My music playlist for today (July 2, 2012 edition)

It’s a genuinely American week we’re in, so how about enjoying a bit more genuinely American music?

We can get right down to the roots today when it comes to country music. Personally, I love the sound of good bluegrass being played. I guess that’s because bluegrass is a part of my roots. I love to hear mandolins and fiddles together, an upright bass, banjo and guitar, and a vocalist with more of a high-pitched sound.

Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys (Photo credit: Thomas Hawk)

In order to celebrate bluegrass music, we might as well go all the way back to the ones who brought it to the forefront, Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys — the “Father of Bluegrass.”

Bluegrass is fed by the likes of English, Scottish, and Irish folk music, it’s got African-American influences through its taste of jazziness. It’s a melting pot, filled with the ingredients of the people who came to Appalachia.

As Monroe himself used to describe it, it’s “Scottish bagpipes and ole-time fiddlin’. It’s Methodist and Holiness and Baptist. It’s blues and jazz, and it has a high lonesome sound.”

That “high lonesome sound” is a description I’ve heard most often. It’s part of what’s attracted me to bluegrass for a lot of years. No one’s done it better than Bill Monroe and his boys.