A huge indulgence, this - laying down $70 for a four cd set tracing the development of bluegrass from its recorded origins in the 1920s through to the present day - but indulgence isn't always a bad thing, and sometimes it's positively necessary (ie, indulgent in the particular instance, necessary in the overall scheme of things...incoherent or not?). There's something like five hours of music across the set, and even after the better part of several weeks I don't feel as if I've absorbed it all properly; times being what they are at present, though (that is, tiring, flat and unconducive to listening to music), I don't see this changing much in the near future, and hence the present writeup.
A couple of the songs were already familiar to me, to greater or lesser extents ("I'm A Man Of Constant Sorrow" and "Keep On The Sunny Side" through O Brother, Where Art Thou?, "Poor Ellen Smith" through Laura Cantrell's version of it, "Orange Blossom Special" thanks to Johnny Cash, Alison Krauss + Union Station's "So Long, So Wrong", Rhonda Vincent's "Is The Grass Any Bluer" and Mark O'Connor's "Soldier's Joy"), but I was struck by a sense of familiarity which lingers through all of the music collected here, and which owes much, I think, to the continuity of sound that seems to have been preserved in the genre from those early days through to now (so that the earliest cuts, by artists like Bill Monroe, Charlie Poole, the Carter Family and others, have more in common than not with the more contemporary bluegrass currents with which I'm more familiar). I feel that there's so much to be explored here - perhaps will have more to say once Thesis and coursework have been negotiated.
