Bluegrass Goes to College, But Should It? Yes.
On July 5, 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:
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
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.
_____________________
Jocelyn Neal is the Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is also the director of the UNC Bluegrass Initiative, and the author of The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers: A Legacy in Country Music (Indiana University Press) and Country Music: A Cultural and Stylistic History (Oxford University Press).
