American Music: Bluegrass (part 4)
I’ve been talking about bluegrass music this week with the intention of telling a story that encompasses a greater range of its participants than is normally recognized. It is an American invention, and it is crucial to talk about the expanse of Americans that engaged in its genesis. I have written about the cultural content, instrumentation, technique, and many of the personalities involved in its history. Today, it’s time for us to discuss one of the iconic stages from which the country music world belongs, and the birthplace of bluegrass in the public sphere. This entry is about the Grand Ole Opry and its role in the backstory of this important genre.
It’s essential to remember that the Grand Ole Opry is a show, not a place. It broadcasted from the Ryman Auditorium in central Nashville until 1974 when it moved to the Grand Ole Opry House in East Nashville, making a three-month winter foray back to the Ryman since 1999. It is considered that birthplace of bluegrass, and according to the Ryman historical archive, “December 8, 1945 – Earl Scruggs made his debut with Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, completing the historic line-up that would serve as the prototype for the bluegrass sound: Monroe on mandolin, Scruggs on banjo, Lester Flatt on guitar, Chubby Wise on fiddle, and Howard Watts on bass.” It is also worth noting that this took place in front of largely white audiences, regardless of the multicultural roots of the music. The Grand Ole Opry is the longest running radio program in American history and the observations and criticisms that it collects are the product of the people that coordinate and organize its function and production.
I had the honor of speaking with Jonathan McEuen; musician and veteran of the Grand Ole Opry stage about his personal experiences with this famous site. Our discussion, along with the resources I’ve compiled, paint a fascinating picture the venue’s role in crafting bluegrass into a definitive style. His story include recollections of an experience playing in 2005 that was broadcast live to 172 countries. Donald Rumsfeld (Rumsfeld served as Secretary of Defense from 1975 to 1977 under Gerald Ford, and again from January 2001 to December 2006 under George W. Bush) was in the crowd. The bass player, Teddy Jack (who is half-black, and the only son of Leon Russell) was not allowed on the televised segment of the performance. While race was unlikely the explicit reason given by the Opry, it was certainly implied, as Jack is to date one of only a handful of black musicians who have ever performed at a Grand Ole Opry event, let alone one of this magnitude. This supports a pattern in which black musicians do make it as suitable acts for the Grand Ole Opry, but more on that later.
Jeremy Burchard of Wide Open Country writes, “…much like music institutions throughout the rest of the South, the Ryman became a place where the Jim Crow segregation laws didn't matter, with black and white people routinely mingling amongst each other to enjoy the music. For many, the Ryman marked the true birthplace of bluegrass music, too.” (Burchard, 2013) This is an interesting perspective, as much of the photographs from the Ryman and the presentation of the Grand Ole Opry do not reflect this so-called “mingling”. Many of the images show white audiences, and as Jonathan McEuen recalls of his time at the more modern structure in Eastern Nashville, “It was a very, very exclusive club.”
Ken Burns’ 16-part series on PBS on country music holds one of its central themes that “country music has always been home to African-American artists. Burns shows that, just like in rock, jazz and pop, every facet of country — from its instrumentation to repertoire to vocal and instrumental techniques — is indebted to African and African-American traditions, but commercial decisions by white industry executives led to their exclusion from the genre for decades”, as cited by Time Magazine’s Andrew Chow (Sept 11, 2019 from his article “Black Artists Built Country Music—And Then It Left Them Behind”). He continues to describe the documented relationships between many black and white performers. The latter going on to great fame and accolade in the development of country music, while the former typically spent their lives in obscurity. This includes the accounts of Joe Bargmann, of the Dallas Observer (July 5th, 2016) in his article about Darius Rucker, “The following decades saw bluegrass and country greats like Hank Williams Sr., Bill Monroe and A.P. Carter learning from and collaborating with African-American musicians — Rufus “Tee Tot” Payne, Arnold Shultz and Lesley Riddle, respectively.”
Bill Monroe spoke highly of Arnold Shultz, who he claimed was an early mentor and influence (from https://bluegrasstoday.com/ibmm-honors-the-godfather/). Shults played guitar, mandolin, and banjo, and hired Monroe for many of his first gigs, playing square dances in his youth. Richard M. Thompson quotes Bill Monroe in his biographic authorship,
“There’s things in my music, you know, that come from Arnold Shultz; ½ runs that I use in a lot of my music. I don’t say that I make them the same way that he could make them, ’cause he was powerful with it. In following a fiddle piece or a breakdown, he used a pick and could just run from one chord to another the prettiest you’ve ever heard. There’s no guitar picker today that could do that.” – (Bill Monroe in reference to Shultz)
There are to date, only a handful of African Americans to be represented on the Grand Ole Opry stage, despite its influences by black culture. Of these, some of the more noteworthy and well documented are DeFord Bailey, Charlie Pride, Linda Martell, and Darius Rucker. There are currently 66 people associated with the Opry’s Members list, of which the Opry’s website states, “There’s no magic formula, no secret code that grants access to one of the most coveted invitations in all of music. The decision to increase the Opry’s ranks is, and always has been, made exclusively by the show’s management.” Of this membership, two (Pride and Rucker) are black. Perhaps the use of “code” is a poor choice of words when describing the nature of their membership selection process.
DeFord Bailey is a black performer that was made famous by his appearances on the Opry because of his skill with the harmonica. He is cited as being on stage in 1927 when the station manager George D. Hay pronounced ““For the past hour, we have been listening to music largely from Grand Opera, but from now on, we will present ‘The Grand Ole Opry.’” (from the Country Music Hall of Fame archive,) making Bailey and his cohorts inspirations for the name of the radio show. The African American Registry (https://aaregistry.org/story/deford-bailey-first-black-star-of-the-grand-ole-opry/) mentions that “Bailey toured with other stars of the Opry, including Roy Acuff, Uncle Dave Macon, and Bill Monroe. During the 1930s, he was well received by the country music public, though racial segregation caused Bailey problems in hotels and restaurants. To get a hotel room, on some occasions he posed as a baggage boy for the white performers.” These records indicate that black musicians were a large part of the influence and story behind how bluegrass was shaped, but often experienced its representation differently in the public sphere, and certainly on the Grand Ole Opry stage.
In fact, performative representations of black music often involved the controversial act of minstrelsy, especially in regard to the banjo and fiddle. “When whites are having to dress up as blacks in order to play the banjo,” as W.E.B. Dubois writes in his memoirs, “it becomes a reminder that the banjo is really a black instrument.” Rather than allow blacks to play them, it was more common to perform in blackface to keep the participants on stage white. This seems to apply only to the accompaniment, as the few artists who have made it in the “very, very exclusive club” are all talents who were the ‘front-people’ of their show. Performers like Bailey, Martell, Pride and Rucker were all headliners, not second fiddle. If you weren’t the big-ticket item, it was more likely that you were replaced by a white face, or in some cases in the early days, a blackface facsimile imitation. White artists may have recognized the musical expression of accompaniment instruments like the banjo and fiddle to be culturally black, but since blacks were considered property, so went their abilities.
It wasn’t a question of appropriation. Slaves and their skillsets were considered the property of whites. Slave owners had been known to force slaves to show them how to play, and this transmission of culture was seen as their property rights. In support of the fallacy of Joe Bargmann’s earlier quote of the desegregated nature of the Opry, Louis M. Kyriakoudes comments on the expansion of city life in the early 20th century. As described in the academic journal Southern Cultures, Vol 10, No 1, “The Opry’s inclusion of blackface and other elements borrowed from minstrelsy aided newly arrived white migrants (in the 1920s) in clarifying racial as well as social boundaries in the new world of the city.” Bluegrass clearly used black cultural roots as a key component of its repertoire, but the recognition of those contribution falls largely on white audiences, in white public spaces, for a country designed for white ownership of property, intellectual or otherwise.
As late as 2012, McEuen recounts an experience at the Opry in East Nashville, where a round portion removed from the original Ryland Auditorium stage is for the star to stand on during shows. Fellow musician Dan Grimm and his companion were visiting off-hours. McEuen felt the “stink-eye” coming from other groups that were scheduled to play that night, and it seemed hard to dismiss as being directed at anything else besides the color of Grimm’s companions’ skin. The atmosphere was uncomfortable enough for Grimm’s friend to eventually leave the show. Maybe it’s just a misunderstanding, but it’s hard to ignore the possibility, given all the other racial homogeny of the Opry’s history.
The personalities responsible for bringing bluegrass to its maturity are not to be discredited. However, it is not as simple a narrative as ‘Bill Monroe walked onto a stage with his buddies and bluegrass was born.’ The Grand Ole Opry was part of an institution and society that perceived the stories and musicianship of performative arts in a way that excluded blacks from its participation yet relies heavily on its history for its creation. It certainly wasn’t alone, as plenty of other instances of racial marginalization exists within the scope of American music history. If anything, musicianship becomes the driving force that destroys the notion of a person as property and emboldens the reality that the human experience is not exclusive by means of the color of a person’s skin. Charlie Pride, Linda Martell, and Darius Rucker (while not bluegrass, specifically) are part of a shift in the Opry’s adherence (albeit a slow one) to southern traditions that divide Americans through racial lines. Bill Monroe and his contemporaries were not blind to the injustices that occurred to black musicians that were often their inspiration and sources of education.
Bluegrass is not a white American music. Bluegrass is an American music that has largely been represented by whites and crafted through the travels of us all. The Grand Ole Opry is an iconic and valuable part of American music history, responsible for catapulting hundreds, if not thousands of names into celebrity, the springboard for an immense library of culturally significant music, and a critical part of the artistic narrative of the United States. It’s crucial that we stop leaving huge segments of the personalities relevant in its story, especially when talking about something as monumental as bluegrass.
This has not been an easy story to tell. It is certainly not done justice by a 4-part series, nor could it be contained is something so small as a book, but in recognition of the need to cover more ground, more ground will be covered. I intent to publish a march larger segment about the topic of bluegrass and its role in shaping the American experience. For now, let’s listen to Bill Monroe give homage to the first African American artist to play the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, DeFord Bailey, in his rendition of “Evening Prayer Blues”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uzwL1XXSQM
I would like to take a moment to thank Dan Mazer and Jonathan McEuen for their help in writing this series on bluegrass. In addition, my experiences performing bluegrass at festivals and around the country with The Rose Valley Thorns has made this topic a joy to write about, and for that I am forever grateful.