Bluegrass music evolved in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Georgia over centuries. Scottish, Scots-Irish, and English settlers combined folk music styles from their original home territories, including harmonized gospel vocals, with the African banjo and other stringed instruments to create a uniquely American genre of music. Originally known as “old time country,” or “mountain music,” the music picked up the term “bluegrass” when Bill Monroe and his “Bluegrass Boys” (after the nickname of Monroe’s home state of Kentucky, the Bluegrass State) started playing the Grand Ole’ Opry in Nashville, Tennessee in 1939.

For decades, the greatest names in bluegrass music made their way to stardom through Monroe’s band, including Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs (who later wrote and sang the theme song for The Beverly Hillbillies television show), Peter Rowan, Vassar Clements, and Del McCoury, among others. By the 1960s, the folk explosion in American music—with its use of acoustic guitar and banjo—helped bluegrass sounds gain a wider following. When Rowan and Clements combined with John Kahn, David Grisman, and the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia on Old and In the Way in 1973, bluegrass music moved closer to the mainstream. The next year, in the little mountain ski town of Telluride, Colorado, one of the longest-running festivals in the history of bluegrass began.

Since the birth of the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, Colorado has become known as a place from which contemporary twists on the bluegrass sound emerge with regularity. Boulder-based bands such as Hot Rize, and String Cheese Incident, and Nederland’s Leftover Salmon and Yonder Mountain String Band (all regular acts at Telluride throughout the years), have helped the Rocky Mountains of Colorado gain fame as a hotbed for musicians interested in listening to and playing bluegrass. In a recent Boulder Daily Camera article, titled “Grassroots Success: how bluegrass has become golden in Boulder,” Hot Rize banjo player Pete Wernick said, “Bluegrass has a special appeal to people who want to feel more in touch with nature, and for people who like being out of the mainstream and not following big trends. Colorado’s that same kind of thing: People who want to be closer in touch with the outdoors and nature definitely moved here…It became a natural thing that a bluegrass scene would grow here.”

1. Listen to the Yonder Mountain String Band’s “Forty Miles From Denver,” about a man who is heading east, away from the Rockies towards the Appalachians, where, he says “life is better.” According to Wernick’s definition of the kind of people who choose to live in Colorado, what might we assume about the main character in the song? Look in your newspaper for articles about newcomers to Colorado, then make a list of reasons wny people move here. What brings people to Boulder, the Front Range, or elsewhere in Colorado and the West? What customs do today’s newcomers bring with them? Make a list of the top ten things you like most about Colorado and measure your list with the list that you created from the newspaper.

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