Plucked from obscurity: why bluegrass is making a comeback
It was once derided as hillbilly music. How did bluegrass become the new sound of political protest across the US?
You could tell Punch Brothers didn’t expect to win a Grammy this year – their frontman didn’t even turn up. Bluegrass doesn’t, historically, make much of a splash at the awards, and this year they were up against the renowned Joan Baez in the folk category. But something in their album, All Ashore, had caught the zeitgeist. And it was probably their song about Donald Trump Jr.
Bluegrass has no history of protest music. Or rather, its protest has always been a passive, melancholic one, the sound of displaced workers longing for their home in the Blue Ridge Mountains far away. It is a music whose roots are bedded so deep in its nostalgic view of America that it can seem estranged from the modern world – and vice versa.