrass, I think, is that explosive creativity.

It keeps happening in this way that we can reference it back to the foundations of the genre.

♪ Won’t you twist your head around ♪ ♪ And talk some more to me ♪ (crowd cheering) NARRATOR: Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys’ sound reverberated throughout the country music world in the 1940s, particularly in the South, and soon other groups began making names for themselves.

NEIL: The Stanley Brothers had grown up in rural Virginia and were playing old time music.

Ralph Stanley played banjo in a two-finger style, rather than the three-finger style.

The two of them were veterans.

They had just come out of the service in 1946 and started their band.

They hired a mandolin player named Peewee Lambert who was a real fan of Bill Monroe’s and in that combination, they began moving their music toward the sound of Monroe.

Ralph Stanley actually took banjo lessons from Earl Scruggs.

How many, I don’t know.

It may have been just, "Can you show me what you’re doing?"

kind of thing.

But there was contact there and the upshot of it was that Ralph Stanley began playing in a style like Scruggs, the three-finger style, so this was the first one of the first bands that really tried to copy Monroe’s style.

NARRATOR: By 1948, the Stanley Brothers and their band the Clinch Mountain Boys had a regional hit with "Little Glass of Wine," a duet by Carter and Lambert, and its flip side "Little Maggie," which featured Ralph’s singing and banjo playing.

They inadvertently aroused the ire of Bill Monroe when they recorded the traditional tune "Molly and Tenbrooks," which they had heard the Blue Grass Boys perform.

They didn’t know that Monroe had also recorded the song, but his version had yet to be released.

Monroe was so angry that he left the Columbia label in 1949 when it signed the Stanleys, saying their sound was too much like his.

Monroe and the Stanleys later reconciled, even sharing the stage together.

And the Stanley Brothers would go on to become one of the most enduring groups in bluegrass, not only shaping its classic sound but taking it across genre and generational lines.

♪ By the late 1940s, the bluegrass family tree had put down roots in America’s musical consciousness.

For musicians, the growing audience for Monroe’s style of music meant opportunity.

Jim and Jesse McReynolds were another pair of Virginia brothers influenced by Monroe’s sound.

They started performing together professionally in 1947, and played together for 55 years, longer than any other brother duet act.

In 1948, two of Bill Monroe’s most popular Blue Grass Boys were ready to branch out.

Giving their notice two weeks apart, first Earl Scruggs and then Lester Flatt, left the Blue Grass Boys to start their own band.

NEIL: Really, I think both Flatt and Scruggs were kind of weary, burnt out from all the travel that band was doing.

They would be traveling almost without end.

They would have to get back to the Grand Ole Opry Saturday night, so they’d be driving hundreds of miles and we are talking a landscape in which there are no super highways.

It was not an easy job and you’d be sleeping in the clothes you performed in.

NED: Flatt and Scruggs, when they left Bill Monroe’s band, they did it largely for commercial reasons.

They thought we can probably make a better living playing our own music, and they were proven right.

They were huge.

They became pretty big stars in the music world on their own from that.

PETER: Finally, when the story comes down to it, it wasn’t Bill who broke the bond with them.

It was it was they who left him looking for some success of their own.

And I can say from my personal experience, standing next to the fire that was Bill Monroe is, you either get burned or you get the fire, and you want to do something on your own.

Because of his passion.

He said, "You’ve got to love the music "and sing it "so that the people will love it the same way."

NEIL: People sort of assume that the moment this happened Bill was upset because his "goose that led laid the golden egg" had left.

But I don’t think that’s the case.

Many good musicians had worked with Bill and left him and gone on to careers, solo careers, on their own.

When they were traveling, he would be listening to the radio.

He kept a little book of names of musicians.

If someone left, he had people in mind to call.

NARRATOR: Bill Monroe hired more than 150 musicians between 1938 and 1996.

In the 1930s and ’40s alone, at least 38 different musicians played in the Blue Grass Boys.

Some stayed only a few months, others for years.

So many went on to later form their own music groups that a stint with Monroe has been called "a school of bluegrass."

♪ But few Blue Grass Boys had gained as much attention during their tenure with Monroe as Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt.

Monroe, one of the top Opry stars, used his influence to keep Flatt and Scruggs off the Opry.

They weren’t even given an audition.

Nonetheless, Flatt and Scruggs continued to rise in the ranks of country music, attaining the full symbol of stardom in 1953, when they gained a major corporate sponsor, Martha White Flour.

In 1955, at the company’s insistence, they were admitted to the Grand Ole Opry.

NEIL: Martha White saw Flatt and Scruggs a band that would sell flour.

And yeah, they were doing better than Bill Monroe.

Their records were selling better.

They started to get charted hits and then they moved into television.

♪ Now, lookie here, Sal ♪ ♪ I know you rundown stockin’ and a worn out shoe ♪ ♪ Honey, let me be your salty dog ♪ SAM: If you ever see any replays of their old shows, they all look right at the camera.

The camera’s their friend.

Especially with Flatt and Scruggs.

We’d just be sitting at home thinking they’re playing just for us.

♪ To me, Flatt and Scruggs were the pinnacle of professionalism in front of the cameras.

They taught us all how to, kind of, do it.

SAMMY: I can still remember just the look of that stage presentation.

You know, in the suits and the hats.

And I just remember old Scruggs being so dynamic.

♪ NARRATOR: Flatt and Scruggs had honed their own distinctive sound and like Monroe, were shaping the future dreams of young banjo players and songwriters.

As well as the course of American popular music.

♪ Honey, let me be your salty dog ♪ ♪ (motor rumbling) NARRATOR: From the stage of the Grand Ole Opry and a small recording studio in Memphis to row houses in Baltimore and parks in Greenwich Village, many musical changes were underway in America in the 1950s and the style that would become known as bluegrass played a role in all of them.

PETE: New York is not a hotbed of bluegrass by any stretch.

Except, maybe one in a million people took it really seriously.

The main thing though is you go down to Washington Square Park in the Greenwich Village.

They had fought their way to getting a permit every Sunday, two to six and I’d take my banjo and walk over from the subway station and there’d be people playing bluegrass.

Really good musicians, and I would get in these sessions with them and get to know them a little at a time.

NEIL: The American Banjo Scruggs Style came out on Folkways Records based in New York City.

That’s really the thin edge of the wedge for bluegrass coming to folk music audiences.

The audiences were young, were college students.

They were interested in this music but didn’t know much about it and they started looking for the records and over a period of four or five years began to pick up the music and try to learn it themselves.

(muffled folk singing) RAYMOND: A lot of people across the country who might never have heard bluegrass or old-time country music or traditional music became not only exposed to that music, but came to love it.

LAURIE: I was raised in Berkeley, California which is where I still live.

I just fell in love with bluegrass when I first heard it as a teenager.

When I was maybe 14, I went for the first time to the Berkeley Folk Festival and it just opened up a whole world to me.

NEIL: And wherever you had a folk festival, you had the programming that included bluegrass.

♪ Now look at that ♪ ♪ Cold Jordan ♪ ♪ Look at its deep waters ♪ ♪ Look at that wide river ♪ ♪ Oh hear the mighty billows roll ♪ NEIL: Flatt and Scruggs and The Stanley Brothers were invited to the Newport Folk Festival first in 1959.

And, again, they appeared in the early ’60s.

The first appearance of a bluegrass band at a college was The Osborne Brothers at Antioch College in 1960.

NARRATOR: Bobby Osborne and his younger brother Sonny were born in Eastern Kentucky, Bobby in 1931 and Sonny in 1937.

Their family moved to Dayton, Ohio in the early 1940s, and seeing the Blue Grass Boys perform in 1947 inspired them to play music.

By 1949, Bobby was performing with the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers in West Virginia.

In sixth grade, Sonny convinced his father to buy him a banjo, and turned out to be a prodigy.

He played in Bill Monroe’s band in 1951 and 1952, the youngest Blue Grass Boy ever.

♪ ♪ Oh ♪ ♪ Ruby ♪ ♪ Ruby ♪ NARRATOR: The brothers’ career playing together took off in 1956, when they got a recording contract with MGM and released the single "Ruby," an innovative arrangement of an old mountain tune.

Like most second -generation players, the Osborne Brothers loved the traditional sound, but weren’t afraid to modify it.

♪ ♪ I’ve done all I can do ♪ BOBBY: One time I tried my best to play like Bill Monroe, but once I got around him I found out in a hurry that there’s only one Bill Monroe.

So, I never tried to play like him again.

I played like I felt it ought to go.

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, the Osborne Brothers.

♪ ♪ Up this hill and down ♪ ♪ And up this hill again ♪ ♪ Up this hill and down ♪ ♪ Up this hill again ♪ NEIL: They began developing their unique singing style and took advantage of Bobby’s singing.

They developed a vocal trio in which his voice was at the top of the trio mix.

What they call a "high league trio."

And that’s really what made them distinctive.

(crowd applauding) ("Rocky Top" by the Osborne Brothers) ♪ Wish that I was on ol’ Rocky Top ♪ ♪ Down in the Tennessee hills ♪ ♪ Ain’t no smoggy smoke on Rocky Top ♪ ♪ Ain’t no telephone bills ♪ BOBBY: We recorded many, many records of that type of harmony.

It’s paid off for us down through the years, and mine and his career, he and I were together for 50 years.

It’s made me what I am today.

♪ Good ol’ Rocky Top ♪ ♪ Rocky Top, Tennessee ♪ NARRATOR: The Osbornes were popular with both bluegrass and country fans and had a major hit with "Rocky Top" in 1968.

Like a growing number of younger performers of the time they were willing to experiment with amplification and adding instruments, such as electric bass and drums.

Not all bluegrass fans approved.

The first time Sonny played an amplified banjo at a bluegrass festival, someone cut the cord.

A great debate had begun, "to electrify or not to electrify."

TERRY: The Osborne Brothers, the main thing is how they took bluegrass farther.

I mean they basically were the first ones to combine bluegrass and country music.

I mean they grew up bluegrass and that, and they got to the Opry and that but they combined country music too.

I mean they put steel guitar on the records, electric guitar, drums and it worked.

NEIL: 1965 is the key turning point.

That’s when Bob Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival.

It’s also around the time when lots of young people who had been playing folk string band music started to electrify.

The Beatles come on the scene and then the next thing you know you’ve got The Byrds and The Lovin’ Spoonful.

♪ They’re former folkies who have become Rock n’ Rollers.

♪ Rock n’ roll ♪ NARRATOR: A full decade before The Beatles performed on the Ed Sullivan Show, Bill Monroe’s music was influencing a new generation of American rockers.

In 1954, Sun Records in Memphis, released the first single by a young singer from Tupelo, Mississippi, Elvis Aaron Presley.

One side featured the old blues tune, "That’s All Right Mama."

On the flip side was a rendition of Bill Monroe’s "Blue Moon of Kentucky."

Presley and other early rockabilly stars such as Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly, and Johnny Cash had grown up idolizing Bill Monroe and his progressive sound, but Presley’s version of "Blue Moon" was a new, stoked up take on the gentle waltz that Monroe had recorded in 1946.

Monroe’s reaction was far different than when the Stanleys had recorded Molly and Tenbrooks.

This wasn’t imitation, it was innovation.

Monroe also didn’t mind the songwriting royalty checks that started to pour in from sales of Presley’s record.

NEIL: Presley only performed on the Grand Ole Opry once, as a guest, and it was right when that single came out.

And Monroe told the story more than once of meeting Elvis backstage and Elvis coming to him and apologizing for changing his song.

Monroe told Presley that he didn’t have any problem with that.

"That’s fine" if he could use his music, that is Bill’s music, to advance his career.

Bill was happy for him.

He thought if people used his music, they ought to do like Elvis did and make it different.

And so he was pleased with that.

In fact, he went into the studio very soon after and recorded his own version of "Blue Moon of Kentucky" in which he starts as a waltz and then ends up in the 4/4.

♪ He sort of embodied the change that Elvis had made.

NARRATOR: Rock and roll changed the shape of country music.

Commercial success became more difficult for traditional country and bluegrass performers.

But good new music was still being added to the bluegrass canon.

JIM: With the growth of rock and roll it really put a damper on things commercially in bluegrass but then, you know, it found its own way.

NARRATOR: During this period, singer and guitarist Mac Wiseman, a veteran of both Flatt and Scrugg’s and the Foggy Mountain Boys and Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, had a string of enduring hits, including "Tis Sweet to Be Remembered," "Little White Church" and "Shackles and Chains."

In 1952, banjo player and guitarist Don Reno and guitarist "Red" Smiley and their band "The Tennessee Cut-Ups" recorded "I’m Using My Bible for a Road Map."

In 1956, they released "Country Boy Rock and Roll" and what would be their most popular song, "I Know You’re Married But I Love You Still."

♪ I know you’re married but I love you still ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Bluegrass would survive its commercial challenges with help from unexpected places.

Like the nation’s capital.

A rich bluegrass music scene had developed in the Baltimore-Washington DC area by the 1950s through performers like Mike Seeger, Hazel Dickens, and Alice Gerrard.

One of the biggest stars to come out of the area was Del McCoury, who spent a stint with Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys in the early 1960s before going on to form his own band.

Another influential act was the Country Gentlemen.

In 1957, guitarist Charlie Waller, who had been playing off and on in bars in the area, teamed up with banjo player Bill Emerson and a young mandolin player and singer John Duffey.

By 1960, what became known as the group’s "classic" lineup was in place, Waller and Duffy, with Eddie Adcock on banjo, and Tom Gray on bass.

The group’s comic adlibbing and other on-stage antics, along with its open-minded approach to the music, they were the first bluegrass band to cover a Bob Dylan song, broadened the audience for bluegrass in the 1960s.

"We’re not mountain boys," Duffey noted, "We’re gentlemen."

Several members went on to continue their progressive approach to bluegrass in the 1970s, teaming up with banjo player Ben Eldridge, dobro player Mike Auldridge, and guitarist John Starling as the Seldom Scene.

Meanwhile, on the West Coast, TV and the movies couldn’t get enough of the mountain boys.

BRISCOE: Ya bring your stringin’ instrument, Sheriff?

ANDY: I didn’t think we’d have time for any music.

BRISCOE: You got time to breathe, you got time for music.

And a one, and a two, and away we go.

NARRATOR: Bluegrass music was woven into the plotlines of two top 1960s comedy series.

The Dillards, a bluegrass band from Salem, Missouri, were regulars on the "Andy Griffith Show."

♪ A good ole man ♪ ♪ He lived below the mill ♪ ♪ Dooley had two daughters ♪ ♪ And a forty-gallon still ♪ NARRATOR: Flatt and Scruggs made cameo appearances on the "Beverly Hillbillies."

The show’s theme song, "The Ballad of Jed Clampett," was the first bluegrass recording to reach #1 on the country charts, as well as the only #1 hit of the legendary duo’s career.

JOHN: It’s hard to imagine in the 21st century that there was hillbilly television, but there really was.

And that brought Flatt and Scruggs up to a new level that no bluegrass act had been.

BELA: The first banjo I heard was Earl Scruggs on The Beverly Hillbillies and it was a very unusual sound for me, because I was just a New York City kid.

TV ANNOUNCER: The Beverly Hillbillies.

♪ BELA: And on came the opening theme and I was like, "Wow, what is that?

"That that is so cool."

And I said so to my brother.

He said, "What?"

It didn’t even register for him.

But I was one of the ones that it was like a whole new world for, just hearing that sound.

♪ Boil them cabbage down, down boys ♪ ♪ Turn that hoecake brown ♪ ♪ The only song I ever did sing ♪ ♪ Is Boil Them Cabbage Down ♪ NARRATOR: Bluegrass was also showcased on popular ’60s variety shows.

The widely respected fiddler, composer and banjo player, John Hartford, was a regular on both "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" and the "Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour."

On an episode of the Goodtime Hour, Campbell teamed up with Hartford, Don Lineberger, Roni Stoneman, and two of his comedy writers, Mason Williams and a 24-year-old named Steve Martin to play a six-banjo version of "Cripple Creek."

(faint "Cripple Creek") In 1967, bluegrass made it to the big screen.

Warren Beatty, who had become interested in bluegrass while in high school, chose the Flatt and Scruggs’ song "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" as the signature musical backdrop for the film Bonnie and Clyde.

("Foggy Mountain Breakdown") DAVE: My very, very first meeting with bluegrass was the film Bonnie and Clyde, which was "Foggy Mountain Breakdown."

And I sat in the audience and I heard that banjo, "Wow, what’s that?"

I’d never heard it before.

JOHN: That recording of "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" was huge.

It was on pop radio, it was on rock radio, it was on country radio.

And it seemed like the inescapable song of that year.

And so again Flatt and Scruggs is in people’s minds and bluegrass music.

There’s not much more bluegrass than "Foggy Mountain Breakdown."

And even to this day, people... if they see somebody playing a banjo they’ll holler out, "Bonnie and Clyde!"

They don’t even know the name of the song but they’ve got the reference to the movie.

("Dueling Banjos") ♪ Not too long after, guess it was ’72 or ’73, "Dueling Banjos" was the same sort of thing from the movie "Deliverance."

♪ It’s like a little ratchet-effect each time bluegrass gets in the public eye.

It’s never been a mass media complete sensation, but I sense a difference now that I don’t have to explain to people what bluegrass is.

If I say I’m involved with bluegrass, "Yeah, I like bluegrass."

They couldn’t name a bluegrass artist, but their reaction is "Yeah, yeah bluegrass, that’s cool."

e way people, kind of, were about reggae maybe 20 years ago.

"Yeah, reggae, I know about reggae."

And hey, I’ll take that.

If bluegrass is something everybody’s got to be able to say they know about, that’s a major victory.

LAURIE: Every time there’s a movie that comes out that uses bluegrass in the sound track, that seems to make it get really popular again.

Which makes me think that maybe the only problem with bluegrass and popularity is that people just don’t get a chance to hear it in the mainstream.

When they do, they really respond to it.

NARRATOR: By the mid-1960s, the term "bluegrass" was more than a nickname for Bill Monroe’s home state of Kentucky and more than the name of the band he had led since the late 1930s.

It was now widely used to refer to a style of music.

Disc jockeys and serious scholars were among those to first use the term.

In a 1959 Esquire magazine article, the esteemed ethnomusicologist, Alan Lomax, anointed bluegrass as "the first clear cut orchestral style "to appear in the British-American folk tradition "in 500 years."

Bill Monroe was also getting his due as its originator.

A 1962 RCA Victor Camden album of his early recordings was titled "The Father of Blue Grass Music."

The reference stuck, especially after Labor Day weekend, 1965, when the first multi-day bluegrass festival took place in Fincastle, Virginia.

♪ Kyper Kyper you’re not A-ridin’ right ♪ ♪ Molly’s beatin’ old Tenbrooks clear out sight ♪ ♪ Clear out of sight O Lord clear out of sight ♪ NEIL: The first bluegrass festival was really clearly to honor Bill Monroe.

And this is when Bill Monroe starts to accept the idea that he’s the "father of bluegrass."

Carlton Haney has a portion of his first festival, and every festival for many years after that, called "The Story of Bluegrass."

In which he reenacts Monroe’s many changing bands, brings in the people who play with Monroe over the years and dramatizes, like a theatrical reenactment, of the growth of Monroe’s music.

It shows Monroe as being the father of all this and these people are his children.

Bill Monroe had been active in the music business since the early ’30s.

The first published interview didn’t appear until actually 1963 when Ralph Rinzler’s interview in "Sing Out Magazine" appeared, that’s the first interview with Bill Monroe in his career.

So Rinzler was really the one who convinced Monroe what he was doing was leading a special style of music.

JOHN: Carlton Haney, who’s one of the most colorful figures in the history of bluegrass, had the idea to book this pasture land that a local farmer owned and host a three-day bluegrass festival outdoors.

And it was so influential that for probably a generation and a half, all bluegrass festivals were held on somebody’s farm.

And all he did was put up a very rudimentary stage and he hired the biggest names in bluegrass at the time, in 1965, and they just performed back-to-back sets throughout the three-day weekend.

We take it so for granted now, but the notion that you could see the top stars of bluegrass all in one place over the course of three days was, well it just didn’t exist, it was unheard of.

NEIL: Notably, Flatt and Scruggs were not involved in this and they were the most popular group, but Monroe was at the center of it.

Word of mouth played a big role in those early years.

People have this experience of coming to the festival.

Not only that, the festival was not just something that had things happening on stage, it also had people camping out.

Jam sessions, workshops.

Together it was an event unlike just a show or a concert.

It was an appealing new kind of experience.

And the word spread and for every one person, there were ten back home who heard about it from them and came back.

So you had the first festival, and the second festival, much larger audience and people get the idea, "Well they have a festival in Roanoke.

"Why don’t we have one in Bean Blossom?"

♪ NARRATOR: Monroe started his own annual festival, "Bean Blossom," on property he owned in southern Indiana, in 1967.

Across the U.S., and around the world, festivals proliferated, drawing increasingly diverse musical programs and audiences.

A "Newsweek" article called the 12,000 people and 25 big-name bands expected at the 1970 Bean Blossom festival a "surprising cross -section of America."

"There was good fellowship," the article noted, "a "Thereeenaiepostfarnd thepiesn the article noted, would become one of the sustaining hallmarks of bluegrass music.

JOE: Well, the bluegrass festivals a mti p causrafear hepan They brought in new songs and a new attitude.

JOHN: I don’t know that this is true, but I’ve heard people say that the inspiration for the Woodstock festival, the rock festival, was these early bluegrass festivals in the mid-60s.

Now the bluegrass festival is the lifeblood of the industry.

Most people that come to learn about bluegrass, I’ll bet, find it at a bluegrass festival.

It sounds like fun, why don’t we pack up the kids and take a 30-min trip outside of town and we’ll go to a bluegrass festival.

Now it’s gotten to be where many municipalities around the country host downtown festivals.

♪ They’re outdoor festivals but instead of being in a rural environment, they’re right in the middle of cities.

ALISON: When I was growing up in California, the big bluegrass festival in Southern California was basically held in a cow pasture.

Recently there’s been festivals come up that are just in more urban settings.

That have a very different flavor to them.

Again, it just speaks to the universal appeal of bluegrass music.

That it can speak to such demographically different audiences.

It can just be at home at different kinds of campuses too.

SAMMY: Over the past 20 years, there’s festivals who have become like the mega festivals and they also bring in more diverse music than bluegrass in order to draw those crowds.

But it gives the bluegrass people opportunities to get in front of that many people and try to get in that many more households that you weren’t in before.

We work on average 60 to 70 festivals a year.

40 of those are going to be festivals of 2,500 people or less.

CHRIS: I think the notion that it’s a geographically -constrained music I think been, you know, destroyed.

It really has evolved.

♪ Was born in Kentucky ♪ ♪ I was raised in Tennessee ♪ ♪ When I get them blues ♪ ♪ You know, I fall down to my knees ♪ ♪ Tell me, how long ♪ ARTHUR: So if you’ve never been to a bluegrass festival, you can buy a ticket, you can show up, bring your own beverages.

You can introduce yourself to the people sitting next to you and they’ll be nice to you and wonder where you’re from and why you’re there and what’s your favorite band.

You can walk around the campground, find something to eat, find a place to sit in the shade and hear some good music by people that aren’t performing at the festival.

And then become friends with them.

And if you’re lucky enough to go to that same festival the next year, odds are most of those people will be exactly where they were the last year, doing the exact same thing with most of the same people.

♪ KRISTIN: All these people are here on purpose.

They sought the music out.

And so, you’re sharing it with people who love it as much as you do.

And that makes for a perfect group of people to play for if you’re one of the bands, because they really do want to listen and hear and they love it and they enjoy it.

So, I think it’s the greatest audience ever to play to.

JOE: Quite traditional for a bluegrass artist to leave the stage and within just a few minutes show up at a merchandise table where they’re selling their recordings and their CDs and autographing pictures.

Most bluegrass artists do that do it with a lot of passion.

JERRY: Bluegrass music is the only genre, that I know of, that I’ve seen, where the fan has such access to the performer.

They’ll offer to cook you a meal.

You know, when was the last time Mick Jagger had a home cooked meal on the road?

(laughing) CHARLI: Your fans can walk up to you and say hello and feel like they’ve known you.

I think that it’s a big deal for bluegrass.

You feel like a friend and it’s like a family.

NARRATOR: Many young American music icons of the 1960s and ’70s were pulled by the twang of bluegrass at some point in their careers.

Jerry Garcia played banjo before becoming famous as a guitar player for the "Grateful Dead."

He never lost his fascination with bluegrass.

In 1973 he formed a group called "Old & In The Way" with Peter Rowan, Vassar Clements, David Grisman, and hn Kahn.

For decades, their self-titled album was the best-selling bluegrass LP.

Chris Hillman played mandolin before taking up electric bass in the West Coast folk/rock group "The Byrds."

Levon Helm of "The Band" said that seeing the Blue Grass Boys perform when he was 6 years old got him hooked on music.

For other talented young musicians of the time, bluegrass wasn’t a stop on a journey elsewhere but a place where they wanted to stay but in a time of American cultural and generation changes on their own terms.

Like Bill Monroe, Sam Bush grew up on a farm in Kentucky and started playing mandolin as a boy.

In 1970, he joined "Bluegrass Alliance," a group based in Louisville, Kentucky, that was popular in area clubs and on the festival circuit in the late 1960s.

Bluegrass Alliance was a proving ground for a new generation of players with long hair and adventurous musical ideas.

At various times its lineup included fiddler Lonnie Peerce, guitarists Dan Crary and Tony Rice, banjo players Courtney Johnson, Buddy Spurlock, and Bela Fleck, and singers Vince Gill and John Cowan.

Bluegrass Alliance was one of the first groups to use the term "newgrass" to describe its progressive sound.

Bush and other former members took the term with them for their 1970s group "New Grass Revival."

♪ ♪ This heart of mine ♪ ♪ Is made of silver ♪ ♪ This heart of mine is made of gold ♪ ♪ It will shine like a candle ♪ ♪ When your world is dark and cold ♪ ♪ When your world is dark and cold ♪ JIM: They really kind of shook the world, not just of bluegrass, but the musical world.

SAM: The spring of ’71 rolls around and it’s like we got our reward, we got to play at some bluegrass festivals.

I think the first one that year, we went to somewhere in Illinois.

We did that, and then we got to go up to Bean Blossom.

We were invited to play Bill Monroe’s Bean Blossom Festival and that was such a highlight for us, because the band did really great at the festival.

Plus, we got to talk with Bill more and be around him.

And I remember he took us up to his barn and showed us his two white mules, Tennessee Tom and Kentucky Kate.

For us to be standing in the barn with Bill Monroe telling us about his mules, we felt like we were in a pretty privileged position.

We hoped to play Bean Blossom 1972 and Bill wouldn’t invite us.

He just told people he didn’t want the long hair and stuff at his festival.

So, we went up anyway and just jammed in the parking lot all weekend.

(laughing) NEIL: You have to look at it from the point of view of the New Grass Revival to be told that you can’t perform because your hair is too long.

It may have been a way of encouraging their audience to say, "Okay, they’re doing their thing "and their right to be standing up for what "they’re doing is the right way."

And Monroe is being reactionary.

It’s a kind of "punk" thing in some ways.

JOHN: There was a real thing going on between people our age that were playing "newgrass" music and the older guys who were playing traditional bluegrass.

Some of the older artists said, "Well, if you hire those hippie boys.

"We’re not going to be there.

"We won’t play if you hire them."

And that really hurt.

In terms of the culture, I think it really was reflected in what was going on in bluegrass at that time.

We go through the Civil Rights movement.

We’ve got Vietnam going on.

And I know in my own home in those days, it was "us" versus "them."

Them being our parents and people their age.

But I think it was exacerbated by what was happening culturally at that time.

It was reflected in music, it was reflected in how we looked, what we talked about.

♪ There were some other bands that were up to what we were up to, which was trying to take this traditional art form and bring our own experience to it.

We were playing rock n’ roll songs with bluegrass instruments.

♪ Ain’t that peculiar ♪ ♪ A peculiar-arity ♪ ♪ Ain’t that peculiar ♪ ♪ Peculiar as can be ♪ NARRATOR: Musical innovators like New Grass Revival’s Sam Bush and Bela Fleck would have a lasting impact on the genre, ensuring that the adjective "progressive" would forever be linked to the term "bluegrass."

SIERRA: Sam just has this unbelievable sense of rhythm that the rest of us just really wish we could have, and I mean he’s such a great lead player too, but something about his chop and his rhythm, really I think just sets him in this place that we all wish we could get to.

If you’ve never seen him play, he’s totally a rock star.

♪ LAURIE: What I love about Sam is he is really steeped in what came before in bluegrass.

He really listened and is a student of early bluegrass.

That kind of ear and that attention to the tradition and then not being afraid to just mess with it and take it somewhere else, is what’s so wonderful about a player like Sam Bush.

JOHN: I often think if New Grass Revival was a young, hungry band right now, they would be a massive hit.

I’ve noticed, watching performances today, how many banjo players, young banjo players play very much in the style Bela Fleck pioneered for New Grass Revival.

It’s just considered the norm, the way my generation learned to play banjo like Earl Scruggs and Ralph Stanley.

It’s just what you did.

Now they’re doing Bela Fleck banjo.

♪ JOHN: We kind of made our own audience, is really what happened.

We tried to contemporize a traditional form of art.

And I meet young musicians all the time that talk to me about this New Grass record or that song and I get treated with deference and respect and that’s nice.

It kind of heals that hurt that I had at that time.

So now it feels like, yeah, what we did was good.

♪ ♪ Ooh-wee, ride me high ♪ ♪ Tomorrow’s the day that my bride’s a-gonna come ♪ NARRATOR: Disagreements over the bent of the music caused rifts in the bluegrass family in the 1960s and 1970s, but it also created exciting cross-generational collaborations.

Flatt and Scruggs parted ways in 1969.

Flatt wanted to stay traditional, while Scruggs went on to perform with younger contemporary musicians such as Bob Dylan, the Byrds, Joan Baez and Linda Ronstadt.

The name of his 1972 album captured his desire to bridge two generations.

It was called "I Saw the Light with Some Help from My Friends."

Scruggs was among the pantheon of musicians young and old who joined "the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band" on the groundbreaking 1972 three-album set "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," helping recruit such legendary performers as Mother Maybelle Carter, Roy Acuff and Merle Travis for the project.

JOE: They were all together with "the Dirt Band" for that first "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" album and again it was another big boom for bluegrass.

A big bang to bring in new audience and expose quality bluegrass and roots music to the whole world.

I’ve heard some of the Dirt Band guys say Mabelle Carter called them "the dirty boys", but affectionately.

To bring that type of young energy alongside guys like Jimmy Martin and Earl Scruggs.

It was an exciting time of growth.

JOHN: And you know, back in those days, if you’re a musician, when you got records you would just sit there and stare at the cover and you’d read who the musicians were and where the recorded it.

JEFF: You got Earl Scruggs, you got "Scruggs pickin’."

You got Merle Travis, you got "Travis pickin’."

You got Mabelle Carter.

These folks were all like Mt.

Rushmore quality folks to us.

We spent six days in the studio.

It was a wild ride and we were hanging on for dear life.

You know, keeping up with these brilliant musicians.

They were so gracious and welcoming, but we were scared to death and also really happy.

It’s like Christmas every day in studio.

("Old Home Place" by J.D.

Crowe and the New South) ♪ ♪ It’s been ten long years since I left my home ♪ ♪ In the hollow where I was born ♪ ♪ Where the cool fall nights make the wood smoke rise ♪ ♪ And the fox hunter blows his horn ♪ NARRATOR: The evolution of bluegrass was further reflected in another pivotal album of the decade, "J.D.

Crowe and the New South," released in 1975.

James Dee Crowe grew up in Lexington, Kentucky.

As a 12-year old he was transfixed seeing Flatt and Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys perform, and he was still a teen when Jimmy Martin, the esteemed guitarist and vocalist known as the "King of Bluegrass," recruited him for the "Sunny Mountain Boys."

When he formed his first group in 1961, Crowe’s hard-as-nails playing style and impeccable timing fused the influences of first-generation bluegrass with his own varied musical interests.

In January 1975, Crowe went into the studio with a brilliant ensemble of rising bluegrass players.

Joining him were two other young Kentuckians, mandolin player Ricky Skaggs and fiddle and bass player Bobby Slone, plus guitarist /vocalist Tony Rice and a guest dobro player named Jerry Douglas.

Their material, traditional songs alongside new compositions by up-and-coming songwriters such as Gordon Lightfoot and Rodney Crowell, represented what bluegrass music writer Marty Godbey called "the great convergence."

The album became widely known as simply "Rounder 0044."

A reference to its number in the Rounder catalog.

Rounder Records, itself, represented a new era and important development in bluegrass.

The label was founded in 1970 in a Boston suburb by Ken Irwin, Bill Nowlin, and Marian Leighton-Levy, three college friends.

It was a collective, shoestring operation and the time was right for a label with a policy of allowing artists to maintain artistic control.

♪ RICKY: But that first 0044, as everybody refers to it, the geeks, you know.

That was an amazing record.

That influenced so many young bluegrass artists.

It was just a very influential record and it was such a short-lived band.

(laughing) ♪ SAMMY: J.D.

Crowe was an influence on every banjo player, I think, through the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s.

He took what Earl Scruggs did and took it to another level, I think.

And every player takes bits and pieces of what they learned from all their influences and puts it together and makes their own style and then J.D.

definitely did that.

J.D.

: I got a lot of influence from different instruments, because I always liked different types of music.

I never liked just one type.

I liked different kinds of music.

If it’s good, it’s good, you know.

I did take a lot of guitar riffs.

The blues style.

I did listen to the old Southern Blues, Southern Gospel.

And I took different things.

I listened to saxophone players, piano players, steel guitar players.

And I’d pick notes or riffs from their instruments and adapt it over to the banjo and it worked.

♪ Now old man Hicks, he owned the farm ♪ ♪ From the hog lot to the barn ♪ ♪ From the barn to the rail ♪ ♪ He made his living by carrying the mail ♪ ♪ BELA: Even the modern guys, you know, worship at J.D.’s feet.

♪ You know, because he’s got this, this sense of timing and he plays the old stuff in a way that feels so fresh and so honest.

In a way, he plays like a blues man.

He took that Scruggs style and he made it his own and he found these things that he could do better than anyone else could do.

(applauding) ♪ DAN: Jerry Douglas, he’s an innovator.

I mean he was on the record that first made me really, really want to play.

I mean that the J.D.

Crowe and the New South record.

For me, at that time, that was a new instrument.

I wasn’t real familiar with it, but I was fascinated with it.

I feel like Jerry did for the dobro, to a degree, what Earl Scruggs did for the banjo.

JERRY: Dobro is now an integral part of bluegrass music.

Compared to what it was when I started, there’s a dobro player in practically every bluegrass band you see that has mandolin, fiddle, banjo, that kind of thing.

And they’re so good.

It’s amazing how many of them there are and how far they’ve taken the level.

♪ NARRATOR: By the early 1980s, Nashville was big on bluegrass.

Nightclubs like the Station Inn and Exit In packed in the fans, and some of Music City’s biggest stars were young musicians who had gotten their start in bluegrass.

Kentuckian Ricky Skaggs was one of them.

Long before he played with the Country Gentlemen and J.D.

Crowe, a 6-year-old Skaggs had played and sang onstage with Bill Monroe.

At age 7, he performed on television with Flatt and Scruggs.

As teenagers, he and guitarist Keith Whitley, another young Kentuckian, were invited by the Stanley Brothers to join the Clinch Mountain Boys.

Skaggs and other performers such as Whitley, Emmylou Harris, Jerry Douglas, Marty Stuart and Vince Gill, were viewed as country artists as much as, if not more than bluegrass.

But the reverence they showed for the pioneering bluegrass sound brought many new young fans into the fold.

In 1984, Skaggs’ cover of Bill Monroe’s song "Uncle Pen" hit number one on the country charts.

To promote Skaggs’ next album "Country Boy," his record label wanted to produce a music video in which he plays a country boy turned New York City executive.

His stern old Uncle Pen comes to town to chew him out for getting above his raising.

Though in his 70s, Monroe was still recording and performing.

"Would Bill Monroe be in the video?"

the director asked.

"Could he act?"

Well, Skaggs said, "He can do the chewing out part real good."

Any doubt that bluegrass was a distinct genre of music to be taken seriously vanished in the 1980s, when universities began to establish formal courses of study.

East Tennessee State University launched a Bluegrass, Old-Time and Country Music Studies program.

Kentucky’s Morehead State University and Boston’s Berklee College of Music would follow suit in adding traditional music programs.

In 1985, the International Bluegrass Music Association, IBMA, was formed.

The organization launched World of Bluegrass, an annual trade show and awards program.

PAUL: The World of Bluegrass, our one-week big event, we’ve been holding now for 30 years, brings together so much of what we do.

LARRY: It brings us all together for a week.

You’ve got everyone here from television, to radio, booking agents, other musicians.

Bands from all over the world.

We’re all one big family.

♪ PETE: Some of us grew up in cabins on farms and a lot of us didn’t.

But here we all are and we all play this music and we all know a lot of the same songs and we can jam together even if we’re from different parts of the world.

And that’s exciting.

KAIA: I think that when we’re talking about how to make bluegrass more inclusive or how to move bluegrass forward.

I think that it’s a really powerful thing that you have the link of music to form sort of the base of discussion.

NARRATOR: In 1989, further cementing bluegrass’ rising and independent status, the Grammy Awards added bluegrass as an award category separate from country music.

The first bluegrass Grammy gave a nod to the genre’s paternal foundations, going to Bill Monroe for his album Southern Flavor.

Two years later, the award went to an album called "I’ve Got That Old Feeling."

Despite the title, this was definitely new-time bluegrass by a new-time star.

Allison Krauss.

A woman.

Women have always played bluegrass music.

Accordion player Sally Ann Forrester and bass player Bessie Lee Mauldin were two of Bill Monroe’s "Blue Grass Boys."

Alice Gerard and Hazel Dickens were influential songwriters in the Baltimore-DC bluegrass community of the 1950s and 1960s.

And women were at the heart of some of bluegrass’s most famous family acts, like Miggie, Polly, and Janis Lewis of the Lewis Family, the first bluegrass group devoted exclusively to gospel.

And Patsy, Donna, and Roni Stoneman, who forged new instrumental territory for women.

By the 1970s and ’80s, more and more women were leaders of the bluegrass bands.

Gloria Belle, Laurie Lewis, Claire Lynch, the Buffalo Gals, Betty Fisher, Rhonda Vincent, and then came Alison Krauss.

♪ Two highways lay before me ♪ ♪ Which one will I choose ♪ ALISON: It was a real watershed moment when she came on the scene.

And I think that Alison really opened the door, but created a real point of accessibility for the mainstream, when she started to rise up out of bluegrass.

JOHN: All through the history of bluegrass, people in the industry have been hoping for an artist who could really transcend bluegrass and still bring it along with them.

Alison Krauss has done that.

NARRATOR: Krauss, born in 1971, studied classical violin as a child but by age 13 she was a champion fiddler.

As a teenager, she listened to a variety of music but said that hearing Rhonda Vincent brought her to bluegrass.

Krauss soon caught the attention of Rounder Records, producing a solo album and a second album with the group "Union Station."

She was 19 when she won her first Grammy and went on to cross multiple musical genres to become the most awarded musicians of all time.

Bluegrass had a woman superstar, and plenty of other young women took note.

♪ When you don’t say a thing ♪ KELSI: My very first introduction to bluegrass was Tony Rice and after that my dad bought Alison Krauss’ "Lonely Runs Both Ways" album and that was the turning point for me.

I knew that was what I wanted to do.

I wanted to sing like her but not to sound like her.

I wanted to sing in the way that she makes you feel exactly what she’s singing.

♪ There’s a truth in your eyes ♪ ♪ Saying you’ll never leave me ♪ ♪ The touch of your hand says you’ll catch me ♪ ♪ If ever I fall ♪ LAURIE: When I first started playing bluegrass professionally, there were not very many women.

It was sort of a man’s field.

I’m really happy to say that it has changed a lot since then.

KATIE: I think there’s still some growing to do with bluegrass music.

But it has come a long way.

If you look at festival bills now, you can certainly see a lot more women on it than there was say 20, 30 years ago.

MARIAN: It’s kind of amazing to think about that evolution of women in bluegrass because, of course, it has continued.

I mean now people like Alison Krauss and Alison Brown have had a 25 or 30-year career, and there’s a whole new generation of younger women who have come along as great songwriters, as great instrumentalists, as great new voices.

Becky Buller, as a fiddle player and a songwriter.

And of course, Sierra.

She’s the first female mandolin player to win the IBMA Mandolin Player of the Year Award.

♪ ♪ PAUL: I think one of the exciting parts of our music right now is watching how women are leading bands.

They are really putting their voice to the music.

They’re front and center in many respects.

("Gypsy Jubilee" by The Bankesters) RHONDA: The whole lesson is that if you want to play on the same court as the guys, your skill level has to be equal to that or as good or better and make sure that you have your singin’, your songs you pick, the style that you’re doing, and make sure if you want to be here, make sure you have everything in play that’s going to be able to move into that situation.

ALISON: When I was growing up playing banjo, that was an unusual thing for a female to do.

It’s still unfortunately more unusual than it ought to be, but people would always say, "You pick good for a girl."

It was just their way of being polite.

It would be easy to make them swallow their words when you look at the great achievements of women in the genre, especially over the last 20 years.

I like to think back to my banjo sisters from a couple centuries ago, of which there were quite a few.

MISSY: Many, many battles have been fought since I came into making a living playing bluegrass.

And so, today it’s a completely different world.

And a generation below me is finding a completely different environment than I did.

BECKY: There’s a place for anybody in bluegrass music regardless of color, creed, gender, whatever.

There’s a place for everybody, it’s a very inclusive music.

It’s kind of almost a secret, in a lot of ways.

And yet, as we’ve been talking about.

It’s all over the world if you know where to look for it.

♪ ♪ Let me be your salty dog ♪ ♪ Or I won’t be your man at all ♪ ♪ Honey let me be your salty dog ♪ JOHN: It’s fascinating to me that bluegrass has become a truly international art form.

There are some just plain terrific Japanese bluegrass bands.

But in the 60s, when they were first really making bluegrass happen over there, most of the bands were singing in English with phonetic approximations of what they heard on the records.

MICHIO: That is 1961, when I was in the first grade of University.

I heard FEN, means Far East Network.

That is American armies network, radio program.

So, me and my friend heard every day some country music hour and they would pick one or two bluegrass tunes, I recorded it, and then I played it numerous times.

SABURO: When I was like 14, my bther pushed me to play guitar.

I heard that sound, Earl Scruggs, picking the banjo.

I still remember those years, Vietnam War still going on.

And those service men, they cry, I mean, yeah, when we play that Appalachian music.

I saw this kind of music touch heart of the people.

I don’t know those words in English, but I still feel the connection of mountain music and my banjo and bluegrass.

SAMMY: Back in the ’60s and ’70s, the big folk movement created a market in Japan for bluegrass.

Flatt and Scruggs went, The Stanley Brothers, Ralph Stanley, and J.D.

Crowe and the New South toured over there a bunch.

J.D.

: We went to Japan in 1975.

We were over there for like ten days and I think we played eight concerts, and out of those eight, every one of them were sold out.

It was just encore after encore.

They wouldn’t let us quit.

We had to come back three or four times.

I mean, that was a great feeling, you know.

I really didn’t want to come back to the US after playing in Japan.

(chuckling) JERRY: Bluegrass in Japan, at that point was at its peak, and I remember running to the car after the concert and people trying to rip our shirts off and things like that.

It was like real "rock god" mentality, you know, over there.

It was a strange thing that I haven’t really had happened to me since.

BLAKE: Bill was huge in Japan.

They love bluegrass over there.

There’d be people waiting for him at the airport.

♪ JEFF: When we toured Japan, the second time, think 1974, Vassar came along with us, Vassar Clements.

When we got off the airplane, they were like, it’s funny, this has really only happened to us really once or twice ever, but they treated us like The Beatles.

We’re walking down the ramp, there’s these people with placards and screaming teenagers and off to the side is a whole lot of young Japanese music fans with Vassar’s picture on it.

NARRATOR: Japan’s love of bluegrass inspired the country’s own musicians and led to a thriving roster of festivals and traditions.

CHRIS: There’s a bluegrass subculture in Tokyo.

There’s something about that music that touched a lot of people over there who weren’t even fluent with the language.

(speaking Japanese) ("Gonna Raise a Ruckus Tonight" by Bluegrass 45) ♪ Come along, everyone come along ♪ ♪ While the moon is shinin’ bright ♪ ♪ We re gonna have a wonderful time ♪ ♪ We’re gonna raise a ruckus tonight ♪ JOHN: I think "Bluegrass 45" was the first Japanese bluegrass band to get much attention here in the United States.

They were all native Japanese people who developed a fascination with the music, learned how to play it.

And they were something of a hit back home, but when they came to the United States they were just embraced immediately, because audiences recognized that their English skills were, you know, they weren’t native speakers.

They were very entertaining on stage.

They had copied a lot of the stage antics from the Country Gentlemen, who were really popular at that time.

They just were eager to please and they were so excited to be in the United States playing bluegrass music.

It was palpable and you couldn’t help but love watching them.

SABURO: I started Takarazuka Bluegrass Festival, which is still going on.

I think it’s the 3rd oldest bluegrass festival in the world.

This year we have 120 bluegrass band play at my festival, so every 10 minutes, you have only 10 minutes for 3 songs.

From 8:30 in the morning until 2AM.

♪ (speaking Japanese) ♪ ALISON: So, one of the things that kind of tells you that bluegrass music is a great music is the fact that people from other cultures have embraced it.

People that you don’t share a common language with.

If you share that bond of bluegrass music with, they’re friends for life.

It’s very, very special.

("Blue Moon of Kentucky" by Bluegrass 45) ♪ Blue moon of Kentucky keep on shining ♪ ♪ Shine on the one that’s gone and proved untrue ♪ ♪ Blue moon of Kentucky keep on shining ♪ ♪ Shine on the one that’s gone and left me blue ♪ RAYMOND: Bill Monroe said "the sun never sets on bluegrass music."

He was very proud of the fact that people all over the world loved bluegrass music.

♪ Say goodbye ♪ ♪ Blue moon of Kentucky keep on shining ♪ ♪ Shine on the one that’s gone and said goodbye ♪ EUGENE: You’re getting a sort of almost like a European bluegrass feel.

You’re getting people who are writing their own songs.

Who are writing them in their own language.

The place that you’d say is the center of bluegrass music in Europe, because of the sheer number of people who play it, is the Czech and Slovak Republics.

They took on bluegrass music and have developed it ever since.

And in fact, right now, we have got one of the best banjo manufacturers in the world, who supplies many parts for US manufacturers.

JAROSLAV: If I will play banjo and on the opposite side of me will stay some banjo player or somebody who likes the banjo sound.

He will understand me.

You don’t need the words, you can just speak with the music.

MARTINO: We think that bluegrass is a universal language.

So, we will never be able to sing like someone from Kentucky or from West Virginia.

We never will pick a banjo like from North Carolina or a mandolin from Tennessee, but that’s what sets us apart.

♪ ♪ JOSH: You know, Japan, America, different country, but when we play or you listen and play music, no nationality, the same.

When I play music, I feel love for other people.

So, nationality has nothing to do when me and you get together.

JOHN: I wish Bill Monroe could still be alive to see how what he started back in the 40s has become this large international music form.

And he did live long enough to see that start.

He saw Japanese musicians.

He toured in Japan and in Europe, but I’m sure, even though he might say he knew it all along, he couldn’t have imagined that "Okay, this is gonna be it, "this is going to be everywhere!"

♪ NARRATOR: Bill Monroe gave his last Opry performance on March 15, 1996.

After suffering a stroke.

he died on September 9th, two days shy of his 85th birthday.

His New York Times obituary praised Monroe as the creator of a revolutionary fusion of American music and noted that he lived to see bluegrass become "the bedrock of a tradition that survives "among enthusiasts around the world."

("Man of Constant Sorrow" by Soggy Bottom Boys) As the 21st century began, bluegrass got one of its biggest boosts ever into the consciousness of mainstream America with the release of what Billboard magazine called "the flukiest movie soundtrack ever."

"O Brother, Where Are Thou?," a 2000 film by the Coen Brothers, was set in the 1930s.

The T-Bone Burnett produced soundtrack of period-style music brought together a spectacular roster of old-timers and new-timers, from Ralph Stanley and John Hartford to Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch.

The film starred Kentuckian George Clooney.

♪ I am a man ♪ ♪ Of constant sorrow ♪ ♪ I’ve seen trouble ♪ ♪ All my day ♪ DAN: You know, the weirdest thing in the world for me was getting the job as George Clooney’s voice.

I remember being excited that I was gonna get to do this voiceover.

I remember calling home to tell my wife at the time that I got a voiceover.

She says, "Oh, Dan, that’s great!

A voiceover.

"What is that?"

And I went on to explain, I said, "Well, when you go to the movies, "you’re going to be looking up at George Clooney "on the big screen but you’re gonna be hearing "my voice coming out."

And without hesitation she said, "Dan, that’s my fantasy!"

♪ Oooooh ♪ ♪ Death ♪ NARRATOR: The soundtrack to "O Brother" defined the nature of 21st century bluegrass.

Unbound by age and demographics.

Connecting generations.

And full of surprises.

Ralph Stanley enjoyed a remarkable late-career revival.

His chilling acapella performance of "Oh, Death" for the soundtrack led to a Grammy.

He continued recording and performing well into his 80s, attracting the largest audiences of his long career.

♪ None can excel ♪ ♪ I’ open the door to heaven or hell ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Steve Martin, the young banjo player who once wrote for the Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, returned to his love of music after a wild and crazy career in films and standup, even creating an annual prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass to recognize artistry and innovation.

Old tracks and new share the spotlight in contemporary bluegrass, just as love for music of the past shapes a new future.

♪ Well I’ll never ♪ ♪ Grow old ♪ ♪ I’ll never ♪ ♪ Grow old ♪ Come on, keep it going.

♪ No, I’ll never ♪ ♪ Grow old ♪ CHRIS: There’s no question that bluegrass is expanding and growing, both in terms of the audience, the pure audience, but also the bands that are playing it, and the type of stuff that they’re playing.

And in some ways, I think bluegrass as a term is actually a limiting factor, because it brings with it certain connotations of what people might expect.

But the reality is that you’ve got young folks from cities, from the south, from the north, from jazz schools, from classical schools, from rock and roll fans coming and using these instruments to make new kinds of music.

Is that bluegrass?

I don’t know?

RAYMOND: My father used to say, "the most consistent thing "about tradition is change and evolution."

And it is.

And it was that way when bluegrass music began.

All these influences on Bill Monroe showed up in the music.

It’s the same way today.

CHRIS: Copying Bill Monroe, for instance, is the quickest way to not be like Bill Monroe.

Bill Monroe did not sound like anyone.

♪ Bluegrass is starting to sound like America, I think.

You think about how America was formed.

All these different people coming here.

And still, all these different people coming here.

It’s everyone.

And that’s what’s amazing about it.

(people laughing) I think bluegrass is starting to sound like that.

DAROL: Bluegrass doesn’t really know necessarily what kind of music it is and that’s part of its charm.

Is it art music?

Is it pop music?

Is it honky tonk?

What is it?

It’s all these things rolled up into one.

It’s a little bit of rock and roll.

♪ ♪ SIERRA: It doesn’t bother me if somebody wants to put a label on my music.

Because in some ways, I understand the need.

We’re all just, kind of, searching for a way of understanding something.

And I know sometimes people want to hear, "Oh, it’s bluegrass."

But if I say its bluegrass, the very thing that I think of when I think of bluegrass music, isn’t necessarily what I do.

PAUL: It really is an amalgamation of sounds that have come together.

You can still hear the blues in our music, you can still hear the mountain sound in the music.

JIM: The future of bluegrass is in great hands, because there are so many super talented young pickers and singers and writers that it seems to be a growing genre of music and the love of it is spreading.

KAIA: The reason I’m in love with bluegrass is because I think that there’s such a free form to it.

I think that there is so many opportunities for it to grow and it almost gives me goosebumps to think about you know what the next 100 years will bring.

♪ GRAHAM: The level of musicality these days in bluegrass is mind blowing.

I think it is taking the music to all these different directions.

ABIGAIL: It’s infectious, the love for it.

I think it really connects to people across the spectrum of socio-economic classes too.

It really connects to people who grew up in the countryside.

It connects to people who grew up in the cities.

It connects to almost everyone I know.

It’s not that everyone listens to it, but those that do, that open their ears to it, they really feel the connection to humanity through the pain, the struggle, the joy of the music.

RAYMOND: The future of bluegrass music is secure because it’s good music and because people need it, we relate to it, we all... It’s part of us.

NARRATOR: Rosine, Kentucky was the town that Bill Monroe left.

Today’s it’s the town that people go to by the tens of thousands to better know the farm boy who sparked a musical revolution.

♪ In Rosine, they can visit the Bill Monroe Museum and the restored Monroe Homeplace.

Nearby, in Owensboro, the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and Museum honors all generations of bluegrass music.

Its grand opening in 2018, drawing stars and fans of all ages, was like one big family reunion.

Nobody doubts that there is such a thing as bluegrass music, but musicians and fans alike are still debating exactly where bluegrass starts and stops.

That’s not likely to change.

Amid the disagreements though, people who play and listen to bluegrass manage to get along, connected by pride and love for this American-born music and a devotion to its future.

♪ That’s what families are like.

♪ That shined long ago where I lived ♪ ♪ Oh the people would come from far away ♪ ♪ They danced all night till the break of day ♪ ♪ When the caller hollered do-si-do ♪ ♪ You knew Uncle Pen was ready to go ♪ ♪ Late in the evenin’ about sundown ♪ ♪ High on the hill and above the town ♪ ♪ Well Uncle Pen played the fiddle ♪ ♪ Lordy, how it would ring ♪ ♪ You could hear it talk, you could hear it sing ♪ ♪ ANNOUNCER: Funding for this program is made possible in part by the KET Endowment for Kentucky Productions.

♪ ♪ BE MORE PBS - When you say the word PBS, immediately quality comes to mind.

And not just quality, but a massive cultural diversity.

Everybody here in the United States gets a look at a global culture, which is phenomenally presented.

(bright music) What makes PBS so strong is that it is a product of the support of the public.

It stands out as a public service.

It reaches out and grabs a nation and it grabs a world, and I think that's wonderful.

♪♪ ♪♪ BE MORE PBS ♪♪