Published in Bean Blossom to Bannerman, Odyssey of a Folklorist: A Festschrift for Neil V. Rosenberg
(St. John's, Newfoundland: Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2005).
It's a singular honor to be asked to contribute to a festschrift honoring and celebrating my friend Neil Rosenberg. Neil is generally regarded by literate bluegrass music fans today as the ultimate scholarly bluegrass music authority. "He's the one that wrote the history of bluegrass," is the way it's been simply explained to me more than once by helpful fans who didn't know I already knew Neil and was familiar with his body of work. Many bluegrass fans don't know much more about Neil than that: he wrote and published Bluegrass: A History in 1985, a move which immeasurably bolstered the fortunes of the University of Illinois Press and brought Neil's name to the awareness of a growing constituency of bluegrass music folks: artists, fans and followers. Most are unaware of the depth and breadth of Neil's scholarship outside of bluegrass, and might be surprised to learn how many important scholarly non-bluegrass works have also come from the desk of the "Phantom Discographer."
Bluegrass fans, who have for the most part aggressively bought into the happy 1960's sound-bite acclamation of Bill Monroe as the "Father of Bluegrass Music," may never have given voice to an appropriate derivative formulation: Neil V. Rosenberg as the "Father of the Scholarly Study of Bluegrass Music," but if they were presented with that coinage, they would undoubtedly concur and approve.
A couple anecdotes can help me flesh out the reality of Neil's influential presence for me and underscore the impact his life and work have made on me and so many others.
As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, I had already been playing bluegrass banjo for five or six years when I read Neil's seminal article "From Sound to Style: The Emergence of Bluegrass" in the Journal of American Folklore in 1967. My first encounter with Neil came the following year, while I was still an undergraduate. In November of 1968 I traveled to Bloomington, Indiana with my mentor at the University of Illinois, Archie Green, to attend the American Folklore Society's annual meeting. The Society was much smaller then, though already growing. There were grumblings to be heard at that year's meetings about some of the consequences of the scholarly society's growth. The innovative approach to that year's program, involving for the first time two different simultaneous panels, meant that American Folklore Society members could no longer attend the annual AFS meeting in its entirety. No longer would the folktale people have to sit through the musicology sessions, and vice versa, and while some applauded this new-found specialization, other folklorists -- the "old guard" in particular -- complained that it felt wrong somehow that the simultaneous sessions precluded the participants' sharing the annual meeting's totality in a manner emblematic somehow of folklore's core..
At the height of this period of a sea-change in the disciplinary development of folklore, Archie Green, knowing of my longstanding interest in bluegrass music and already helping to raise the trajectory of my to-be-continued plan of graduate education in folklore, mentioned as we drove to Bloomington from Champaign that he would ensure that I met Neil. During the first part of the meeting I saw Neil participating in the scholarly sessions, and Archie finally introduced me to him just as we were being seated for the AFS annual banquet early Saturday evening. I sat at the round banquet table with Neil and six others, listening and being deeply impressed with the conversation that Neil was having with his fellow students in the doctoral program at Indiana University's Folklore Institute. They spoke about music, about the new structuralist approaches to folktale and folklife scholarship, and about music again, peppering their banter with respectful jibes and anecdotes about the Folklore Institute's demanding and sometimes irascible director, Richard M. Dorson.
What struck me first about Neil was his combination of intellectural curiosity and an open and easy manner. Here was the articulate scholar with profound things to say about bluegrass, and he was directly engaged in the field of graduate studies that most appropriately served to give him a respectful podium from which to make his trenchant assessments. And yet he was immediately welcoming and accepting of me, a mere college junior. I was thrilled.
That evening I also had a chance to see Neil for the first time as a performer. After the banquet was over, a number of participants (including eventually Mike Seeger, Ralph Rinzler, and Neil himself) gathered at one end of a large meeting room and began to play a medley of instrumentals and dance tunes. Having brought my own banjo, I joined in for a while as well, and as the festive throng of folklorists grew and the drinking and dancing and singing began in earnest, I felt a profound sense of belonging, engendered in large part by Neil's gracious presence. He seemed to know and greet everyone, from the venerable scholars like Dorson, Herbert Halpert, Benjamin Botkin, and Archer Taylor to the young turks from Philadelphia and colleagues in the IU graduate program. Like Archie Green, Neil brought me into the scene.
A second, more profound incident followed almost immediately. On Sunday afternoon, after the society's formal meeting agenda had been completed, Neil introduced me to several other bluegrass fans and suggested that we all ride over to the next county to see the afternoon show at a nearby Indiana hamlet with an unbelievably quaint name: Bean Blossom. Four or five of us piled into a car and drove over, with Neil explaining on the way that the actual showplace was called the Brown County Jamboree, that it was a "park" which belonged to Bill Monroe. Neil also told us in broad terms that the show would be held in an "old barn" at the park. The Jamboree park had hosted Monroe's very first bluegrass festival the previous summer, although Monroe carefully designated his show the "Big Blue Grass Celebration" in order to avoid the copycat designation of "festival" that had been used repeatedly by the promoter of the first such events over the two prior years. The show scheduled for that Sunday in 1968 featured Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys. It was also to be, as Neil explained to us, one of the season's last regular performances, and therefore would also involve Monroe himself, along with his band, the Blue Grass Boys. Such shows, we were told, were typically staged in the park's unheated old barn each Sunday from about Easter through Thanksgiving. I did not know at the time that Neil himself had worked as the Brown County Jamboree's manager for the season of 1963, and had connections with both Ralph Rinzler and Bill Monroe that I did not then understand. Yet the impact of that first trip and of Neil's explanations about Bean Blossom proved to be profound and sustained for me. In the years that followed, after I finished an M.A. program in Folklore at the Cooperstown Graduate Programs and then followed somewhat in Neil's footsteps by matriculating at Indiana University’s Folklore Institute, I repeatedly returned to Bean Blossom and the Brown County Jamboree. I found that the bluegrass music I already enjoyed lived there in a context of active, rapid and multivalent cultural interchange. While the professional artists held forth from the Jamboree and festival stages each day, amateurs held impromptu “parking lot picking” sessions around the periphery of the old barn, or near their weekend or festival-week campsites, exchanging not only songs and tunes, but also providing a context for the learning of traditional and popular instrumental techniques and vocal repertoire. In short, it was a laboratory of living folkloric activity,i in which the “transmission” and re-creation of of traditions was occurring constantly. From a folklorist’s perspective, the Brown County Jamboree Park at Bean Blossom was ripe with possibilities for collection and study – if only one took the time to explore it and recognize it as such.
By about 1975 I was developing ideas for my own dissertation topic. Again Neil’s experiences at Indiana University provided me with help at a key time, though he himself was unaware of it, having already finished his own graduate studies and departed from Bloomington. The problem, for both Neil and myself, was the reticence of our dominating chairman, Richard M. Dorson, to acknowledge the relevance of any aspect of bluegrass music to folklore study at all. Dorson’s well-known battles against commercial “fakelore” and those who published it, combined with his own acknowledged lack of comfort when dealing with cultural expressions centered on music and song, meant that he failed to see any relevance to the study of bluegrass music as an expressive and traditional system. Consequently Dorson prevented Neil’s own leanings toward any sort of bluegrass-related dissertation. And thus it was that, years after Neil’s graduation from the Folklore program at Indiana, when I finally confronted Dorson in his office and first presented him with my own plan to study the transmission and inculcation of traditional knowledge among bluegrass banjo players, he frowned and indicated his displeasure. Yet, to my delight and amazement, Dorson quickly conceded, admitting openly that his willingness to reverse his decision about my topic was all due to Neil. Although Neil and I have always looked at somewhat different dimensions of the musical and cultural bluegrass scenes we encountered, Dorson simply assumed that what I wanted to do for my own dissertation was pretty much that same thing that Neil had wanted to do and would have done: it was bluegrass. “I didn’t let Neil do that,” he said -- without further qualifying what the “that” was -- “but perhaps I was wrong.” And so I was able to proceed with my research on a topic that was important and all-consuming to me, and in late 1979 I finished my own doctoral dissertation at Indiana. Although I am proud of that work, in the details of its final form it was not at all a thesis that Neil himself would likely have produced. Yet I owe a great debt to Neil for having inspired me to study at Indiana University and for helping in so many ways -- even inadvertently -- to give me the opportunity to write it.
I have continued to be in touch with Neil through the years, not only to periodically renew our long friendship, but also to talk about the 5-string banjo music we've each recently heard or played, and more. In 1996 I began to think of writing an interpretive history of the site in Indiana that has meant so much to Neil, and me, and many others: the Brown County Jamboree at Bean Blossom. Since I began in earnest, Neil has generously helped me at every turn in my work, with research suggestions and gentle corrections. He has freely shared with me numerous key materials from his well-organized interviews, notes, transcripts, letters, recordings, and, above all, has passed on some of his own vivid and crucial memories of the times he spent at Bean Blossom.
My work on the very specific subject of the Brown County Jamboree and Bill Monroe's bluegrass festivals has led me to consider that site and its setting from many perspectives. As the only performance venue owned for more than forty years by Bill Monroe, and the site of his first and most successful bluegrass festival, the place was and is historically unique. Yet the singular record of performances at Bean Blossom threatens to dominate its consideration and overshadow the ways in which Bean Blossom was also typical of a range of other, similar performance venues. In the aggregate, these are often called "music parks." More specifically, Bean Blossom is typically -- though not entirely accurately -- thought of by its attendees as a music park that is particularly devoted to a special kind of music: country music, with a particular (though not original) focus on bluegrass music. It is important for many to further qualify a place like Bean Blossom as "rural"; that is, it not only celebrates a musical form called "country," but also is situated in the country, in a rural setting. Although they are sparsely distributed across the eastern United States, such rural country music parks constitute a little-studied phenomenon of the mid-twentieth century, remaining for the most part hidden to historical scrutiny. Yet there are -- or were -- a lot of these parks. An informal survey of popular country music and bluegrass music literature has yielded the names and locations of more than eighty music park sites that operated between 1940 and the present (CLICK HERE for Fig. 1), and the recorded reminiscences of country and bluegrass musicians regularly include references to small and isolated rural country music parks as important, if low-paying, regular venues for their public performances.
Thus many city-dwelling fans of bluegrass music today have either directly experienced, or at least heard of, such "famous" music park sites as Sunset Park in Pennsylvania; the New River Ranch in Maryland; Frontier Ranch in Ohio; Watermelon Park in Berryville, Virginia; and Renfro Valley in Kentucky. The state of Indiana has been home to at least six rural music parks through the years, some of which operated or thrived for only a few years. While Bean Blossom's "Brown County Jamboree Park" is arguably the most famous and long-lived, thousands of country music and bluegrass fans also attended shows in Indiana at Anderson's "Mocking Bird Hill," Laurel's "Haspin Acres," Mulberry's "Shady Acres," Brookville's "Don's Bluebird Hill Park," and Angola's "Buck Lake Ranch." Over the remainder of this short essay, and with Bean Blossom and Neil very much in mind, I'd like to further introduce and reflect on the general topic of such parks, their antecedents and characteristics.
A condensed but specific Bean Blossom history is in order here. Today's bluegrass music fans typically think of all musical events experienced on the site where Neil worked and played as being part of "Bean Blossom." Metonymically, the name of the town has come to be used as a stand-in not only for the festival, but also for the entire musical place and the whole set of experiences that fans have had there or heard of at second-hand.
But the "Brown County Jamboree Park" -- the actual site that Bill Monroe owned and Neil introduced me to -- is not co-extensive with the town. It is a partly-wooded plot of 55 acres boasting a small lake, and is located, strictly speaking, just "out of town," at the northeast end of the small, dispersed crossroads community of Bean Blossom. For some regular fans and performers at Bean Blossom, the term "park" was even more specific, denoting only that section of the property in which a series of outdoor stages have stood.
Under the stewardship of the Jamboree site's first owner, grocery-store owner Francis Rund, the land he purchased in 1938 was improved in 1940 with three tourist cabins in a wooded area near the lake. In the fall of 1941 the Brown County Jamboree show, established a few months previously outside a nearby restaurant, and then consisting of a fast-paced free variety-show featuring young singers, instrumentalists, and comedians, found a permanent home on Rund's land. The show premiered there under a huge rented four-ring circus tent, and also traveled during the first winters to nearby communities, where a few wintertime Jamboree shows were held in regional fraternal organizations and local high school gyms. Over the next two years, Rund and his supporters built a countrified indoor auditorium in the form of a long, narrow barn, with board-and-batten siding and ornamental puncheon-slabs, in a very basic version of what has been called the "Brown County Rustic" style. The performance barn -- which by Neil Rosenberg's arrival in the 1960s was universally called "the old barn" -- had only eight small pot-bellied stoves to supply heat, making its use nearly as seasonal as the original Jamboree tent had been. From Rund's founding stewardship of the Brown County Jamboree, and continuing long after Bill Monroe's 1951 acquisition and development of the entire property, the barn was typically the place where Jamboree shows happened every Sunday afternoon and evening.
But the site included more than the cabins and the old barn. Several additional outdoor stages or performance platforms were also used in the Brown County Jamboree Park from the 1940s on. It's worth noting that at Bean Blossom, the primary outdoor performance site is in the northeast half of the property, separated from the barn by a transition from a sunny open meadow into a wooded part of the site. In the terminology of former Blue Grass Boy Butch Robins and a few others, only the wooded part of the site is called "the park." ii Outdoor stages were created in the same wooded grove at least three times, at the focal point of a broad natural amphitheater, or at least a space that lends itself to that interpretation. Many attendees at Bean Blossom have noted that both the stage and the audience space in front of it are fortuitously located in a grove of trees. Performances that truly touch and emotionally connect with fans in the context of the outdoor stage area at Bean Blossom somehow benefit from the inexpressible magic that the shady grove itself lends to the space. The trees themselves are sometimes said to be touched by the music played under them.iii
Beginning in the 1950s, the Brown County Jamboree Park also had one or two additional, much cruder, performance sites: unroofed outdoor platforms, located much closer to the barn. These were elevated only a foot or so above the dusty ground, and defined visually only by minimalist 2-by-4 railings at waist height around the platforms' perimeters. The plywood surface and size of these platforms suggest that they may also have been intended for dancing. Shifting historic relationships between "country music, " "bluegrass music" and dance make it hard to envision a past in which dance was much more important to audiences than it seems today, but in Brown County in particular, the social climate of the 1930s through the 1950s put a powerful emphasis on dancing to country music, and amateur square dancing was preeminent.
A controversial but constant feature of the music park at Bean Blossom was, from its inception, its crude or nonexistent toilets and sanitary deficiencies. The park was severely undersupplied with running water through most of its existence, and the cinder-block restroom formerly located near the "back" or performer's entrance end of the barn -- when it worked at all -- used water pumped straight up from the 4½-acre lake just east of the barn. A series of pit toilet outhouses, and (later on) islands and clusters of porta-potties, provided the only subsequent improvements in the park's sanitary accommodations for fans through most of its history. Even in the pre-festival years, from 1940 until 1967 (when the annual June bluegrass festival began to be held), fans would frequently camp on the grounds, and in staying overnight, would ultimately have to deal with the absence or primitive nature of basic hygienic facilities.
Why did Neil (and so many others) call the performance setting at Bean Blossom a "park"? Apart from the simple fact that Bill Monroe referred to and advertised the property as the "Brown County Jamboree Park," the term seems generically appropriate. Parks of all sorts -- meaning public or private outdoor places, especially natural or pristine places, that are preserved or reserved for a specific purpose and named as such, are members of a uniquely culturized class of places. Paradoxically, "natural parks" have long been growing in importance withing the cultural landscapes of both the Old World and the New. Perhaps most familiar to Americans today are the National Parks, great jewels in the crown of America's natural reserves, each dedicated to a very specific sample of landscape with all the endemic geomorphology and ecology of any preserved "wild" place. The concept of "park" thus begins with the notion of a unique outdoor place.
But the evolved concept of the park as realized in the 19th and 20th centuries is much broader, and encompasses many other types of parks, public and private, urban, suburban, and rural. In American's urban places, as in Europe's, the public preservation or creation of natural places has transformed them into a myriad of sorts of official city parks: formal, informal, and oxymoronically: wild. Private nature parks, if modest in size, might well be called simply gardens; to be sure, the ideas of "park" and "gardens" overlap.
Zoos are more formally called zoological parks, and historically provide a very early example of the term's extension into new ranges of cultural meanings. A more recent historic extension of the idea of "park" into an even-more culturalized domain is the amusement park, from private or public Old World models like Marie Antoinette's peasant village or Vienna's Prater, to New York's Coney Island, Chicago's Riverview and today's ubiquitous franchised "Six Flags" parks, filled with rides, sideshows, and diversions. Now, too, there are racing parks, sports parks, water parks, history parks, outdoor museum parks, industrial parks, and every manner of ceremonial and memorial park. A closely-related notion is that of the outdoor place where vehicles can be stored, that is, the car "park" or parking-lot, which at country and bluegrass music venues is often the scene of informal "parking-lot picking."
Within this unruly landscape of reserved outdoor places called parks (as if they were all somehow "natural" outgrowths of their sites) are those that paradoxically have been created for or dedicated to specific artistic forms. Still speaking generically, this is the case with what seems to be a 20th century development: the music park.
A majority of parks (other than those intended strictly as wilderness or nature preserves) somehow involve or sanction the use of music, and often serve concomitantly as places where dance and theater and other forms of stage entertainment are the focus. This is particularly noticeable in the case of city parks, which often feature stages, amphitheaters, gazebos, and other spaces suited to public musical performance. In the classical and fine-art music traditions, the American commitment to creating informal outdoor performance niches for high art music in rural places began around 1900. Suburban Chicago's century-plus-old Ravinia Park, which bills itself as "North America's oldest music festival," is a large suburban site, dedicated from its inception as a summer venue for classical music and opera, and incidentally created to help stimulate ridership on the Chicago & North Western Railway. A much later, yet similar, suburban site is Wolf Trap Farm Music Park, developed as America's National Park for the Performing Arts in 1969 in Vienna, Virginia, near Washington, D.C., on land that former generations of owners maintained as a working farm. Interestingly, those farming landowners had already made their site known as a kind of place where neighbors could come for parties, dances, and carnivals.
These sorts of music parks brought audiences to suburban and rural settings in which musical performances could be offered informally, or at least much less formally than in "normal" indoor venues. The outdoor nature of performance in a music park is a key to both the experience and the conceptual type of these venues. Playing or performing music or theater invariably involves creating a divided space for artists and audiences to share. Emphasis on the outdoor or open-air aspect of park performance often leads to a preference for unroofed amphitheaters, with or without constructed open-air stages at their focal points, or open-sided pavilions sheltering audiences and artists alike. Unwalled "auditoriums," which may be as simple as a cleared field and a rude stage, make possible the accommodation of large crowds of attendees who can take care of their own seating arrangements. The clearest defining characteristic of a music park, therefore, is the combination of an expansive rural setting and an outdoor stage.
From what sources did these outdoor music parks arise? Individual histories of such music parks have been and should continue to be compiled,iv but these often fail to point directly to antecedent forms. As an idea, rural music parks may have evolved in part from such earlier forms as the religious camp meeting, which dates to the late eighteenth century and has deeper roots in the "Great Awakening" of evangelistic fervor that swept through Europe and America prior to that time. Camp meetings were created by early American Methodist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, Baptist, and other Protestant churches to facilitate the gathering of their dispersed rural congregations for "revivals" of worship and fellowship. Often held annually in wooded areas, the camp meetings brought together like-minded families who lived in tents or covered wagons, and who also constructed makeshift shelters, often called "brush arbors." In areas where the annual camp meeting succeeded and flourished, the original brush arbor was frequently replaced by an open-sided "tabernacle" or pavilion, under which the participants could meet for singing, worship, and socializing. Outdoor stages were often constructed at some early-19th-century camp meeting sites, and their designs seem to directly prefigure that of many music park stages. For example, the stage and audience seating shown in an 1839 watercolor entitled "Religious Camp Meeting," drawn by the artist J. Maze Burbank from a sketch made on an actual spot, uncannily resembles the 1968 stage built by Monroe at Bean Blossom. v The camp meetings also prefigured the rural country music parks and bluegrass festival parks in another important respect: the expectation that visitors might literally camp on the grounds for the duration of an extended multi-day event.
Another probable source for the music park idea, which took advantage of natural or park environments to provide an appropriate context for fresh, informal presentations of music and art intended to ennoble or uplift audiences, was the Chautauqua movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The original Chautauqua Lake Sunday School Assembly was created at a rural New York state site in 1874 as an educational experiment in out-of-school, vacation learning. Built on the nineteenth century's strong foundation of religious camp-meeting popularity, the Chautauqua institution quickly succeeded, and broadened almost immediately beyond courses for Sunday school teachers to include academic subjects, music, art and physical education. A wave of development of "daughter" Chautauqua institutions followed, spreading and diffusing across the United States, bringing summertime outdoor lectures, dramatizations and performances, particularly musical performances, to large numbers of Americans. In many states, both public and private institutions created special parks in attractive "natural" sites for the use of the daughter Chautauquas. Virtually all of these, particularly the obviously named "Chautauqua Parks" found in Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, Ohio, and beyond, have in common their regular use for public musical performances, both commercial and free. Typically Chautauqua parks, like their camp-meeting antecedents and music park descendants, had one or more focal points for performance: amphitheaters, open-sided pavilions, and outdoor stages were built, improved, and maintained as part of the park's facilities. From early times, too, those attending the special annual summertime Chautauqua events would camp on or near the park grounds, generating the feeling of a camp-meeting community and heightening the emotional impact of all that was presented. Some of these Chautauqua-like elements continue to inform the rural country music park.
While the 19th- and early 20th-century Chautauquas may have played an important role in fostering the idea of parks as a setting for uplifting and entertaining music, the actual creation of small rural parks for the express purpose of presenting country music shows could not have begun until the country music industry itself was created in the wake of recording and radio technology in the 1920s. The industry had a number of key components which could be recombined into new forms: first was the music itself, namely "old-time" or "hillbilly" or "country" (and later, "western" and "folk") performances built around nostalgic and romantic repertoires. A second key element, obviously enough, was radio, and particularly the 1920's rise of powerful broadcast stations and networks, many of which followed the early leads of WSB in Atlanta, WBAP in Fort Worth, Texas, WLS in Chicago, and WSM in Nashville, Tennessee, in promoting live theater-based broadcasts of country music billed evocatively as "Jamborees" or "barn dances" (although dancing at such shows was not usually done by the audience, but typically created by professional exhibition performers).
Despite the phenomenal rise of commercial radio as an advertising medium and generator of business for many sorts of commercial ventures, most of the original weekly or monthly music park shows were created with no initial intention to create a broadcast presence. At a few sites created in the 1940s, park owners and promoters strove to develop representation on the local or regional airwaves, lending their regular shows some of the historic validity and general cachet of the venerable National Barn Dance on WLS, or the dominant Grand Ole Opry on clear-channel WSM.
But the great classic radio barn-dance shows were not held in rural places. They originated from cities, from accessible and comfortable auditoriums, whence the sound of a local barn-dance show — possibly involving actual rural people brought in to the show because of their musical repertoires and traditions — could be marketed to mass radio audiences. For music parks in the country, a true rural location often forestalled or greatly complicated the mechanics of broadcasting. At Bean Blossom, early radio shows were sporadically broadcast by any of a half-dozen central Indiana radio stations, but the shows always had to be transmitted over telephone lines draped casually on a fence and connected as needed at a telephone pole near the two-lane highway on which the property fronts.
In the late 1930s, after the Depression's worst years had passed and prosperity began to return to a hard-hit nation, the idea seems to have taken hold among artists and fan-promoters across a wide swath of eastern, southern and Middle Atlantic states that it would be a good thing to create and own outdoor venues for commercial country music programming.
Although country music and many related forms termed "hillbilly" and "western" and "folk" music certainly arose with the aid of radio, concomitant changes were marked by the advent of World War II, when many of the daughter Chautauquas were losing ground to new forms of mass entertainment: radio, records, movies, and eventually television. A key factor, as well, was the dramatic rise in automobile ownership amongst rural and small-town Americans in the first third of the 20th century. Obviously enough, cars and improved highways made it possible for fans to get to rural sites without requiring (as in the case of Ravinia) a previously-established mass-transit route. Once the public (both urban and rural) had acquired enough cars, it became possible for fans to travel to a rural park for musical entertainment, rather than waiting for a traveling tent-show to bring the entertainment to their immediate vicinity.
Rural country music parks, as a regular form, began to appear in the early 1940s, just as the traveling tent-shows of circuses (and the Grand Ole Opry) began to diminish and disappear. While Opry tent-shows continued through the years of World War II, once that war ended and relative prosperity led to further rises in car ownership and individual mobility, the rural parks began to flourish. For individual star performers like Roy Acuff, Pee Wee King, and Bill Monroe, the post-war years meant that the tent-show was increasingly forsaken in favor of a privately owned music park which might bear the performer's name and certainly gave them a regular venue, foreshadowing the rise of artists' theaters and auditoriums in Nashville and in Branson, Missouri in the 1970s. So, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, a growing network of small "parks" were founded across a wide swath of the eastern United States. Their sites are always rural, unlike other emergent country music venues like the "little opries" found from North Carolina to Texas, which typically operate in refurbished and repurposed movie theaters or other urban auditoriums.vi
Most rural country music parks are or were privately owned. Anecdotal evidence suggests that, where a nationally-known "star" was not involved, such parks seem most often to have grown from a truly local impulse or individual whimsy, as when a gregarious musician would begin to invite musical family and friends to come to his farm for a periodic jam-session or get-together. The owner or his friends would give the event and site a name, perhaps based on the owner's identity ("O.C. Winburn's Music Park" near Richmond, Kentucky) or a particular local feature of its main stage or auditorium, e.g., Jack Cox's "Chicken Coop Jamboree" in Brown County. Advertising for the smallest and most local shows was typically either nonexistant or minimal. Inspired by the regularity and success of the event, the landowner might then decide to build a platform stage, set up a temporary stage using a wagon or truck-bed, or re-purpose a standing barn or outbuilding as an auditorium; but the parks' designers evidenced an overwhelming preference for outdoor siting or performance stages or pavilions.
Because the shows are outdoors, performances at most rural music parks, naturally enough tend to be somewhat seasonal, depending on the park's location and climate. Spring, summer, and fall performances are common at rural country music parks, and shows are held almost exclusively on weekends, when both the proprietors of the parks and fans of the music who make up the audience have time to promote or enjoy such entertainments.
Until the 1970s advent of week-long bluegrass festivals, which caused some music parks to become "festival parks," performances during the week remained a rare exception. Most of these venues simply do not operate at all, most of the time; the sites continue to function as farms or meadowlands, or are left as fallow fields. A busy rural music park might have a show of some kind every weekend during the outdoor season, but each park owner was and is free to make his own decisions about when shows occurred. From the earliest days of rural country music parks, some individual promoters only put on events on a monthly or sporadic basis at their parks. With the post-1965 rise of bluegrass festivals, too, a number of rural country music parks, or more specifically bluegrass music parks, have resulted from the prior development of a "park" site for staging a bluegrass festival. But with the older parks -- like the one at Bean Blossom -- the rural country music park had a long existence prior to and somewhat independently of its later use as a bluegrass festival site.
The rudimentary or minimalist approach to the development of audience facilities at rural country music parks is, in a curious way, evocative of what is being marketed at the park anyway: a nostalgic music contexted with rural imagery. Both the style and the setting suggest a nostalgic longing for bygone days on the farm, where living close to nature always meant putting up with outhouses and privies and bathing in a lake or pond. And so the audiences at Bean Blossom and other small music parks grudgingly accepted the crude reality of a "park's" facilities, for it was obvious (and needless to comment on the fact) that the park was created on land usually left wild or used for farming.
While a significant number of small individually-owned rural music parks got started with no financial considerations at all, the typical trajectory of music park development quickly lead to commercialization. Shows that may have begun as free events for a truly local rural crowd of close friends and neighbors evolved some of the trappings, or intentions, of commerce: management (or its lack), advertising (or its conspicuous absence), concessions and souvenir sales and other profit-centers piggybacked onto the central draw of the country music performances.
Among the most important and influential early rural country music parks was Kentucky's Renfro Valley. The story of John Lair's creation of a near-mythical bucolic haven for traditional Kentucky country music has been told and examined often before.vii While the original Renfro Valley radio presence began in 1937 on WLW in Cincinnati, prior to Lair's development of the park site at Renfro Valley, his desire to establish a music park in Rockcastle County, Kentucky, is said to have grown from his experiences as a promoter at WLS's Barndance, in Chicago: "Studying the culture in Chicago, Mr. Lair noticed that many folks came in from out of town--from the country to the city--for the shows. This got him thinking in the reverse, that city folks may enjoy a trip to the country. With this hypothesis, the idea to build a barn in Renfro Valley to broadcast from and hold shows was born."viii
Perhaps because of Lair's experiences at WLS, his vision of Renfro Valley, unlike most other private music parks, was developed with radio at its very core. Renfro Valley's large radio footprint and long regular exposure helped make that park a successful venture that could concentrate on the vision of a single type of music: country music, as variously defined through the years by John Lair himself and, ultimately, by the regular Renfro Valley musicians and performers. At other parks, however, changing times and circumstances meant that the owners or promoters might go far afield in trying to make their parks commercially successful. In the 1950s and 1960s at Bean Blossom, this meant the deliberate staging of rock'n'roll or rockabilly shows and dances, as well as the rental use of the park grounds for political rallies, carnivals, auto-daredevil thrill shows, fox-hunts, baseball games, and other entertainments. A profound change in the American transportation landscape also affected the rural parks beginning after 1956, with the creation of the interstate highway system. The interstates obviously changed the entire experience of long-distance automobile travel. Interstate access undoubtedly played a role in the continued success of Renfro Valley, located next to an exit on heavily-traveled I-65; but the marginalizing of rural backwater sites by interstate highways did not necessitate the immediate demise of the small rural parks. Rather, the interstate system led to a significant increase in the distance that tourists could expect to travel while on vacation, so access to all the parks was improved.
Other changes in American culture and history led to further transformations of the older rural country music parks. The rise of bluegrass festivals in the mid-1960s led to the repurposing of many small old parks as festival sites, as well as to the creation of other new "festival parks." That is, after bluegrass festivals began to proliferate, some new places built in the manner of older rural country music parks were developed only to host festivals once or twice a year, rather than each summer weekend. A case in point is the Bass Mountain Music Park near Burlington, in central North Carolina, which was carved out of a farm purchased in the mid-1970s by owner John Maness. Maness admits to having been influenced both by annual festivals, such as the Carlton Haney event in Camp Springs, North Carolina, and also by older music parks like Wayside Park in Stuart, Virginia. For the first Bass Mountain Festival, in September of 1978, Maness and his partners built a permanent covered stage, a covered dance platform, and a concession stand. Attendees were offered only primitive camping, although running water was available. The stage and camping areas featured many shade trees – always a popular feature – and as at Bean Blossom, the stage was built at the bottom of a hill, providing a large seating area with good views from any direction.ix
An even more recent development is the addition of a music park functionality to an existing RV (Recreational Vehicle) park. The explosive growth of the RV industry after 1970 led to the creation of many commercial sites where RV owners could establish temporary residence in the course of their longer-term motoring. Initially these parks needed only room for the large vehicles -- easy to come by in a rural setting -- and the travelers' desired temporary connections to electrical power and water "hook-ups." As RV parks proliferated, their owners have sought to attract customers by adding features that would entice RV-ers to come and stay for more than a single night: swimming pools, fishing lakes, children's playgrounds, food concessions and stores stocking the special equipment needed for maintaining a life (or a comfortable vacation) on the road. Since the bluegrass festivals had clearly proved that they could attract not only tent-campers, but also the owners of half-million-dollar RVs and buses, it was only natural that some RV park owners would add festivals or regular weekend musical events to their parks. In the 1980s and 1990s, though, when combined RV and Music parks began to be more commonly developed, the park-owners' commitment to bluegrass or country music was less important. A successful RV park could offer country music shows, but could just as easily add rock'n'roll, blues, old-time music, "jamgrass," or other musical forms, as well as movies, hiking trails, automobile daredevil or "thrill" shows and other attractions, since the ever-more-mobile clientele no longer had to be presumed to be limited by local tastes in entertainment.x
What lies ahead for the rural country music parks? Shifts in population and the proliferation of alternative entertainment forms and media might seem to herald the rural music parks' demise, and it is undeniably true that many famous parks have disappeared in recent years. The parks that continue to thrive have done so by retaining their venerable image as rural retreats from normal city life, but they have also undergone profound transformations. Some successful park owners, like former Blue Grass Boy Dwight Dillman (who purchased the Brown County Jamboree Park from James Monroe, Bill's son and heir, in 1998), have committed to profoundly updating their properties to bring them into line with the desires and expectations of visitors by adding RV hook-ups, improving showers and restroom facilities, rebuilding stages with modern lighting and sound systems, adding playgrounds and other facilities for children, augmenting telephone and computer access to and from the parks, and above all, increasing the number and scope of musical performances to serve wider and more diverse audiences. In the early twenty-first century, the owners of successful rural music parks can no longer afford to let their facilities stand idle, since the parks have undergone a basic transformation from lightly-used farmland into full-time recreational sites. While a growing number of rural music parks might no longer be able to afford the narrow specialization of being only venues for country music or bluegrass music, their attraction for music fans, festival attendees, and the RV travelers who seek temporary refuge from routine daily life remains strong. The Brown County Jamboree Park that Neil managed in 1963 is still a rural music park, but it has also evolved into a festival park, an RV park, and a musical multi-use facility. In an increasingly pressured urbanized society, rural outdoor music parks like Bean Blossom provide not only a commercial artistic venue for performance, but also a meaningful social safety-valve which is likely to endure for some time to come.
Lexington, KY
May, 2004
NOTES
i Guitarist Robert "Red" Cravens, a member of the historic Illinois-based group known both as "The Bluegrass Gentlemen" and "Red Cravens and the Bray Brothers," recently recalled how active the informal picking scene was at Bean Blossom in the late 1950s and early 1960s. His vivid memories of the informal interchange and possibilities for musical learning lead him to felicitously characterize Bean Blossom as "the University of Bluegrass." [Telephone interview, Aug. 25, 2003]
ii This careful distinction between the entire 55-acre property and "the park" was carefully made by banjoist Joseph C. "Butch" Robins in a lengthy interview about his own experiences at Bean Blossom. [Tape-recorded interview, June 21, 2003]
iii When a good-sized walnut tree in Bean Blossom's outdoor stage area was taken down around 1999, the wood was donated by park owner Dwight Dillman to master Kentucky banjo builder Frank Neat, who soon began construction of a unique special series of instruments built of that wood. Numerous fans who know of this event have opined that the walnut wood was likely to yield great instruments, not only because of Neat's acknowledged mastery, but also, in part, because of the exposure of the tree to the sounds emanating from the stage over many years.
iv A perceptive, yet all-too-brief example of such a history is found in Henry Koretzky's article, "Night Falls On Sunset Park," Bluegrass Unlimited, Vol. 37, No. 7 (January, 2003), 28-30.
v The painting in question can be viewed online in the Library of Congress's documentary website exhibition entitled "Religion and The Founding of the American Republic." [http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel07.html]
vi Davis, Amy. "When You Coming Back?": The Local Country-Music Opry Community. M.A. Thesis, University of North Carolina, 1998, provides an overview of "little opries" in Kentucky and North Carolina. Davis notes that while many little opries are based in refurbished movie theaters, she also uses the term for some indoor performance venues that are located in rural settings, but invariably inside buildings -- barns or auditoriums -- built for the presentation of musical performance. She also has noted features that little opries share with rural country music parks, such as the nearly universal prohibition of alcohol and the emphasis on "family entertainment."
vii Stamper, Pete. It All Happened In Renfro Valley. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999.
viii Sawyer, Loretta. "The Renfro Valley Entertainment Center," Bluegrass Unlimited, Vol.37, No. 12 (June, 2003), pp. 52-55.
ix Parsons, Penny. “Bass Mountain Bluegrass Park: It’s Just Like Coming Home,” Bluegrass Unlimited Vol. 35, No. 11 (May, 2001), pp. 52-57.
x For instance, Swindall's RV Park south of Troy, Alabama, is the largest and oldest recreational vehicle park in the area. Each individual RV parking site within the RV park offers water, sewer, electricity (20, 30, 50 amps) and cable television hookups. Other attractions include a fishing lake, a picnic pavilion and a 10,000-square-foot climate-controlled handicapped-accessible "indoor pavilion." Mike Swindall, the park's owner, added music facilities in the year 2000, and now advertises the place as "Swindall's RV and Music Park."
See as well:
33-minute video link (below):
Bluegrass Music and the Evolution of Rural Country Music Parks
The YouTube video linked above is a version of the Powerpoint presentation I gave in 2005 at the Bluegrass Music Symposium held at Western Kentucky University.
The text of this presentation was published (in Japanese) in the April 2025 issue of the premier Japanese bluegrass fan magazine Moonshiner. My thanks to Megumi Wright for doing the translation and to Shin Akimoto for publishing this piece!
