Search Results

This chapter examines the progression of three musics through the four genre types, focusing on the hanging mix of the resources they use. These resources include organizational form, scale, and locus; the sources of income and press coverage for artists; the codification of genre ideal, performance, and technological conventions; boundary work; styles of dress, adornment, drugs, politics, and argot; and the invention of a name for the style. In order to focus on the attributes that characterize genre forms, the chapter selectively presents examples from three musical styles: bluegrass, old school rap, and bebop jazz. It hopes that focusing on examples from a sample of musics will highlight the features of genre types and their attributes without producing unnecessary confusion.

By 1830, craft distilling was transitioning into industrial distilling, and works were increasingly focused in the high-quality lands of the Greater Bluegrass region, especially the Inner and Outer Bluegrass. There, distillers could take advantage of springs, perennial streams, fertile soils, and productive farms. These areas also had quality turnpikes and river transport and, eventually, a railroad network. Regional farms supplied grains for distilling, and banks and private investors provided financing. Case studies demonstrate this development in Bourbon, Harrison, Fayette, Franklin, Woodford, and Anderson Counties. Within these areas, large industrial distilleries located along trunk streams, such as the South Fork of the Licking River and the Kentucky River, or their tributary streams. Distillers drew their labor force from county seats, farming neighborhoods, and villages such as Tyrone and Peanickle in Anderson County. Several distillers built large homes in Lawrenceburg,constituting a “Distillers’ Row.”

This chapter defines venerable trees through the introduction of two ancient trees, one at a temple in Indonesia and one in a graveyard in Kentucky. Venerable trees are defined as old or otherwise significant trees to which people have reverential and emotional connections. The chapter describes the author’s long-term personal connection to trees and his realization of the importance of conserving ancient trees. The unusual ancient trees of the Kentucky Bluegrass and Nashville Basin are introduced and a rationale provided for their conservation. Ancient trees that were here before the first permanent habitation in 1779 are still in our landscape but are fast disappearing.

Kentucky's territory is neatly demarcated into sharply contrasting regions by changes in bedrock, surface topography, and concomitant variation in soils and natural vegetation cover. The central limestone plains, the Bluegrass, was not uniform but was made up of three sub-regions, the Inner and Outer Bluegrass and the Eden Shale Hills. While the limestone lands were fertile, the shale country was rugged with poor soils though the area did contain saline springs or licks that produced salt.

This memoir sets up the case study of the Del McCoury Band to follow. It does introduce one new idea though: the idea of a show and the act of showing. The idea here is that quite apart from listening to music, the choreography of the band on stage also contributes in an essential to the way in which improvisation and tradition are intertwined in a way which prevents tradition from descending into traditionalism. It is this that keeps such music alive: it's often concealed ('secret' again) improvisatory dimension.

This chapter continues the discussion of the Del McCoury Band while re-introducing Deleuze's concepts of virtuality/verticality and actualization/horizontality to illuminate the manner in which bluegrass can remain a 'live' tradition thanks to the multiplicity/difference of the 'idea' of bluegrass. This, the differentiation of the idea, is enacted through improvisation.

The striking scenery of the Bluegrass—gently rolling pastures with plank fences, elegant estate houses, horses, and woodland pastures of huge, old tree—is unique. The ecological region of the Bluegrass is defined by its deep beds of limestone in the Inner and Outer Bluegrass, and interbedded shale and limestone in the Hills of the Bluegrass. The fractured limestone creates karst topography, which features fractured rock, sinkholes and caves, and rapid drainage of soils and creeks. Extensive woodland pastures grow on karst soils in the Inner Bluegrass and to some degree in the Outer Bluegrass. The Inner Bluegrass is severely threatened by development, which has been slowed by tight land use regulations.

Josie discovered that the major topic of conversation in her hometown, as in Memphis, concerned the pros and cons of secession upon her return to Bowling Green. She repeated the fears and opinions expressed by her parents and praised the attempts of rational residents to curb the growing hostility to her friends. Josie lamented the refusal of others to measure their words in light of their explosive potential. The April 12 firing on Charleston's Fort Sumter marked the beginning of war, and throughout the summer Kentucky's opposition to secession increased, as did the fear of invasion. Kentucky's governor and the legislature proclaimed that the Bluegrass State would never send troops to fight against its southern sisters; the commonwealth would remain neutral.

Nelson County, in the Outer Bluegrass, and the adjoining counties of Larue and Marion were favored locations for distillery development in the nineteenth century.The fertile limestone uplands attracted grain farmers, millers, and distillers. At Fairfield, in northern Nelson County, Irish immigrant Henry McKenna started a steam-powered milling and distilling works in the early 1850s, where he maintained credit accounts for more than 350 customers. McKenna built a new mill, distillery, cooperage, and bottling house, and by the 1890s, the distillery was mashing 100 bushels of grain per day. Railroads arrived in central and southern Nelson County in the 1860s, with extensions in the 1880s. Many established distilleries relocated from traditional water-power sites to the railroad tracks. New Hope in Nelson County and Athertonville in neighboring Larue County were “whiskey towns” that developed adjacent to distilleries to provide housing and services for laborers and managers. Several distillers erected works in Bullitt County near springs and the Louisville& Nashville Railroad tracks. Some historic distillery remnants remain in the area, and one of the nation’s largest distilleries, Jim Beam, still operates at a historic distillery site.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Bob Dylan's output in the new millennium. It traces how Dylan's embrace of capitalist culture is perhaps not so much a resignation as it is a final rejection of a generation whose voice he did not want to represent. For Bob Dylan's voice is not the voice of a single postwar American generation, but rather a voice that is in many ways outside time, an American voice that derives from a rich musical tradition, from folk music to rock and roll, from Tin Pan Alley to bluegrass, from jazz to Western swing, from blues to ballads. It is, moreover, a uniquely poetic voice, and one that brings with it a lyrical tradition that stretches back to the French trouvères, forward to the Beats and beyond.

Thoroughbred horse racing experienced an explosive growth in popularity from 1865 to 1910, but Kentucky lost its dominant position as the locus for the breeding of racehorses. The overarching theme behind this struggle to build a Kentucky horse industry was the realization among the region's horsemen that they could not begin to do so without luring the big money from outside capitalists into central Kentucky. Kentucky racehorse breeders got left behind in the new expansion of the sport, even before the Civil War had ended. Racing shifted to the northeast, Bluegrass breeders lost valuable horses to both armies as well as to guerrillas and outlaws, and the only plan of action for a productive future resided with Robert Aitcheson Alexander, the owner of Woodburn Farm, and his handpicked associates.

The composition of limestone, which is calcium carbonate, is very important to horse breeders because it includes a heavy concentration of phosphate, which plays a greater role in growing a strong horse than calcium carbonate does. Limestone is relatively uncommon and only occurs in a few other places outside Bluegrass, according to Professor Frank Ettensohn. In 1876, Professor Nathan Southgate Shaler wrote that Bluegrass land was “surpassed by no other soils in any country for fertility and endurance.” The soil, the limestone, and the Kentucky bluegrass that grew on this land continued to fascinate observers, who wrote about this verdant section of the United States. Bluegrass had two qualities that no other region possessed: (1) an abundance of superior Thoroughbred breeding stock; and (2) the unique land these horses grazed on.

The pathways through Bowling Green led thousands of Union troops to the South's bloody battlefields. Josie and her friends expressed pride in the fine looking troops—a Wisconsin regiment was “more stalwart and healthier looking” than all others—and horror at the fate that awaited many of them in the days to come. However, as regiment after regiment moved through the commonwealth, many residents of the Bluegrass State began to distinguish between Kentucky unionists and those from other states. The destructive nature of the invading armies became associated with troops from north of the Ohio River. A captain from Hopkinsville stationed in Bowling Green and Russellville during most of the Federal occupation compared the invaders and the damage and havoc they created to a five-mile-wide plague of locusts and frequently referred to them as “Yankee rascals.”

The sun moves over the hills of Kentucky's bluegrass and ignites the leaves gripping to the trees. Silhouettes can be formed to the first wave of mountains beyond the Kentucky River. Sacred icons and sculptures on the front doors of Saint Hubert's Episcopal Church were crafted by Niles. The choice of Saint Hubert as the church's patron is particularly appropriate, because the parish is centrally situated within the verdant countryside known as “hunt country.” Up at the hill behind the church is a pastoral graveyard, shaded by walnut trees and graced by a pond. John Jacob rests here next to his wife, Rena Lipetz Niles, under a simple granite marker that lies with the bluegrass.