Generational Differences in Music! - A Prescription Bluegrass Editorial

Saying that younger people have a different idea of what constitutes bluegrass is about as profound as saying that younger people are missing some of the information.

When I say younger, it's a relative term. It doesn't necessarily mean any age group such as teenagers or those under age 30.

It's just that each of us knows what we know in the order in which we learned it. And if we never learned it then it should stand to reason that we don't know it. That aphorism came home to me not too long ago when our farrier, Sam, came to shoe the horses. His 15-year-old daughter comes along in the summertime to help and the conversation somehow drifted away from horses and onto school and education.

Somewhere in the dialog Sam asked me what was the very first school shooting I could remember. Fully expecting me to say Columbine, you should have seen his consternation when I said: “Kent State.”

Sam doesn't usually stop what he's doing in the middle of a nailing or a trimming but his hammer stopped in mid air just as he was about to hit the nail and he put the horse's foot back down and just stood there looking at me for what seemed like the longest time imaginable. Then he finally said, “guess I don't know about that one...did that just happen?”

Now Sam is a pretty sharp individual and knows an awful lot about a lot of stuff, so this caught me off guard but I quickly recovered and said...no..that may have happened before you were born (Sam was born in 1976 – six years after the shootings). So I filled him in on a few of the circumstances surrounding that horrible day.

Fortunately, I'd had some training in generational differences and I was able to recall some aids to keep me from absolutely ridiculing poor Sam for a void in his experiences.

To really get the gist of just what generational differences do and how they affect each of us, try this exercise. You can do it in a group if you have enough different ages represented or you can try it one at a time but you will need at least for different people. One should be a teenager, another should be from 25-50, the next from 50-70 and finally someone over age 70. Ask all in a group or each one this same question. If you're in a group and someone asks for an explanation, don't provide any more but rather just simply repeat the question word for word. The question you will be asking is: “Where and how did Kennedy die?”

When this question was presented to my group, I responded first with, “Gunshot from a sniper in the book depository in Dallas. Another in the group countered my statement with, “I though he died in a hotel kitchen in Los Angeles and still another said they were sure it was a plane crash that killed him. Finally the youngest person in the room blurted out with as much shock and surprise as you could imagine, “Jamie Kennedy is dead!?”

The lesson learned was that each generation had their own Kennedy and so to does each generation have it's own music and it's own bluegrass.

Now back to Sam...he's a country music fan in a big way and so is his daughter. He likes Tammy Wynette but she likes Taylor Swift. He likes The Oak Ridge Boys, but she likes the Band Perry. He said that he just couldn't relate to any of this new stuff that she likes...but give him that good old stuff like Waylon and Wille. Good old...uh..OLD stuff...??? Man I couldn't believe my ears. To me that's just yesterday and far from old. But remembering my generational differences training, I asked him what he thought of Hank and Patsy and Cowboy Copus and I named a few more from that generation. Once again he stopped his work and said... “I don't know anything about them.” Well how would he if the Real Country Radio station he listens to thinks that Reba McEntire and George Strait are the old-guard?

I finally got around to asking him about bluegrass and he said sure he liked it, but he couldn't really name anyone that he knew about....until finally he recalled that... “Man of Sorrow Song” he said.

It seems that years ago, generational differences were not so pronounced as they are today. Could it be that is because years ago, life was somehow simpler, less complex, less hectic and definitely a much smaller place when the amount of travel away from home for the average person's lifetime might be as much as 100 miles.

Maybe that's why in bluegrass we don't really have those four generations with differences. Bluegrass is still a much smaller community and at any festival you're apt to see every age from 6 months to 60 years and 9 months to 90 years.

But we do have at least two - between the traditionalists and the jamband fans. And were quickly working on a third generational difference. Just ask a few people to define the term “New Grass” and see the variances you'll get depending upon the person's age who is answering the question.

Veteran Country Music DJ and historian Hugh Cherry once told me that he'd been offered a major syndication deal to produce a documentary on the HISTORY OF COUNTRY MUSIC and they wanted him to start with Hank Williams (Sr.). Now, at the time this syndicator was one of, if not, the biggest outfits in broadcasting so you can imagine my surprise and stupefaction when I heard him say he turned them down. Why? Was my question and he answered simply that it would be like producing a history of the United States and starting with the Vietnam War.

So much has happened long before we came to be that we can't ignore, but we still learn it at the time that is right for us regardless of how far apart that is from others who've learned the same. And so it is with bluegrass music. Those who profess to like only traditional just haven't heard the right sound at the right time and those who camp out on the other side with the progressive movement just haven't yet discovered that rare gem from the past that will set them on a new course of admiration and adventure.

Whatever your generation, we do what we can in hopes you'll like Prescription Bluegrass.