No, you wouldn’t have experienced the music of Mississippi John Hurt and probably not Doc Watson or Flatt and Scruggs, either, Kerbie - it was Yankee college kids and serious New York City folkies who provided the fervor and knowledge base that funneled their energy through events like the Newport Folk Festival. That festival and similar ones like the University of Chicago Folk Festival and others gave a platform for those performers like those I mentioned and many more.
At the time bluegrass had just about run its course as a commercially viable branch of country music, but the Folk Revival not only rescued it from commercial oblivion but opened it up to a much wider audience and helped turned it into the cultural phenomenon that it remains today.
So far as I’m aware, there was no such thing as open air “bluegrass festivals” in the 1940’s and 50’s. Those started as a direct outgrowth of the Folk Music Revival. Young Yankee musicians didn’t used to play Bill Monroe or Earl Scruggs tunes back then, either - bluegrass music was strictly a regional endeavor before it got exposed to a much wider audience.
This greater appreciation for bluegrass wasn’t entirely due to the folkies taking an interest; having Flatt & Scruggs on the Beverly Hillbillies and the Dillards on the Andy Griffith Show had an impact, as did having Earl Scruggs’ banjo instrumentals on the soundtrack of the hit movie “Bonnie and Clyde.” (My best friend bought a copy of the soundtrack album, which had Earl blazing away at “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” and “Flint Hills Special,” interspersed with snippets of dialogue between Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway and J. Michael Pollard. Whenever there was dialogue we’d groan and get up to lift the needle over to the next piece of music...)
Those TV shows and movie soundtracks exposed many more people to bluegrass music, but if it hadn’t been for the folkies presenting bluegrass music at their festivals first, it’s questionable whether those mass market outlets would have followed.
The mass market bombshell that firmly planted bluegrass in the larger cultural landscape was the release of the three record “Will The Circle Be Unbroken” album recorded by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and a dazzling array of bluegrass and old time country musicians. Bill Monroe refused to take part because the guys in the Dirt Band were long haired hippies, in his opinion, but he soon came to regret that imperious decision as he watched the album elevate the careers of everyone involved.
But not him...not immediately, anyway. But as there became more and more interest in bluegrass, he benefited as well.
The release of that album was in the early 1970’s, well past the peak of the Folk Revival, but the fact that it could even take place at all was a direct result of the influence that the Folk Music Revival had on millions of musicians in the US and around the world.
Wade Hampton Miller
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