How Bluegrass Got Its Three-Part Harmony By Way of Ohio
Originally published in No Depression, March 2021.
Photo by jimeone / Getty Images
When you think “bluegrass,” your first thought probably isn’t “Cleveland.” Or, to get a little bit more metaphorical, your first thought probably isn’t “industrialization” and “urban centers.” But maybe it should be.
Despite how old bluegrass feels, it is fundamentally a young genre, and one that could only have succeeded due to the technological and social developments that existed at the time of its inception in the 1940s. And nowhere embraced and embodied those developments more than the near-Appalachian rust-belt state of Ohio.