Should bluegrass go to college? yes

On 5 July 2017, Ted Lehmann’s weekly bluegrass column in No Depression asked this provocative question: Bluegrass goes to college, but should it? Through deft turn of phrase, Lehmann hints that the answer may be no, and that perhaps both the music’s historical integrity and today’s aspiring performers might not be best served via the college route. Dialogue on such topics is always welcome, and the flurry of responses to his column on social media and through other venues including Inside Higher Ed suggests that the subject is acutely ripe for discussion. I write here to contribute a few ideas to this conversation, centering on three particular points: that bluegrass music has always intersected with college, that people rather than music go to college, and that a university’s role is fundamentally different than what is depicted in Lehmann’s essay. And while Lehmann focused specifically on programs that offer pre-professional training in bluegrass performance, I will expand that to the broader question with which he titled the essay.

First, should bluegrass go to college? In many respects, it already has, in ways that cannot be written out of the music’s history. From the 1960s Folk Revival onward, much of the development of bluegrass music has occurred at junctures between college-educated communities and the groups of musicians who work the road. Accounts of the Osborne Brothers’ career almost always include the impact of their performances at Antioch College in Ohio and their acquisition of a new, college-educated audience. The biographies of Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard—where working-class meets college-educated backgrounds—are a real-life illustration of that intersection, and the music that the two made together was incredible. Even today’s bluegrass festivals both foster and rely on the co-mingling of fans and performers from different educational demographics, an essential part of the formula that makes such events financially viable. Bluegrass Today’s 2012 “Special Report” on fans today confirmed that the bluegrass audience holds college degrees in approximately the same proportion as the general American population. In other words, it is only our nostalgic imaginings that frame yesteryear’s bluegrass as music removed from higher education in the first place.

Swarthmore, Columbia, Harvard, Indiana University, George Mason University… These universities pop up in the resumes of the people who have given lasting form and substance to bluegrass’s narrative. Individuals such as Ralph Rinzler, Neil Rosenberg, Fred Bartenstein, Bob Cantwell, Murphy Henry, David Freeman, and so many more, have been a living, breathing part of bluegrass music, and their approach to the music is shaped, de facto, by their education. So pervasive is the influence of their work that even fans and performers who have not read their writings first-hand understand the music through these individuals’ interpretations of it.

In other words: bluegrass going to college is really nothing new, and we should not pretend otherwise.

Second, musical genres don’t go to college; people go to college. Far from mere semantics, the idea that it is not “music” but rather people who embark on the journey of a college education is key to this discussion. At colleges and universities coast to coast, people study myriad topics: art history, literature, music, physics, math, sociology, engineering, foodways, biology, gender theory, business, etc. Many years ago, music departments enshrined a particular cultural hierarchy that declared only some musics worthy of study. During that era, music appreciation classes often centered on the apparent brilliance of western art music (“Ah, Bach…”) and those classes are a vivid memory for many former students. But that attitude—that only some musics were worthy of study—is one that many music departments have left in the past for all sorts of excellent reasons, including the fact that such an approach focused on an unacceptably narrow slice of music, limited by racial, regional, gender, and class-based identities. And in the face of students eager to learn and study, is the bluegrass community really willing to say that bluegrass is not worthy of study?

Third, a university education offers unparalleled opportunities for students, not limited to job placement. Lehman proposes that “Colleges essentially have two basic functions: to inform the past and to prepare workers for the future.” This assertion misses, in my opinion, the most central functions of a university on both counts. The past is just that–an abstraction of a time period that has passed, and not anything that can be “informed.” And preparing people to work is too narrow an interpretation. In contrast, consider the following:

A university serves as a nexus for knowledge and creative output (all the books in the library, recordings in the archives, field interviews in the oral history collections, and expertise of its faculty). The opportunity to dive into those resources (an archive full of field recordings, oral interviews, and rare singles!), and to do so in the company of peers under the guidance of scholars and librarians, is itself of immense value.

A university is a crucible where the next generations’ knowledge of science, medicine, humanities, and arts creativity are forged, where ideas take form, where books are written. Students take part in that knowledge formation. If one wants to understand the relationships between bluegrass and whiteness, working-class culture, the sounds and structures of the music that express that culture, and southern, rural America, university scholars are bringing their expertise and—yes—real-life ethnographic experiences to bear in classroom lectures and in new books and articles that are worth reading and re-reading under the tutelage of scholars, as Jordan Laney and others have pointed out in response to Lehmann’s article.

A university offers students an education. Note that an education is very different than “job training and placement.” The goals of that education are to develop students’ ability to think critically, to understand and interpret the world around them, to make sense of their place within that context, and to contribute original ideas to the world in meaningful ways. Colleges and universities are set up for students to work with experts, namely the faculty, on a regular and intense basis. In a college program, a team of faculty experts offers guidance; they teach not only how to play an instrument, but also how to write and communicate, how to do research, how to engineer a recording, how to market a band, and so much more. And they incorporate the full range of learning methods appropriate for the music, including oral transmission and aural acquisition. As Dan Boner, director of ETSU’s Bluegrass, Old Time, and Country Music degree program explained in his response to Lehmann’s article, ongoing access to the breadth and depth of faculty expertise is incredibly valuable.

There is, of course, a strong correlation between earning a college degree and finding a satisfying and lucrative career. It happens that many attractive employers seek to hire individuals with the skills and experiences afforded by a college education, and of course, as a result, colleges and universities advertise their job-placement and earnings statistics. But I would suggest that the real take-away for a student is the education itself, an education that students can build on for the rest of their lives, with the proven potential to open doors and raise standards of living for those holding degrees. It is not, directly speaking, job training.

Among the concerns that Lehmann articulates is that bluegrass music will change if it entwines itself in the world of the university. Yes, it likely will. But bluegrass music, as any musical genre, is a living, organic art form that is in a constant state of change and evolution. Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs all sounded different after they heard rock-n-roll; Fred Bartenstein has written persuasively that Josh Graves was likely hired as a response to those different external musical contexts. That was a change in bluegrass. In the late 1960s, young fans shifted the way that they consumed music in response to the social movements of the time, and bluegrass adapted in response. That was a change. Commercial opportunities have appeared at various junctures, whether Flatt and Scruggs on television or Alison Krauss gaining a mainstream country audience. Those moments changed bluegrass.

Even the staunchest traditionalists today who play in bands that sound every bit as close to Monroe circa 1947 as possible are not making music “the same” as Monroe: he was an ambitious progressive who shaped the songs and repertory he borrowed to be his own sound, boldly facing the future (as we hear so clearly with the way his version of “Muleskinner Blues” altered Jimmie Rodgers’s version, and then kept changing it over the years). A band today imitating those performances is working from a position of retrospective nostalgia. So yes, bluegrass will change. But not because “it goes to college.” It will change because it is music, and like the currents of the river, it flows onward through time, continuously carving new paths.

Most important, perhaps, the demographics of the bluegrass audience—and of Americans in general—have changed and are continuing to change. In 1947, when Monroe’s most famous line-up was crafting the classic sound of bluegrass, fewer than 5% of women and 7% of men held college degrees. Those numbers have been climbing steadily, to the point that today nearly six times as many Americans hold a college degree. In other words, the role of college itself has changed since the founding of bluegrass music. If we exclude bluegrass musicians from higher education, we ensnare them in a world of limited opportunity.

Consider that since World War II, advocates of education, governmental policy makers, and others have advocated tirelessly to get first-generation college students from rural America into college for the very reason that a college education affords a person more avenues for success, agency to choose and/or change where one lives, and in general, a leg up in the world. Enormous efforts from the GI Bill to tuition-reimbursement programs have been deployed toward these ends. For many first-generation college students, these opportunities are more than exciting.

Wouldn’t it be much better, therefore, if more colleges and universities recognized and rewarded a wider set of skills and talents from their applicant pool? Wouldn’t it be great if a young bluegrass musician who otherwise would never set foot on a campus were able to leverage bluegrass skills to gain an education and receive a college diploma? And wouldn’t the fan culture around bluegrass music benefit if the diverse population of students at colleges and universities encountered bluegrass in serious, informed, and critically reflective ways as part of their overall education?

Yes, bluegrass should go to college in all respects to take its place in the discourse and education of future generations of thinkers, artists, and leaders.

A version of this post first appeared on Jocelyn Neal’s blog “Reflections on Country and Bluegrass” on July 14, 2017, and is reprinted with permission from the author.

Featured Image credit: 2013 Telluride Bluegrass Festival by Doug Anderson. Some rights reserved via Flickr.