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No other place in the world has a romance with American bluegrass like the Czech Republic. Banjo Romantika introduces the musicians who play this unique bluegrass hybrid. Czechs first heard bluegrass during World War II when the Armed Forces Network broadcast American music for soldiers. The music represented freedom to dissatisfied Czechs living in a communist state. Czechs’ love for the music was solidified when Pete Seeger visited and performed in 1964. Inspired by classic American bluegrass sounds, an assortment of musicians from across the formerly communist Czech Republic have melded the past, the political and the present into a lively musical tradition entirely its own.

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

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.

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Bluegrass music was formed, in part, to be part of the soundtrack of emigration from the American South to industrial centers. The texts of some widely enjoyed bluegrass songs express the losses in this transition, often in longing for far-off, idealized places. Through a decade of ethnographic research on bluegrass in the Czech Republic, I have found Czech bluegrass - related music makers articulate a more globally expanded experience of dislocation and desire. Czech fans and musicians alike (bluegrassers") have blurred some genre and style boundaries as they have adapted American forms for local usage. Infusing the European landscape with "far away" ideas and tropes, Czech bluegrassers create "country" spaces that have flourished and diversified through political and social changes since the introduction of the music in the 1950s. These idealized “real-imaginary” spaces allow participants to reinterpret and reshape their social and natural environments. Part of today¹s global bluegrass scene, Czech bluegrass projects also connect with local folk and folklore milieus, as well as Czech musical and political history. Balancing a sense of locality with cosmopolitan elements bluegrassers shape the particular ‘country’ in which their music resounds. Following Melinda Reidinger and Ruth Gruber in addressing questions of self-realization through "real-imaginary" recreation in the Czech lands, I describe how bluegrass-related music-making has persisted, flourishing, through political and social changes, affording participants a way of interpreting and reshaping their physical and social environments through the idealized soundscapes connected to American music."

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Bluegrass is a music form often considered to be necessarily or uniquely connected to Appalachia. Significant popular and scholarly discourses (Malone, Negus, etc.) support the sense of a homological relationship (Middleton, Born, Murphy) linking certain rural spaces with country musics. At the same time, bluegrass has a broad and varied global appeal. Abroad, bluegrass is often a part of "Americanism," the negotiation of cultural elements from the United States--and is subject to an array of different cultural politics. This presentation presents an analysis and contextualization of three Czech bluegrass-related songs to indicate some ways in which bluegrass music makers can create a sense of place far afield from the music's putative geographic roots. 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 bluegrass songs reveals a playful ambiguity. Czechs have cultivated this music and sense of place through Americanisms that blur boundaries between what is American and what is Czech. These cases challenge homologies of sound and geography, and provide new ways to consider music and place in Appalachia.

Excerpt: Proc ty housle? ("Why the fiddle?") - "Fiddlers are all bad here - Why not write about the banjo or something else that Czechs are good at?"These questions about my ethnographic fieldwork came from musician colleagues with whom I working in researching bluegrass music in the Czech Republic, during a jam circle around a table. While these colleagues were mainly banjo and guitar players, these critiques of Czech fiddling are common even among Czech fiddlers, who are in many cases not as accomplished (in technical skill or musicality) as are their banjo-playing and mandolin-picking compatriots.