| Popis: |
This book documents the history and development of bluegrass music in and around Washington, DC. It begins with the pre-bluegrass period of country music and ends with a description of the local scene near the end of the 2010s. Capital Bluegrass details the period when this genre became recognized locally as a separate genre within country music, which occurred shortly after the Country Gentlemen formed in 1957. This music gained a wider audience during the 1960s, when WAMU-FM began broadcasting this music and the nationally recognized magazine Bluegrass Unlimited was launched in suburban Maryland. Bluegrass flourished during the 1980s with dozens of local venues offering live bluegrass weekly and the public radio station featuring forty hours a week of bluegrass programming. Although it remains a notable genre in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area, by the 1990s bluegrass began its slow decline in popularity. By 2019, the local bluegrass community remains stable, though graying. Despite the creation of both bluegrasscountry.org and the DC Bluegrass Union, it is abundantly clear that general recognition and appreciation for bluegrass locally is well below the heights it reached some thirty-five years earlier. |
