American letter | Blue grass and the banjo

(Lexington, Kentucky) Cody Dugger opens the case and discovers the precious object nestled in an orange plush toy.

“The neck has been redone, but the barrel dates from the 1930s, when Gibson made banjos,” the 32-year-old musician told me.

We are in the immense Horse Park in Lexington, the racing horse capital of the world. But today, it’s the iconic Kentucky music capital of the world: the Spirit in the Bluegrass festival celebrates its 50th^e birthday.

By day, Cody Dugger is what you’d call a super-nurse. In the evenings, he plays banjo with his band Hancock and Shoushe. It was Patrice Béliveau, a Quebec orthopedist who went into exile in Kentucky in 1997, who introduced him to me, at St. Joseph Catholic Hospital, in the small town of London.

I tell Cody how much I love the banjo. I ask him to define bluegrass, a music of white people from Appalachia, literally “Hillbillies”, these descendants of the hillbillies of Kentucky. That’s how I got invited to the festival, because the field is worth a thousand definitions.

“Politically, it will be rather Republican, I imagine?

– No way ! You’ll see, it’s a gang of hippies, it’s very cool. »

So here I am in the Horse Park campsite, because the real festival-goers spend three days here, cooler, barbecue, intoxicating drinks and, in some corners, the smell of weed late at night, and not blue.

“Have you ever eaten a tomato from the garden?” You know, when it’s still warm and you’ve just picked it? Annalisa McDonald asks me, holding her five-string violin as if it were her sixth baby.

– Um yes…

— I’m from Alaska and I played bluegrass. I liked it, but it was like a tomato from the supermarket in winter, you know? I came to Kentucky, I played with bluegrass musicians. I understood what a tomato tastes like. It comes straight out of the earth from here. »

On the other hand, the banjo player’s wife, Kasey Dugger, hated this music before meeting Cody.

“Let’s just say high school girls don’t really like banjo players… It sounded like old people’s music. But new artists like Tyler Childers, who mixes country, folk and bluegrass, have brought a new generation,” the convert tells me.

“It’s in our soul. When I hear the mandolin, I get goosebumps,” says my neighbor who has had a few beers, and I don’t know if that’s what brings tears to his eyes, or if it’s is his way of expressing the overflow of emotions.

It’s music full of mountains, mists, coal. But we slip, or rather we accelerate on sadness, as if to deceive nostalgia. The tempo increases and joy rises to the surface.

“Country is played like this [il se penche en arrière]bluegrass is played like that [il incline son corps vers l’avant] “, Frank Powell, a spare-time luthier, told me, to show how we rush into chords with the pedal all the way down.

“It grows like a weed on you, you can never get rid of it. »

The term “bluegrass” emerged in the 1940s, when founder Bill Monroe formed the Blue Grass Boys, and there was a search for a name for this subcategory of music from this state also famous for this type of grass. Neither really folk nor perfectly western, although a bit of both, and mixed with traditional music from the British Isles.

With his cowboy hat and high-pitched voice, Monroe imposed implicit rules on the acoustic style. A mandolin, a banjo, a guitar, a violin and a double bass. The style draws on the Scottish reels and English square dances of the Appalachian pioneers. But it also borrows from African-American music, since the banjo, played by slaves, is derived from African stringed instruments.

Blue Moon of Kentucky by Monroe was covered by Elvis Presley in one of his first recordings.

“Like all great American music, it has African sources,” says Dave Howard, who founded the Louisville Folk School. The goal is to transmit and bring to life the original musical heritage of Kentucky, but also to teach other musical traditions.

“We are very proud of our music, and we want to make it known, but it’s the same for all people, so we also teach Afro-Cuban and West African music. »

In front of the stage, hundreds of folding chairs have been set up in rows. Behind the trailers and tents, the musicians jam and warm up their voices, knowing that at any moment a stranger could show up with his guitar and ruin the rehearsal, but it’s not a big deal.

This year, the festival pays tribute to JD Crow, who died during the pandemic. The guy played the banjo so fast in Ain’t Gonna Work Tomorrow that one might think of as a happy song, as it tells the story of the guy who lost his girlfriend, lost all his money shopping and gave up his job to go around the world and spread his pain.

If I ask Cody, he tells me the crowd is 80% “left” (the state voted 62% Trump, 36% Biden in 2020). Others tell me “50-50”.

A guy who made his fortune in the highways industry told me: “Everyone I know votes for Trump. With all the money I sent him, I sure hope he wins. He says stupid things all the time, I don’t like him at all, but I don’t like taxes. »

I wanted to tell him that without taxes, he might not have made as much money building roads, but the next group was coming on stage, and already talking politics at a festival is messy. . I stopped my survey.

In an article from the Harvard Political Review¹, musicologist Chloe Levine notes that the traditional themes of bluegrass, whose stars are almost exclusively white, find an echo in conservative discourse (nostalgia for the good old days, traditional values, religion). But a new urban generation is giving new impetus to the genre, reinventing its content and mixing contemporary issues with mountain air.

Kentucky also gave birth to protest folk, after all, like that of Sarah Ogan Gunning, who sang in Girl of Constant Sorrow the starvation of miners and the exploitation of workers almost 100 years ago.

So, is bluegrass blue or red? Who knows. Tonight, the night is soft, the music sounds good, the crowd is relaxed. Bluegrass is also “cold drinks, banjo and friends”.

Between the clouds, the moon appears, because, I remind you, I am in theOld Kentucky where the skies are always blue.

1. Consult the article in the Harvard Political Review