Jews, Americana, Bluegrass, Jewgrass...

This is slightly off topic, but here's an article I wrote for Hadassah Magazine about the involvement of American Jews in bluegrass and Americana music, focusing on the current crop of musicians but also providing some background on what is a decades-long involvement.

Jews Plus Bluegrass Equals Toe-Stompin' Jewgrass

By Ruth Ellen Gruber August 2017

Banjo picker Eric Lindberg loves with a passion the distinctive harmonies of the acoustic country music known as bluegrass. However, he says, as a Jew, he long felt “a bit out of the loop.

“Much of the work from the inception and early days of bluegrass is deeply spiritual and Christian based,” says the dark-haired, darkbearded 30-something Lindberg, who also plays guitar. “Musically, I could connect with the songs on every level, but my identity as a Jew from Brooklyn always kept me from truly identifying with them.”

The solution? He and his wife, singer Doni Zasloff, formed a bluegrass band called Nefesh Mountain whose original songs meld bluegrass and old-time licks with lyrics reflecting Jewish traditions. “Nefesh is a Hebrew word which loosely translates as the soul or animating spirit of all living things,” they explain on the band’s website. “The mountain is a cross-cultural symbol used widely in Jewish text as well as in bluegrass and old-time musical forms.”

Bluegrass and old-time are two different approaches to traditional 20th-century American roots music, performed by ensembles made up mainly of stringed instruments such as fiddle, banjo, mandolin and guitar.

Nefesh Mountain’s 2016 debut album featured bluegrass greats Sam Bush, Mark Schatz, Scott Vestal, Rob Ickes and Gary Oleyar, and it included songs called “Singin’ Jewish Girl” and “Adonai Loves Me.” Lindberg and Zasloff are among the current crop of musicians who blend their deep-seated Jewish identities with an equally deep connection to traditional roots music—a fusion that some performers and critics dub “Jewgrass.”

[...]

New Orleans-based Mark Rubin, 51, a veteran of both the American roots and klezmer scenes, takes a different tack on his new album, Songs for the Hangman’s Daughter. In songs such as “Southern Jews Is Good News” and “Teshuvah,” Rubin, who was born in Stillwater, Okla., bluntly attempts to reconcile his experience as a culturally Jewish musician in the American South.

“It is not religious music in the usual sense,” says music critic Ari Davidow. Rubin “is in-your-face about who he is and how he doesn’t fit stereotypes. He is not just making a statement to anti-Semites who see Jews as aliens, but also to Jews of the coasts who find it alien to imagine that there are Jews who live in redneck territory, proudly embracing redneck values.”

The involvement of Jews with American roots music goes back decades, to the folk and old-time music revival that kicked off in the late 1950s and in which Jewish musician, musicologist and filmmaker John Cohen was a key figure. (Today, one of the top bluegrass artists is Jewish musician Noam Pikelny, recipient of the first annual Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass in 2010, though he does not address his Jewish identity in his music.)

Mandolin and clarinet virtuoso Andy Statman and award-winning scholar and performer Henry Sapoznik, now director of the Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture at the University of Wisconsin, were both pioneers of the klezmer revival movement. They had been steeped in old-time and bluegrass before turning to Yiddish sources in the 1970s.

.... Read full article

Bluegrass -- schmoozegrass

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

This audio "vox Tablet"  piece on Tablet Magazine (an online publication to which I sometimes contribute) by Jon Kalish about an orthodox Jewish bluegrass musician named Jerry Wicentowski is a bit off topic, but it combines several of my interests, including the way that Americana and Jewishness are interpreted, transformed and passed on.

As a teenager, Jerry Wicentowski rebelled against his Orthodox upbringing, but only to a degree. He wouldn’t take the bus from his Brooklyn home to Washington Square Park to join his friends for bluegrass jam sessions but instead he stayed at home, incessantly practicing guitar runs in his bedroom to the great frustration of his father. Now in his fifties, Wicentowski has stopped rebelling. He does not play instruments on Shabbat. But he’s a highly respected bluegrass musician who’s found a way to combine his passion for the music with his religious faith. His greatest limitation, it appears, is that he is unavailable for most weekend gigs. Reporter Jon Kalish profiles him in this week’s podcast.

The piece moved back in December -- and I'm delighted to note that the it has been nominated for a major magazine award.

The interview with Wicentowski highlights some of the problems he found -- including, as an Orthodox Jew, playing bluegrass songs with a pointedly Christian message. There are links on it to some great songs, including a bluegrass version of  Shalom Aleichem from an unreleased album called "Shabbos in Nashville," and other clips that show how he he united lyrics from Jewish prayers and songs with bluegrass music. He calls these combinations "bluegrass zmiros."

Christianity, gospel and Christian imagery are one of the backbones of traditional bluegrass. The Christian -- or at least sacred --  message in bluegrass is something I have on occasion asked non-religious bluegrass players  about (though I can't find my notes just now...) -- and Lee Bidgood has also focused on questions related to this in his research and writing on Czech bluegrass.

Though there are relatively few Jews in the mainstream country music scene -- the towering Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel stands out in more ways than one -- there  are quite a few Jews in the bluegrass (and folk) scene -- as musicians, songwriters, historians and fans.

Several musicians who became prominent in the klezmer music scene -- Andy Statman, Henry Sapoznik, Bob Cohen -- also play bluegrass: Sapoznik has a famous story about how an old bluegrass fiddler told him to explore the roots of his own music, and that's how he got into klezmer. There is also a great klezmer-Jewish band called the Klezmer Mountain Boys, and the onetime Czech bluegrassy band Teagrass also experimented with klezmer.