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Bluegrass has found an unlikely home, and avid following, in the Czech Republic. The music’s emergence in Central Europe places it within an increasingly global network of communities built around bluegrass activities. Lee Bidgood offers a fascinating study of the Czech bluegrass phenomenon that merges intimate immersion in the music with on-the-ground fieldwork informed by his life as a working musician. Drawing on his own close personal and professional interactions, Bidgood charts how Czech bluegrass put down roots and looks at its performance as a uniquely Czech musical practice. He also reflects on “Americanist” musical projects and the ways Czech musicians use them to construct personal and social identities. Bidgood sees these acts of construction as a response to the Czech Republic’s postsocialist environment but also to US cultural prominence within our global mediascape. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1157/thumbnail.jpg

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The Knoxville Sessions, 1929-1930: Knox County Stomp gathers together, for the first time, all the issued recordings made at the St. James Hotel, remastered from the original 78s-some of them so elusive that only single copies are known to exist. These 102 fascinating performances, on four CDs, are accompanied by a 156-page, LP-sized hardcover book containing essays on the history of Knoxville, the background to the sessions, and the individual artists, much of the material based on new research. The book is also filled with scores of rare photographs, many previously unpublished, as well as complete song lyrics and a detailed discography with 250 illustrations. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1168/thumbnail.jpg

Bluegrass stylings in Colorado have ranged from Hot Rize's mix of traditional and modern ideas with humor to the earnest traditionalism of Jeff Scroggins and Colorado; from the jamband approach of Yonder Mountain String Band and String Cheese Incident to the indie-pop sensibilities of the band Front Range. The Colorado bluegrass scene's participatory aspects (Gardner 2004) are entwined with lucrative enterprises like Planet Bluegrass and its instant-sellout Telluride and Rockygrass festivals. While the Colorado Bluegrass Music Society (est. 1973) and a variety of camps have long supported learning about the music, Colorado College and the University of Northern Colorado have begun to engage bluegrass as a part of curriculum. Bluegrass music making in Colorado parallels recent trends in bluegrass and related acoustic musics elsewhere, but also reveals local particularities. Presenters (key local musicians and music organizers as well as scholars) will highlight salient aspects of Colorado bluegrass, with particular emphasis on festivals, production aesthetics, jambands, continuity with larger bluegrass scenes, comparison with other "extra-contextual" scenes (Hambly 1980), higher education's engagement with the music, as well as ways that ethnomusicology can contribute to bluegrass activities, and vice versa. All attendees to this session are asked to participate in the discussion, bringing their perspectives on this and other "named systems" revival musics in Colorado and elsewhere. This roundtable will serve as a rare chance for scholars and nonacademic stakeholders to engage in relaxed dialogue about this form of music in a formal setting.

Book Summary: A History of Virginia Literature chronicles a story that has been more than four hundred years in the making. It looks at the development of literary culture in Virginia from the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to the twenty-first century. Divided into four main parts, this History examines the literature of colonial Virginia, Jeffersonian Virginia, Civil War Virginia, and modern Virginia. Individual chapters survey such literary genres as diaries, histories, letters, novels, poetry, political writings, promotion literature, science fiction, and slave narratives. Leading scholars also devote special attention to several major authors, including William Byrd of Westover, Thomas Jefferson, Ellen Glasgow, Edgar Allan Poe, and William Styron. This book is of pivotal importance to the development of American literature and of American studies more generally.

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During their long history of Americanism, Czechs have inscribed “real imaginary” elements of Americana on their environment, laying a foundation for the current interest in bluegrass music. Czech articulations of this imagined “Amerika” in translated, newly created, and recontextualized songs reveal a playful ambiguity. Czechs have cultivated bluegrass through a sense of place that contains traces of Americanness, blurring the boundaries between what is American and what is Czech. With humor and hard work, Czech bluegrassers shape a sense of place through their performance of songs in which U.S. music becomes part of the European landscape.