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Homegrown Music: Discovering Bluegrass by Stephanie P. Ledgin: ISBN 0-275-98115-0. Hardcover, Greenwood Publishing, 2004. 181 pages, Index, bibliography, discography.
This expert introduction to Appalachian mountain music and its offshoots, bluegrass and newgrass, should be required reading for every newly-appointed or elected student Bluegrass Director in the college and university radio stations across America which have just discovered the power of the music thro such vehicles as the film, “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” (referenced frequently thro this text), and who need this kind of thorough rounding in the music they have come to recently and with great curiosity.
For example, here they will find an extremely helpful discography of “Twenty-Five Recordings to Jump-Start Your Collection….” - all of which should be in the station library, and if not, should be acquired for any self-respecting new bluegrass program to have the depth and range it needs just to get started in this rich field, with its long history and family tree of “tangled roots and branches,” to quote the author in the Introduction. Here also is a very useful directory of publications, both on and off the Internet (from Robert Cantwell’s “Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern
Sound", published by the University of Illinois, 1984.2003, to Bluegrass Unlimited – www.bluegrassmusic.com]), devoted to the music which has gained such a wide audience in the past few years. There are bluegrass festivals listed, Internet radio stations devoted to or with bluegrass programming on them, record labels and retail outlets all listed, besides selected academic programs and summer camps devoted to the music – if anything, a cornucopia of riches that might overwhelm the casual newbies who only wanted a hint and found themselves in the middle of a treasure-house.
But that is as it should be; Stephanie Ledgin, a well-known photojournalist and one-time Director of the New Jersey Folk Festival, an offshoot of the American Studies program at Rutgers University, has come a long way from her first job out of college, as assistant editor of the late, lamented seminal bluegrass magazine, Pickin’, and it seems clear her old boss, Roger Siminoff, would be very pleased indeed at where she has come along this long and winding road, and what a trail she has blazed for fellow newbies and ex-newbies.