various artists,
Industrial Strength Bluegrass: Southwestern Ohio's Musical Legacy
(Smithsonian Folkways, 2021)

In the 1940s and '50s, tens of thousands of migrants from Kentucky crowded into southwestern Ohio's cities and suburbs seeking employment in the factories and elsewhere. Most felt they had little choice. Though their cultural traditions were rural and deep, jobs were scarce, and mining was (and remains) a harsh and dangerous occupation. Those who already lived in Ohio viewed the new arrivals as natives usually do: uncivilized Others. They called them "hillbillies" and "briarhoppers," later shortened to "briars," and not affectionately. Treated like outcasts, the transplants sought out each other's company and preserved the old ways as best they could in unfamiliar circumstances.

As happened in the white North when Black people moved up from the South into Chicago, Detroit and other cities, innovation and change followed culture clash, and America became a more interesting place with a whole lot more offerings to choose from. A book and a related CD focus on a particular musical genre associated with the Appalachian diaspora. Bluegrass almost certainly would have gone effectively extinct, like other sub-genres of country such as rockabilly, cowboy, and Western swing, if homesick mountain folk had not embraced it as a modern iteration of beloved older ballad, hymn and fiddle-tune traditions they had grown up with. (Bluegrass's second savior was the folk revival of the latter 1950s, when it was fading out of fashion from the Opry stage and radio playlists, to be recognized and preserved by urban folkniks. Southwestern Ohio helped provide that link. The Osborne Brothers, Kentucky-grown but Dayton-based, played the first college bluegrass concert at Antioch, in Yellow Springs, in 1960.)

In the essays and memoirs that comprise Industrial Strength Bluegrass, genre scholars Fred Bartenstein and Curtis W. Ellison put together writings by themselves and other knowledgeable observers to reconstruct the mid-century bluegrass scene in Ohio's Miami Valley, which extends northward 50 miles from Ohio's border with Kentucky (and, less crucially for their purposes, Indiana). It amounts to a sort of micro-history, and its appeal to you will likely depend upon your degree of engagement with bluegrass. It's a story worth telling, and I -- a bluegrass enthusiast of decades' standing -- was pleasantly surprised to find how much I didn't know about performers I've been listening to most of my life (everybody from the Osbornes to Red Allen to Frank Wakefield [the mandolin player on the cover] to Jimmy Martin to Larry Sparks to the Hot Mud Family). The book also devotes coverage to the radio stations, record labels and rough-and-tumble bars that helped performers to sustain a living of sorts or at least a means to supplement their regular income.

Industrial Strength is a volume in the University of Illinois Press' Music in American Life series, which for decades has documented all the forms of vernacular sound and the personalities who have brought them into our ears. To those familiar with it, that ought to be encouragement enough. Much of what I haven't learned from listening I've learned from reading these books, recommended for anybody whose interest doesn't end when the music does.

Perhaps in a perfect world the companion CD would have revived the vintage records by the original bands. In this world, however, even a nonprofit outfit like Smithsonian Folkways can't entirely ignore the marketplace. Thus, in what is commercial compromise only by the most relative of definitions, we get 15 cuts by current bluegrass musicians and one, at the conclusion of proceedings, by an advanced-age Bobby Osborne. Mostly, the songs are from the era the book covers, as reimagined by singers and pickers who revisit the sound from that generation.

The immediate impression one gets from listening is how good those songs were, and how talented the current crowd is. I've heard most of the originals, which remain as appealing as ever even in the 21st century. I suppose something is lost in the keen professionalism that defines the genre in our time, and the tough, sincere intensity of mid-20th-century performance -- you might call it white soul music -- makes for a unique kind of listening experience, of the sort in which the real world surrounding the listener feels relegated to some shadow realm -- the way I felt when I first heard, for two examples that come to mind, the Stanley Brothers' "Rank Stranger" and the Osbornes's "Ruby, Are You Mad"; the book, by the way, covers Bobby & Sonny's history with that song.

Still, "real good" -- if you will pardon the technical jargon -- describes every cut here. The album commences with a somewhat more recent composition, "Readin' Rightin' Route 23," which recalls country star Dwight Yoakam's youthful Kentucky-to-Ohio odyssey, done here splendidly by Joe Mullins & His Radio Ramblers. (Joe is the son of the late Paul "Moon" Mullins, a bluegrass fiddler and celebrated local DJ whose career the book chronicles.) Bluegrass long-timers will recognize most of the titles that follow, some of them the most enduring songs (including "Stone Walls and Steel Bars," "Once More," "Are You Missing Me?" and "Barefoot Nellie") lovingly recreated in fresh interpretations by (respectively) Bowman, Rigsby & Smith, The Grascals, Dailey & Vincent, and Jim Lauderdale & High Fidelity.

Among the songs new to me is a superb Tom T. Hall creation from the early 1970s, "The Rolling Mills of Middletown," covered by Larry Cordle. It is rarely remarked that Hall's storytelling approach is rooted in the folk-ballad tradition, but if there were any doubts on that score, they're settled here. The novelty is not the "rolling mills" of the title -- several traditional songs boast such (not least the fabulous "Rolling Mills are Burning Down") -- but the tale's resolution. Not far into the story the listener assumes how it will end, only to learn in due course that one has encountered an exceedingly rare phenomenon, the near-murder ballad.

Curiously to me, the one raise-the-hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck performance is not by a bluegrass artist but by neo-traditional country singer Lee Ann Womack. "From Life's Other Side" is not the 19th-century "A Picture from Life's Other Side," recorded by the Blue Sky Boys, Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams and many others. It's the work of the late Dave Evans, whose fearless way with a song elevated him to the status of something akin to a bluegrass Roscoe Holcomb. This is no less than a meditation on sanity, mortality and grief. Womack's heart and voice match the challenge. Just be sure you're sitting down.