Telluride Contest 4
From atop the large stage of the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, Adam Dirtz gazes off into the mountains while he sings the second verse of “A Long December.” During a guitar solo, he slides back into the shadows and attaches an oxygen mask to his face. He rips it off and finishes the song.
“In case you haven’t noticed, we’re not really a bluegrass band,” he says afterwards, almost nervously. It’s his band Counting Crows’ first appearance at the annual festival, but they’re not the first rock band to grace the mountain stage. Since its founding in 1974, Telluride has featured a wide array of bands from all musical genres.
But does it stay true to its bluegrass roots?
Though it has been on the national radar for less than a century, bluegrass is old. Neil Rosenberg, a [professor] of folklore at St. John’s and Oberlin alumnus, describes the rural Appalachian Americans who started bluegrass music as the “spiritual and cultural descendants of the Yankees”—to most of the country, they were simply “hillbillies.” When hillbillies moved to big, diverse cities, they clung to bluegrass as part of their social identities. The music spread slowly and only between certain circles.
Then in the 1930s, Bill Monroe made it big. Born in Kentucky in 1911, the father of bluegrass fused popular hillbilly songs with older string band music. Monroe established the instrumental criteria for the bluegrass band as banjo, guitar, mandolin, dubru, upright bass and fiddle.
Bluegrass in Monroe’s tradition is clean. Its melodies are simple, but deceptively so. Songs are usually in 4/4 with instrumentation distributed over those four beats. A song may consist of three melodies that each instrument takes a turn playing; while the banjo has a solo, a bass player may pluck on the one and three beats and the mandolin on the two and four. If one musician screws up, you know it.
In the late 1940s, more and more people began to copy Monroe’s style. In the 1950s, disc jockeys spun bluegrass music, for the first time organized and neatly packaged, onto the mainstream. It has stayed there since. During the folk music revival of the fifties, urban middle-class youth and young adults snatched bluegrass albums from record store shelves. The musical form attracted a number of city musicians—in the second half of the twentieth century, a plethora of city musicians established themselves as bluegrass stars.
A different place of origin was not the only thing that differentiated the new generation of bluegrass musicians from the old. A lot of them had grown up on rock and roll. Bluegrass of the seventies onwards both responded to and appropriated from rock music. “Newgrass” musicians, as some called it, began using electric pickups to project their acoustic instruments with much greater volume. They incorporated long improvisational instrumental passages within songs and experimented with mixtures of old-time, country, rock and bluegrass.
Traditional bluegrass performers clung to their clean, individualized solos and cringed at the sound of drum beats and electric bass. Bill Monroe, for one, once swore that he would never play on a stage with an electric bass. In the end, the two genres had so many similarities that a partnership was inescapable. In 1983, he shared the Telluride stage with New Grass Revival—the band that had lent its name to the new direction of bluegrass music. The collaboration established the Telluride festival as a place where musicians could push the seams, where they could experiment freely.
Bluegrass festivals had been around for decades before Telluride, but never with audiences bigger than a gym or small field. The Woodstock Music Festival in 1969 introduced high quality, electric sound systems into the world of festivals. In its wake, bluegrass festival producers began implementing sound systems that amplified the instruments and projected their sounds across large spaces. Finally, fans could go to a festival and really hear the music. Telluride has blossomed into the Woodstock for people who like acoustic music.
Far from its Appalachian roots, bluegrass flows thick in Colorado’s veins. Though Telluride may be an important vessel, it’s not the community’s heart. In the last thirty years, a number of successful bluegrass bands fiddled their way out of a city about 300 miles north of Telluride—Boulder, CO. Leftover Salmon, a self-proclaimed “Polyethnic, Cajun, Slamgrass” band, formed in 1989. The String Cheese Incident emerged in 1993 during the height of bluegrass jam band popularity. Most recently, banjoist Dave Johnston and mandolinist Jeff Austin met in college in Illinois. They moved to Boulder and started Yonder Mountain String Band in 1998, which has since slapped together a hearty bluegrass and jam band fan base.
Helen Forester, who was one of the first partners of the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, says that Colorado’s music community has its roots firmly set in bluegrass because of one band: Hot Rize.
“They were the Beatles of bluegrass,” she says.
Her husband Nick was the band’s guitarist until it disbanded in 1990. The band’s “traditional sound” was its packaging: the band’s four members played the mandolin, fiddle, guitar, banjo and bass around one microphone in true old-time fashion. Hot Rize kept its firm footing in the spotlight, however, because it utilized the era’s new technology. It was the first bluegrass band to travel with its own soundman. Between 1978 and 1989, Hot Rize performed at eleven consecutive Telluride festivals.
Erin Youngberg, the bass player for a bluegrass/honky-tonk band called Billy Pilgrims, cites both Hot Rize and the Telluride Festival as very influential on her musical career. Two of the band’s musicians performed at the Festival in 2004 with a band named Hit and Run. Though the band members sing the praises of Colorado bluegrass, not all are enthusiastic about the direction that bluegrass has gone in. The band is very traditional. David Richey, who plays acoustic guitar and lead vocals, is not excited about new bluegrass music.
“If you only expose people to new styles, you don’t get to see where it comes from,” he says.
With sweat dripping from beneath his yamika in the morning sun, Andy Statman twists an unfathomably large range of notes from his clarinet. The rabbi is the second act of the last day of the festival. Statman agreed to perform Sunday morning to avoid having to travel on the Sabbath.
Statman is a fantastic musician, but there was nothing bluegrass about him.
Regardless, the bluegrass musicians dig it. Chris Eldridge from the Infamous Stringdusters hoots every time Statman paused for a breath. Two seats down, Aoife O’Donovan’s sunglasses bob with the beat. At the end of his set, she leans into Eldridge.
“This is what bluegrass needs right now,” she says. O’Donovan’s band, Crooked Still, hit Bostonians hard with their alternative bluegrass sound in 2001—banjo, double bass and cello. The band’s cello player, Rushad Eggleston, reworked his instrument’s notes to make it play as a rhythm instrument. Fans say that they’ve never heard anything like it.
Neither Crooked Still nor the Andy Statman trio is truly a bluegrass band. Telluride is not truly a bluegrass festival.
But as long as enough those true blue Telluride fans keep their ears open, they’re set to stay on the mountain stage.