Bluegrass Music’s Civil War: Why New and Heritage Acts Don’t See String to String
“I’m not so worried about that because the music is strong. It’s not going anywhere,” Cardwell continues. “We have these wonderful, legendary artists, some of them who started the music, that are still alive and still playing. That’s one of the cool things about bluegrass. It’s pretty young music. Jesse McReynolds, Bobby Osborne, Mac Wiseman, and J.D. Crowe — these guys are still out there playing. But I think there’s fear that it will be forgotten or it will change. They look to modern country music and how much that has changed, and think if we’re not really careful, that’s going to happen to bluegrass. I personally don’t worry about that because I feel that the music is so strong and the skills are so strong. The artists who play this music are so talented. The repertoire is still out there. It’s not going anywhere.”
Veteran musician Tim O’Brien agrees. “It’s grown exponentially in 25 years,” says O’Brien, who recently reunited with Nick Forster, Pete Wernick and Bryan Sutton, members of the pioneering band Hot Rize. On September 30th, the band released When I’m Free, their first new album in 24 years, and they are hitting the road again this fall.
Steve Martin described Hot Rize as “the great modern bluegrass band. They’re the connective tissue that links the great founders of bluegrass with the modern tradition.”
It’s a space O’Brien is happy to occupy and sees other acts doing the same. “There’s a whole generation worth of young musicians coming up and fans coming in,” he says. “When we were finishing up back in 1990, Nickel Creek was coming in and other stuff like Yonder Mountain String Band. And Leftover Salmon was really going wild with the jam crowd. You had stuff like the Punch Brothers emerging. The music itself is really evolving and diversifying. The traditional stuff is still strong with people like the Gibson Brothers. The audience is growing. Every time there’s a young group coming along, a new group of young people get interested in it.”
Though Hot Rize became one of the most successful acts in the genre before stepping aside in 1990, O’Brien says they weren’t immediately accepted at first. “It was a little bit suspect. Our hair was a little too big. We wore suits and ties, but the ties were suspect. They weren’t matching suits. We had loud ties,” O’Brien recalls with a laugh. “We played bluegrass, but we mixed it up a little bit. It took a while for people to accept us. But at the time, public radio was really mushrooming and every little public station had a bluegrass hour or two a week. So we were able to take that and we kind of went around the establishment a little by plugging into radio. But you have to go back to the traditional fans. If you give them a little bit of traditional music then they are satisfied and you can stretch a little bit from there. We would always open our show with a Bill Monroe favorite to give them something to chaw on. That really helped.”