Lonesome Road : The Roots of Bluegrass

About the year 1927, a startling new rhythm began to be heard on radios and gramophones belonging to the American rural and urban poor whites who would soon make up the Depression Diaspora.

Executed by string bands, the rhythm was irresistibly jaunty, impossible not to tap a toe to, maybe even execute a deft buck-and-wing.

This rhythm swept into the lives of millions of working-class homes unlikely to enjoy jazz, homes that hitherto had sweltered under the dull waltzes and marches of the staid nineteenth century: Boom-chucka-boom-chucka. "Lonesome Road" examines the origins of the Bluegrass Backbeat, and its migration from the black South into Appalachia, where it found an unlikely expression in the astonishingly innovative fingerpicking style of Maybelle Carter, and thence outward all over America in what we now call country music.It traces the other genres that contributed to the style as well-old-time, hillbilly, and hokum, and their origins in European folk traditions that accompanied these immigrants into Appalachia.

It also profiles some of the most influential contributors to this music - The Carter Family, Snuffy Jenkins, Uncle Dave Macon, Jimmie Rodgers.