I’m very fortunate to have grown up with parents who took me all sorts of places. We went on vacations to the beach and on picnics in the mountains, we went to museums and historic villages, we went to ballets and folk festivals. I am a woman with many interests because of my parents.
At one folk festival, a banjo player was kind enough to show me a couple of chords, even though I was only 10. That started my love affair with bluegrass.
I did go through a period of time in my teens when I kept my distance from the genre. Bluegrass seemed too much like country, which I completely disliked at the time. (I’m still not a big fan of country, but there are songs I enjoy.) The thing is, while bluegrass is associated with country music, it’s much more than that. When I ran across this quote by Bill Monroe, the “Father of Bluegrass,” I knew why bluegrass is so attractive to me: “[Bluegrass is] Scottish bagpipes and ole-time fiddlin’. It’s Methodist and Holiness and Baptist. It’s blues and jazz, and it has a high lonesome sound.”
In my 20s I stopped pretending bluegrass no longer interested me. When I discovered Bluegrass Saturday Morning on KBEM 88.5 FM, a Minneapolis radio station that usually plays jazz, I embraced the show. It runs on Saturdays (surprise!), 7-11 a.m. Central Time, and it’s immediately followed by a related hour-long show, Bluegrass Review.
Both shows are as wonderful as they are because of their host, Phil Nusbaum, an expert on bluegrass. He has broadened and deepened my understanding of the genre through his weekly selections and his commentary during these programs. When he retires (and I hope that won’t be for a while), the bluegrass world will experience a significant loss.
Until I started listening to Bluegrass Saturday Morning, my very limited knowledge of bluegrass was confined to more traditional tunes, like my favorite cut from the only bluegrass album I owned growing up.
While I still enjoy traditional songs, Nusbaum has introduced me to a wider range of bluegrass, and I’ve become a big fan of more modern covers of jazz and rock tunes, such as this take on “Caravan”:
You can stream Bluegrass Saturday Morning from anywhere with an Internet connection. Listen live at jazz88.fm. The show is archived for one week, so you can also stream it after it has aired. Bluegrass Review is a syndicated show which plays in 13 states and in Lanena, Tasmania, Australia. Like Bluegrass Saturday Morning, it is archived for one week.
If you’re new to bluegrass, I strongly suggest you listen for a while before giving up on it. There’s a pretty big difference between an old traditional tune from the 1940s and more a recent one, so it’s worth giving this genre some time instead of judging it from a couple of songs. Perhaps, like me, you’ll fall in love with it.