Is There a Difference? Old-Time vs Bluegrass
Bluegrass vs. Old-time, Is there a difference?
Is there a Difference?
Simply put, yes! Old-time music is deeply rooted in the tradition of community, harmony, and dancing accompaniment while bluegrass is deeply rooted in the virtuosity of musical instrumentation and the harmony traditional instruments can achieve when striving for perfection. Old-time music is repetitive and collaborative. Old-time music will feature the same pieces of music, played repetitively for hours at a time, only stopping for musicians to rest, re-string, or switch instruments. Old-time music is about the community created through the music and dance combination, and as a result, solos almost never exist in old-time music. This is a stark difference from bluegrass. Bluegrass, born of old-time music in Appalachia, focused on the art of the instrument and the capabilities of the artist's ability to pick a unique, complex melody, both independently and collectively within the larger band.
A classic example of old-time music, Stringbean with Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt, "Run Little Rabbit, Run."
A classic example of bluegrass style, Foggy Mountain Boys, "Roll in my Sweet Baby's Arms."
Bluegrass is a competitive game to captivate audiences with smooth melodies and dynamic and diverse instrumentation, including the guitar, banjo, mandolin, dobro, and fiddle. Deeply rooted within the Appalachian Bible belt, bluegrass sings the gospels, whereas traditional old-time music will sing to the array of lifetime pits and peaks, including love, death, crime, and natural disasters. Traditional old-time mountain music carves a unique path of time and groove, highlighting a song’s crookedness or broken and odd melodies considered the magic of these old-time songs. Dynamic and gritty fiddles drive the old-time song, whereas a bluegrass fiddle is expected to smoothly provide both melody and percussion to the overall song, as well as contribute a breakdown to solo within the larger composition. When an artist joins an old-time jam session, they would never prepare a solo for the event. However, if participating in a bluegrass jam session, one would be wildly unprepared if one did not devise a solo to showcase to the group.
"Cumberland Gap" played in both styles - can you spot the differences?
A final, and somewhat divisive, difference between the two genres is the role of the listener. Old-time music was born as a release after a hard day’s work and is, therefore, participatory in nature. People sing, dance and flirt on the dance floor as part of a community. Bluegrass is a performance presented to an audience. People are not expected to dance to bluegrass (though many certainly do!), they are expected to listen to the excellence of the players and appreciate the level of skill they bear witness to.