Bluegrass Odyssey by Carl Fleischhauer and Neil G. Rosenberg (review)

Council of Southern Mountains and its executive director, Perley Ayer, were somehow neglecting the migrants. They clearly dislike the Giffin model, preferring instead an "anti-assimilationist" and "multicultural identity" approach, in which Appalachian urban communities empower themselves for their own self-identification. In a word, their approach is often anachronistic, because they judge persons and institutions in the past by the yardstick of the "correct" perpective of present observers. They have a right to their views. But is it scholarship? —Paul David Nelson Fleischhauer, Carl and Rosenberg, Neil G. Bluegrass Odyssey. A Documentary in Pictures and Words, 1966-86. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001. 189 pages with index. Oversized hardback in dust jacket. $34.95. At first glance, Bluegrass Odyssey may appear to be a coffee table book of historic photographs of first and second-generation bluegrass artists in their prime, during the phenomenal rise of the music's popularity at festival venues during the two decades following the mid-1960s. The focus of the book, though, is an overview of the culture, pointing at the depth and variety of personal and sociological interaction between the performers, the audience, journalists, and profiteers. The photographs direct attention to Carl Fleischhauer's narrative, which explicates the pictures, serving as introduction of the subject matter: the intensity of performance, the destination of the venues—clubs, festivals, living rooms, the transaction of business, the community of backstage and parking lot, the family connections of the culture, and the iconography of the inventor of the form, Bill Monroe. The pictures themselves are slices of time, precious and revealing moments captured by the skill of intentional photographer Neil V Rosenberg. The interaction of photograph and text reveals the personal involvement of the writer and photographer in a collaborative project, faceted like a diamond of surprising depth and clarity, framing the mosaic of pictures and intensely personal narrative memoir, an American memory of a time when bluegrass broke through the bonds of regionalism and was making its presence felt in both popular and 70 folk idioms, when divisions spawned by the issue of the Viet Nam conflict shattered the cohesiveness of bands, tested the bonds of friendship, a time when the advent of multitracking and multimiking began to affect a form that was initially developed to deal with the constraints of the one-microphone radio show. Yet the authors, academics drawn into the flow of the music, are objective, not didactic, letting the pictures speak for themselves as the waves of systems intertwine like the bramble and the rose. The pleasure of random discovery within Bluegrass Odyssey makes a strong argument for books as physical objects — to be picked up, thumbed through, read, viewed, and read again. One need not be knowledgeable about the genre to be rewarded by a perusal of this book — the text speaks for itself, the photographs speak for the subjects. Carl Fleischhauer oversaw the production of the magnificent Library of Congress American Memory website. Neil G. Rosenberg, a professor of folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland, won a Grammy award for his liner notes to the Anthology of American Folk Music. —Clark Dimond Philip WalkerJacobs. The Life and Photography ofDoris Ulmann. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2001. 352 pages, $40.00, cloth. (The Little Spy ofBeauty Who Shot Softly and Carried a Big Box) Picture this. Two women roll-starting a Model A Ford down a hill somewhere in the deep South in the middle of the Great Depression. One is a head taller than the other. Both are smoking cigarettes and picking little bits of tobacco from their blood-red lips (the cigarette filter had not been perfected). Theyhave been together a great deal and are beginning to insult each other in little ways. They are quarreling over, of all things, boyfriends. They leave their chauffeur and their great, spacious car under a shade tree, because the car was too large for the narrow, lonely roads. In the backseat of the little Ford is a camera as big as a farmer's mailbox. The women are long past forty years old, and they are looking for something to photograph. Or picture this. The unemployed and the malcontent mill about...