With folk music, country and bluegrass incubating over roughly the same a period of time as jazz after it’s move to major cities, there’s really only a single reason as to why the music hadn’t been embraced in a similar fashion. There were shifts in those genre’s as well, though.

Again, it’s difficult to pin point the immergence of a singular style of music, but most frequently Bill Monroe is referenced as the first bluegrass band leader. Reared in Rosine, Kentucky, Monroe developed a music taste largely based on the music he heard in church. What’s interesting to note, though, is the fact that Monroe always credited a man named Arnold Schultz, a local day laborer, adept at both fiddle and guitar, for influencing his work on the mandolin².

Much in the same way that Rodgers was beholden to the blues, so was Monroe. As a folk music, Monroe was able to take away forms used in the blues and apply each to the various string bands he led over time. Moving to Indiana and gigging with his brother, the two performing as the Monroe Brothers, landed a deal with Bluebird Records and issued a few sides recorded in 1936. Just three years later, Bill Monroe, new band in tow, would perform for the first time at the Grand Ole Opry. The Bluegrass Boys, a name Monroe used as homage for his home state, didn’t attain its often copied sound until a few years later³.

1944 marked the year Earl Flatt and Lester Scruggs joined Monroe’s band. And while the ensemble leader had always sought to push beyond the means of his assembled players, with this pair on guitar and banjo, Monroe was gifted with players to meet his vision. As with an innovate stylist, Monroe soon had a bevy of impersonators and eventually Flatt and Scruggs left to pursue their own careers. Even if that hadn’t occurred, though, there wasn’t any chance of Monroe’s music becoming commercially popular in the same way that jazz had become during the same time period.

Sam Bush, frequently credited as the most important figure in moving bluegrass to whatever newgrass can be quantified as, figures the reason for this disparaging gulf in popularity was due to the concerns each music addressed.

“When bluegrass started out, it was more of a rural music whereas newgrass is contemporary music using traditional instrumentation,” the mandolin player hypothesizes from his home in Kentucky.

By the time Bush began recording in the late ‘60s, though, there wasn’t too great a chance for a either a bluegrass or newgrass group to cross over to the pop charts. Even on albums that Bush recorded on seemed to taut rock and roll as the supreme musical vocabulary as the New Grass Revival’s first record begins with a cover of Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Great Balls of Fire.” It’s interesting, though, that the group choose a song from a white performer as opposed to more blues tinged, R&B rave up.