Region’s Bluegrass roots celebrated

New book, CD, and live performance by top stars aim to spark revival with help of Miami campuses.

BUTLER COUNTY — Bluegrass music was the soundtrack of last century’s migration from Appalachia.

Now, with the help of Miami University’s regional campuses, working-class tunes of yesteryear are being re-discovered.

Leading the resurgence is a new book — “Industrial Strength Bluegrass: Southwestern Ohio’s Musical Legacy” — that chronicles the past generation of thousands of area families who brought along the distinctive sounds of bluegrass as they migrated from Kentucky and other mid-southern states for work here.

Book co-editor and contributor Fred Bartenstein said he hopes for a Bluegrass revival with the book’s release, a coming concert and a CD featuring some of Bluegrass’ biggest performers.

“Southwestern Ohio was to bluegrass what New Orleans was to jazz or what Chicago was to the blues. It was the place where the music really took root and evolved,” said Bartenstein.

It’s a regional musical legacy that rang nationwide but is forgotten by many locally whose families lived and worked here in the last half of the 20th century, said Bartenstein.

The population shift, which began in the 1940s, saw thousands each year taking on the heavy industry jobs offered by Middletown and Hamilton’s steel mills to other manual labor opportunities in the industrialized Dayton and Springfield area.

“It’s totally about the Appalachian migration but bluegrass music, which emerged in the mid-1940s was popular among the hundreds of thousands of migrants to this region. And this (southwest Ohio) region was also one of the largest markets for bluegrass music,” he said.

“Brilliantly talented musicians began their careers here … including many who appeared on live broadcasts from a Middletown radio station … and other really significant radio outlets based in this region and some significant record companies.”

“It all was a perfect storm for it to evolve from the way Bluegrass music sounded in the mid-1940s to the way it sounds today,” said Bartenstein. “And a lot of that happened in Cincinnati, Hamilton, Middletown, Dayton and Springfield.”

Later this month will see a live Bluegrass concert – with a limited on-site audience and broadcasted online – from the Southern Ohio Indoor Music Festival near Wilmington, Ohio and the release of CD featuring internationally-celebrated artists including Rhonda Vincent, Bobby Osborne, Vince Gill, Lee Ann Womack and Joe

Bluegrass

A new book chronicles the area families who brought along the distinctive sounds of Bluegrass as they migrated from Kentucky.