High Lonesome: The Story of Bluegrass Music (review)

Reviews417 High Lonesome: The Story of Bluegrass Music. Written, directed, and produced by Rachel Liebling, VHS video format, 95 minutes, color. A Northside Films production, 1991. Distributed on videotape by Shanachie Entertainment (P.O. Box 208, Newton, NJ 07860), 1994. Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, CMH Records (P.O. Box 39439, Los Angeles, CA 90039), CD-8007. Reviewed by Todd Moye, a graduate student in history at the University ofTexas at Austin. Bluegrass, more than any other form of American music, has always been less about lost lovers and more about dead or far-away mamas. High Lonesome: The Story ofBluegrass Music, a recent film written, directed, and produced by Rachel Liebling, captures this dynamic with art and poignancy as it traces the rich history of this uniquely diverse and vibrant, particularly southern music. In this documentary the songs tell the story—and to great effect—although Liebling does rely heavily on sequences of black-and-white archival still photographs as a narrative device. (Surely there was a different way of making documentaries before Ken Burns's style became so popular, but this reviewer is hard-pressed to remember what it looked like.) Liebling pieces together hundreds of photographs, a few live interviews, several minutes of concert footage, and an impressive number of bluegrass songs to tell the story of this music and its performers. Her rich narrative centers on the legendary figure of Bill Monroe, who died on 9 September 1996 at the age of eighty-four. Monroe is known as "The Father of Bluegrass" and, by extrapolation, "The Grandfather of Country Music." No title has ever been more well-deserved than the former, but after even a brief perusal of what passes today for country and western music, one may well wonder whether or not the grand and sentimental old mandolin player would consider this latter appellation a compliment. Even so, High Lonesome depicts Monroe as a patriarch (in the best sense of that word) whose musical vision was almost single-handedly responsible for the creation and continuation of bluegrass. This documentary could just as easily be subtitled A Walk Through the Twentieth Century with Bill Monroe. Liebling captures the bittersweet nature of Monroe's memories of his childhood in the hills of ultra-rural Kentucky, where he learned the music of his Scotch-Irish ancestors. With a clever touch, Liebling emphasizes the region's Scotch-Irish roots by piping in Monroe's haunting version of "Danny Boy" over archival images of Appalachia. Rachel Liebling is especially wise to explore the relationship between an African American railroad worker named Arnold Schultz and Pendleton Vandiver, a fiddler relative of Monroe's and the subject of one of his early hits, "Uncle Pen." In the early decades of this century railroads and timber industries began to cut through the Appalachians, opening up many areas to new cultural influences for the first time literally in centuries. Comparatively worldly railroad workers like Schultz introduced the area's traditional mountain musicians to the wide world of the blues and beyond. Vandiver, who had grown up playing fiddle music much like that played by his ancestors in the highlands of the American South and Great Britain for hundreds of years, learned blues phrasing and composition from the guitarist Schultz, and Bill Monroe learned from his Uncle Pen. While African American railroad workers, traveling minstrels, and, increasingly, radio performers opened up worlds of musical possibility to rural whites, mail-order catalogs offering mass-produced exotic instruments that even coal miners and tenant farmers could afford began to appear. How must the world view of, say, Galax, Virginia, have changed 418Southern Cultures when the first Hawaiian steel guitar—or, for that matter, the first syncopated rhythms inspired by African Americans—showed up at a picking session or a camp meeting? Bluegrass is a distinctly southern music, even though much of its history has been made outside of the South proper. Not all demographers would consider Kentucky and West Virginia part of the South, and much of bluegrass's early popularity in the 1930s and 1940s depended on midwestern metropolitan radio stations that played the new music for émigrés of Appalachia who needed to know "how the...