INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH BLUEGRASS is a collection of essays and memoirs that paints a vivid panorama of economic necessity sparking migration, and giving a home to a new musical genre based on old traditions.

Beginning in the early 1940s, Appalachian families long reliant on homesteading and coal mining for basic survival began to move north to seek better conditions. Industry-rich Ohio became a chief settlement region for these folks. But after migration and the adjustment to new routines, nostalgia set in. Scornfully called hillbillies, or briars, by some Ohio natives, these wanderers took solace in their traditional music. Soon they would hear on records or radio or see in live performances what would come to be known as bluegrass music, based in old folk and country forms, but with a drive and crispness that some attribute to the mechanized hum of the factory.

"Fans of bluegrass and any genuinely rooted American music will welcome this contribution as both soundly supported scholarship and down-to-earth accounts from those who were there and made it happen."

One early introduction to this new sound was brought to Dayton by the “father” of bluegrass himself, Bill Monroe. Dayton’s radio stations kept bluegrass on the airwaves, and with regular wages, the former migrants began to purchase records, phonographs and even musical instruments. 

As recounted here, southern Ohio became a hotbed of bluegrass, spawning such notables of the genre as The Osborne Brothers, Frank Wakefield, Larry Sparks, Red Allen, J. D. Crowe, and gospel groups like The Isaacs and the Marshall Family. The new music called for recording companies that also proliferated. In essays and interviews, Ohio-based musicians, technicians and producers of the 1940-1970s recall those halcyon days. The work of a performer could be rough, in bars where knife and gun fights might break out, but the band had to keep playing. Lily Isaacs, the motherly lead of her family gospel ensemble, recalls life on the road in a bus with handmade bunks and no bathroom.

Along with the nationally recognized names, the editors also highlight popular indigenous groups like the Hotmud Family and the Corndrinkers. By the 1970s, the times and the music were changing with more urban influences, but, we are told, the down-home music of Dayton and other Ohio venues “never got above its raisin’.” 

Fred Bartenstein is a music instructor at the University of Dayton, known for his editing work on BLUEGRASS BLUESMAN and THE BLUEGRASS HALL OF FAME. Fellow editor Curtis W. Ellison is a professor emeritus of history and American studies at Miami University of Ohio and the author of COUNTRY MUSIC CULTURE. Together they have created this lively look at the southern Ohio region and the music that magically materialized when the right people came along. Fans of bluegrass and any genuinely rooted American music will welcome this contribution as both soundly supported scholarship and down-to-earth accounts from those who were there and made it happen.