Industrial Strength Bluegrass: Southwestern Ohio's Musical Legacy (Music in American Life)

In 1958 Elvis got drafted, Little Richard became a preacher, Fats Domino added strings to his recordings and Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13 year old niece. It was a bad year for pop radio. But I could get Wayne Raney on WCKY on a good night on AM radio and it changed my life.I rediscovered country music which included bluegrass, and I kind of liked that original bluegrass sound. One of the very first bluegrass records I bought was Red Allen and Frank Wakefield on Folkways. That recording is as raw and powerful to my ear today as it was when I first bought it. Frank and Red had left Ohio by the time it was recorded but the sound was primitive compared to other bluegrass band recordings at the time. Flatt and Scruggs were so busy trying to cash in of the “folk boom” that we referred to their music as the Foggy Mountain Flower Children. Bill Monroe, the Father of Bluegrass, was struggling to survive the Rock ‘N’ Roll influence of Elvis and others but was not forgotten in the bands in Ohio. The high lonesome sound was alive and well and being reinvented for a transplanted city audience even as Nashville was reinventing country music to sell to a non-country audience.This book, authored by several knowledgeable historians, tells the story of where, why and how that sound evolved in southwestern Ohio. It was bar room music meant to be played loud above the noisy crowd. It succeeded and evolved into a music which introduced some of the finest musicians and singers of the era as well as opening the door for female band leaders and musicians, ahead of their time. Recording studios and dedicated radio stations proliferated in the area. It was a time to be preserved and remembered. This book does thatBluegrass has changed today. If you like it today here is where it came from.

Sort of an academic treatment of the bluegrass scene in SW Ohio. All the artists and radio stations I grew up with, and some bars I sadly missed as a young adult. I looked forward to each chapter to see if I could find something new and many times I did.

So thoroughly enjoyed this. Highly recommended. Amazing detail and great history lesson. Very well done. Great and rich music history here

Read this as soon as it arrived. I knew some of the story of the Cincinnati- Dayton - Middletown bluegrass history , but learned much more. A little repetitive in that some stories appeared in more than one essay. That’s par for an anthology using different authors. Great photos included. Recommended.

A couple of the chapters are almost too scholarly. But still a great compilation.I had recently read Hillbilly Elegy by J D Vance. A great read also to understand Kentucky.My ancestors are western Kentucky, but they went south (Arkansas) instead of north.

Who knew? It turns out that bluegrass music, that most “backwoods” of all the American country genres, is actually a product of urban life, albeit by those who left their homes in the upper South for employment in northern factories. This book highlights the creative forces forged by those urban migrants who, from the mid 1940’s to the late 1970’s, took their rural string-band traditions from back home and created a highly disciplined and instrumentally virtuosic style which came to be called bluegrass.The focus of the book is on the geographic corridor in southwest Ohio along the Miami River Valley that stretches from Cincinnati through Hamilton, Middletown, Dayton, and Springfield, Ohio. The men and women who became the workforce for this area also gave rise to the musicians who created this dynamic and technical music style: Red Allen; the Osborne Brothers; Frank Wakefield; Earl Taylor; Noah Crase; Larry Sparks; Katie Laur; The Hotmud Family; these names are instantly recognizable for their fundamental contribution to the genre. Equally important were the musicians who did not live in the region but found the Miami Valley area vital to their survival as musical groups, especially the Stanley and McReynolds Brothers, as these musicians came to the area for club, festival, and recording opportunities. The Miami Valley would also be the site of the first bluegrass performance in a college setting when the Osborne Brothers played at nearby Antioch College in 1962.This new and exciting music could not have survived without the daily presence of radio personalities like Smokey Ward and Paul “Moon” Mullins. Mullins’ “down home” approach to both content and sponsors on Middletown’s WPFB and Xenia’s WBZI would prove essential to the community’s support for the genre and its practitioners. Mullins continued to program bluegrass music on area airwaves from the 1960’s to the 2000’s, a tradition continued to this day by his son and grandson, Joe and Daniel, who also contribute important chapters to the book.Russel McDivit’s chapter on the region’s recording studios and retail outlets is encyclopedic. Volume editor Fred Bartenstein’s chapter on the area bands playing bluegrass gospel shows how important this sub-genre is to the continuation of the music. Larry Nager and Jon Fox’s chapters move the narrative into the 1970’s when new and younger audiences discovered and supported bluegrass music. The socio-economic forces that gave rise to and supported the new genre is explored by academics Phillip Obermiller and Nathan McGee. Unique musical aspects of southwest Ohio’s bluegrass styling is explored in an important chapter by musicologist Ben Krakauer.Part narrative, part source-book for future historians, Industrial Strength Bluegrass will prove to be an important contribution to the growing literature on the creation and development of this distinctly American music now recognized and enjoyed throughout the world.

Very good