Bitesize - Tristan Scroggins on Authenticity and Identity in Bluegrass

This week's Bitesize episode comes from a fascinating conversation I had with Tristan Scroggins in 2021.

In this section Tristan reflects on what it means to come to bluegrass as an 'outsider' and how culture and connection aren't just about geographical borders.

Growing up in New Mexico, despite learning traditional bluegrass from his father, Tristan felt a disconnect from the roots of the music. Later, when he moved to Nashville, he found himself wondering exactly why he loves bluegrass so much. 

Whether we're taking about European festival fans reacting to bluegrass (and the culture they perceive accompanies it), or the generation of northern and western musicians who came to bluegrass in the 1960s and 70s as a result of the folk revival, there's a common thread of music transcending boundaries. 

As a Brit coming to this music from outside both the region and the culture, yet feeling like I somehow belong, I find these conversations fascinating.

You can hear my full interview with Tristan on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

For more on Tristan, head to tristanscroggins.com or follow Tristan on Instagram

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

And it was the first time really that you could be exposed to bluegrass without hearing first generation source for a lot of the material. You were hearing people professionally perform covers of the music. And that changes how you know you're hearing their interpretation of something and stuff. That immediately is going to cause a lot of growth and change in the music.

Matt 0:29

Hi, this is Matt, and you're listening to Bluegrass Jamalong the podcast for anyone and everyone who loves Bluegrass. Hey everybody, welcome back to Bluegrass Jamalong. This is a bite-sized episode for you, and it comes from 2021, and one of the earliest interviews I did for Bullygrass Jamalong, and it's with Mandolin player Tristan Scroggins. And I was listening to it again recently as part of another project that I've got going on alongside the podcast. I've been listening to a lot of 70s Bluegrass. I've been listening to a lot of stuff from around the time that people who got into Bullygrass do the folk revival started performing bands. Ties in with the episode I did with Misty Rain's recently about Teldom Steen, and just that period where people who hadn't necessarily grown up in Appalachia and grown up in a bluegrass tradition were starting to get involved with the music and lots of questions around kind of what's authentic and how people from different backgrounds approach the music. And it just I remember Tristan being really fascinated by that kind of stuff. So I went back and had a re-listen and I wasn't disappointed. And I wanted to pull a little chunk of it out and just put it out as a bite-sized episode. A bit that I found particularly interesting, but just conversations around all of that kind of thing. I won't over-explain it, I'll leave you to have a listen. But this came from a longer interview, and I'll stick a link in the show notes in case you want to go back and check that one out as well. Yeah, Tristan's fascinating sort of obviously musician, but also just a writer and thinker and talker about all of this stuff. So just it was a delight to listen back to the full interview as well. Yes, but I will leave you to have a listen and see what you think. This is Tristan Scroggins.

SPEAKER_01 2:20

There's this interesting thing. And for me, I have this kind of weird thing where I I grew up in New Mexico where there wasn't very much bluegrass, but my dad was who is who my dad is. So I I was learning it in a very traditional way. I was learning from him and I was um learning from just, you know, playing music with people. But there was still a sense of like, you know, I I remember coming out east for the first time and seeing the Cumberland River and seeing um the Shenandoah Valley and seeing signs for all of these places that songs were written about, and there aren't any songs really about any of the places that I grew up. Yeah. And I I don't know. I there's definitely this thing I see it a lot out west where people, because of this perceived um uh lack or feeling like they don't have this claim to authenticity, sometimes they'll go really far into learning something like the history and being really intense about knowing everything about it, more so than a lot of people I know out here in Nashville or or you know in the southeast. And I think some of it is is just looking looking for that sense of authenticity. And for me, it was definitely I remember I had this sort of moment where I was probably like 18 or 19, and I was just wondering like why do I like bluegrass? Like I, you know, it it it was the most important thing in my life and still is, but um I I started to wonder like why is this important to me and why is it important to other people? Like what it what about it makes it interesting to other people? And I think back then I maybe had a more naive sense of like maybe bluegrass is special. Like there's I traveled a lot and been to like the UK and been to Norway and France and Canada and all these places where there was people who loved bluegrass, like and like what was the I was really curious what the thing that was drawing them to it was. And I I don't know that there's anything particular about bluegrass because there's also people in all those places that like jazz, and there's people here that are really into Scandinavian folk music. So but that sort of curiosity led me, you know, to just sort of want to learn about all that history, and I just got kind of obsessed with learning about it, and I think it made me a better not necessarily like just knowing about it made me a better musician, but that curiosity led me down some musical rabbit holes that I think made me a more well-rounded musician.

Matt 6:01

Yeah, and I think that's really interesting. I remember you w wrote something about a sort of really moving experience of being in the Netherlands at a festival and just realizing you were surrounded by people who have no physical connection to the spaces or the places or or even some of the culture, but were equally moved by the music as people who grew up right in the heart of it all.

unknown 6:20

Yeah.

Matt 6:21

And um, it's a bit I think it's I think sometimes music can be like a sort of like a a city without boundaries. And they're like, I live in London, but I wasn't born here, I wasn't brought up here. But you move to London and you live in London for a while and you become a Londoner, you just sort of that sort of authenticity thing isn't a thing. You don't have to have been born here to be considered a Londoner. I guess a city like New York's probably the same after a while, you just become a New Yorker. And I think that's one of the beautiful things about Bluegrass. Like I'm, you know, thousands of miles and a lot of different culture away from being part of it, and yet through playing it with people and listening to it and doing this podcast, I feel like I'm in some way part of that family or that sort of city of music. And um, I think bluegrass has that in maybe a way that jazz or something like that doesn't, because it does have a sort of spiritual homeland in a in a very strong way, and the songs are written about the places and the you know the landscapes and yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:18

I one of my favorite things about going to IBM A, which is notable because IBMA has pretty deliberately um decided to not define bluegrass. Like there's not really any sort of desire to say this is what bluegrass is, because that immediately leads to saying it it inherently excludes things. Um but going to IBM A or Ewab back when that was a thing was is really interesting because everybody there loves bluegrass, but it means something different to every single person there. Like bluegrass is not the same to everybody there, but they all love it and are connected by this very intangible idea of being connected to something. And I do think that bluegrass is very unique as far as musical genres go in that sense. And then there's definitely a weird thing with genre. I think about it a lot. Like with with book genres, there's a little bit more, like you can be a little bit more clear-cut about something being science fiction or a mystery or whatever, but musical genres are very much just classifications meant to sell albums. Like it's just how how to put something in a bin that um a person who's gonna buy it is most likely going to find it. And so while we can sort of retroactively look at a time period of bluegrass and define it based on that, it again with John Weisberger, he I'm gonna sort of misquote him because I can't remember exactly, but he his sort of idea about it is that if it's music that was performed with the intent of being bluegrass, was sold with the intent of being bluegrass and bought as bluegrass, then it is bluegrass. Like it it is all sort of based on this collective idea of what it is. There it to put an inherent marker on on what makes something bluegrass or not, it it it it doesn't work because immediately it turns into well, you know, it has to sound like this, and then but then you have things like those albums of Bill Monroe and Doc Watson playing together that don't really fit that mold, or a lot of Doc Watson stuff that like not everything he did was bluegrass necessarily, but a lot of it was, but a lot of it didn't, you know, broke a lot of the rules that people would ascribe to bluegrass and things like that.

Matt 10:13

Yeah, totally. And I mean I spent years working in in record shops and like bookshops back in the day, and and it is exactly where you say it's about it's marketing. Like genres are marketing, they're not they don't tell you what's going to be in the thing when you open it. It's and with a book, you can't you do get instances where people will slap a different cover on a book and sell it as uh an adult version or a young adult version, like a teen book or a you know, like the Harry Potter books or Philip Hullman or whatever. But yeah, like in music, I remember we'd be there sort of debating for hours do we put Steve Earl in country or rock? Like, where do we put him? And I remember going to see him you know years ago and him saying, I'd love coming to the UK because nobody cares really what my music is, they just like it or they don't. And you know, said back home people can get a little bit obsessed with whether I'm country or not. He said, It doesn't really matter, you know. I mean, Steve Earl never said anything quite that gently, but you know that's a good point, you know, and you end it with an REM album that says on the spine file underwater, you know, because they were just like, Well, you we're not gonna tell you where to put this.

SPEAKER_01 11:13

Yeah. Yeah, and I I think that I I could go on a pretty long tangent about my sort of ideas about this, but I do think that Bluegrass changed in the 60s and 70s around what some people would call the third generation, other people would call the second. Um where you started getting a lot of um for lack of a better word, maybe outsiders, like people not in that tradition hearing the music. A lot of like middle class, um northern and western, like college-age kids, you know, finding it through the folk revival. And a couple of things happened all at once, I think. One of them being that all these new bands started forming. And it was the first time really that you could be exposed to bluegrass without hearing the first generation source for a lot of the material. Like you were hearing people professionally perform covers of the music, um, and that changes how you know you're hearing their interpretation of something, and so that immediately is going to cause a lot of of growth and change in the music. And in addition to that, it became this sort of there was a lot of people trying to like fit into this idea or like being intrigued by the culture and sort of adapting to it. And so I like I wasn't there back then, so it's like talking about it feels weird. But I can talk about like now growing to bluegrass festivals in California or Washington State, where you know, there's all these people who grew up out there playing bluegrass, but they wear flannel shirts and speak in like sort of vague southern accents and are really intense about stuff. And it in a lot of ways it feels very similar to um like a like a Star Trek convention or something. Like it's because there's sort of this idolizing of this idea of what this is, and sort of wanting to to cosplay and be a part of it. And in other countries, it's I I have this book somewhere um about country music in in the UK, and um I guess even with my experience, like playing in Germany and stuff, like I play or France, I played at this festival in France, and there was all these people who were really into line dancing and just would line dance to anything. And like it was very strange being like in the French countryside, surrounded by very French people dressed up as cowboys and selling like Confederate flag merch, which is its whole own thing, and um dancing, like line dancing to um acoustic covers of ACDC songs. You know, it's just this very surreal sort of experience, but yeah, yeah. But that I think is a big part of this music where even musically you have a lot of people writing music that is not necessarily um in the style of bluegrass as much as it is in a style that like seeks to invoke or imitate the style of bluegrass. And not necessarily on a conscious level, but I I think a lot of those songs that just are about bluegrass, like bluegrass songs about bluegrass, sort of fall into this category of like is this a bluegrass song, or is it just a song about bluegrass?