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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.

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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.

Performances of old time string band and bluegrass music today often include participants' sense of a deeply "emplaced" sensibility, often with specific place references to Appalachia. How do people outside the United States perform versions of these spaces as they engage in these Appalachia-related music making practices? To address this question I draw mainly on my long-term ethnographic research on bluegrass-related music-making in the Czech Republic, including insights I have gleaned from encounters with musical participants in similar scenes from other countries. I start my inquiry in my own identity as an outsider in Appalachia, and frame issues of genre and regional identity using ideas about place and country music from Negus (1999) and Murphy (2014). The sense of in-between-ness and ambiguity that my field colleagues have expressed challenge homological linkings of place and country music (Carney 1974, 1996), leading me to conclude by posing these views with ideas about"place" as a flexible concept from geographer Doreen Massey (2005).

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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.Screening and discussions occurred on the following dates and places: Czech and Slovak Cultural Association / Minnesota Bluegrass and Old Time Music Association, St. Paul, MN (11/18/2017) William King Museum Speaker Series, Birthplace of Country Music Museum, Bristol, VA (02/07/2017)Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Society of Ethnomusicology Annual Conference, Charlottesville, VA (03/05/2016)Appalachian Studies Association, Johnson City (03/27/2015)Society for Ethnomusicology, Pittsburgh, PA (11/13/2014)IBMA World of Bluegrass Business Conference, Raleigh, NC (09/28/2014)International Country Music Conference, Nashville, TN (05/24/2014)Colgate University, (9/20-21/2016)Merlefest, Wilkesboro, NC (4/24/2015)College of Charleston (3/19/2015)West Virginia University (11/12/2014)University of Virginia Dept. of Music, Charlottesville, VA (11/8/2013)Walker Arts and History Center, Cary, NC (9/26/2013)Fulbright Distinguished Scholar Series, American Center at the U.S. Embassy, Prague, Czech Republic (6/20/2013)Banjo Jamboree Bluegrass Festival, Čáslav, Czech Republic (6/21/2013, 6/22/2013)Jerome College of Prague, Prague, Czech Republic (6/24/2013)Moravská Zemská Knihovna, Brno (6/27/2013)White Stork Bluegrass Festival, Luka nad Jihlavou (7/8/2013)

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I wrote this work with the nation's Bicentennial Celebration in mind. I was completed on Dec. 1, 1975. I hope the musicians who perform it will do so with the same attitude of pride in being an American that I feel and that I experienced as I wrote it. The underlying motive, in the beginning, was to write a "Bicentennial piece" that would be totally different from other works that would be most surely coming out in the '75-'76 Bicentennial year. I chose the vocal medium first because the ability to sing is God's gift to man. It is 'natural' music. I chose the brass accompaniment because of the power of the instruments themselves, hinting at the power of the nation. I chose percussion to add flare, variety, and vitality, the very pulse and drive of the nation. To my knowledge, the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, and the Pledge to the Flag had never before been set to music as I did in America Sings. These are relatively obscure documents in the music world and yet so vital to America's history. I combined the two: 4 significant documents in the history of the nation, and musical treatise. Finally, the original status of these documents was that they were to be read or recited; so the Narrator provides the continuing story of why America Sings. There are two basic musical ideas that seem to recur throughout the piece. One is the use if V-I-V scale degree pattern in both vocal and brass parts. This recurring pattern gives the feeling of "looking upward." The other is a recurring I-V melody bass pattern in the tuba and timpani parts, implying an old American march. The piece is in oratorio form.