Bluegrass

Bluegrass music is a form of American roots music, and is a subgenre of country music. It has its own roots in Irish, Scottish and English traditional music. Bluegrass was inspired by the music of immigrants from the United Kingdom and Ireland (particularly the Scots-Irish immigrants in Appalachia), as well as jazz and blues.

In bluegrass, as in jazz, each instrument takes a turn playing the melody and improvising around it, while the others perform accompaniment. This is in contrast to old-time music, in which all instruments play the melody together or one instrument carries the lead throughout while the others provide accompaniment. Traditional bluegrass is typically based around acoustic stringed instruments, such as acoustic guitar, banjo, fiddle, and upright bass, with or without vocals.

In recent decades bluegrass music has increasingly reached a broader audience. Major mainstream country music performers have recorded bluegrass albums, including Dolly Parton and Patty Loveless, each having released several bluegrass albums. Since the late 1990s, Ricky Skaggs, who began as a bluegrass musician and crossed over to mainstream country in the 1980s, returned to bluegrass with his band Kentucky Thunder. The Coen Brothers' movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (2000) and the resulting “Down from the Mountain” music tour and documentary, have contributed mightily to expanding the audience for bluegrass music.

This description is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses materials from the Wikipedia article "Bluegrass music".