With Jerry’s permission, his Sept. 25 keynote address to the membership of IBMA at the 2006 World of Bluegrass convention in Nashville, Tenn. is printed below.

Good evening, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to you on a subject I know well: bluegrass music. 

I have, in many ways, grown up with this music.  As a child I was awakened every morning by the Flatt & Scruggs radio show beaming from right here in Nashville, Tennessee.  But it the weather between here and northeastern Ohio did not cooperate, my father would probably put on a record instead.  Again, it would be Flatt & Scruggs.  He would listen while the rest of the family got ready for school, and then precisely at 8:10 a.m head out to his job at the steel mill.  He would evenutally put in 33 years there.  Coincidentally, this is the same length of time I have been a professional musician. 

I am ready to speak on the subject of bluegrass music after putting in countless hours on the road working in bars, music parks, amphitheaters and concert halls ranging from the Eagles Hall in Warren, Ohio to Carnegie Hall in New York City.  (Some other places shall remain nameless, to avoid incriminating myself!) 

I made my way there by van, bus, airplane, car and motorcycle; played the shows with The Country Gentlemen, J.D. Crowe & the New South, Boone Creek, Buck White & the  Down Home Folks, The Whites, Alison Krauss + Union Station, and my first job: John Douglas and The West Virginia Travelers, featuring Jerry Douglas.

I have spent a great deal of my life in the recording studio. There is a mystery in creating music with others who carry the same urgency to raise the bar to new heights. While recording with acts as varied as Red Allen and the Lewis Family to Strength in Numbers, the concept of inventing something the world has never heard has always kept me in the chase.

Being the international favorite that bluegrass music is, I have had the opportunity to meet persons from all over the world. Some I’ve been fortunate to collaborate with—from Laurie Lewis, Sally Van Meter, Tony Rice and David Grisman in California; to Tony Trischka and Andy Statman in New York City; to Sab Watanabe in Osaka, Japan.

Other times I've built friendships through a chance meeting on the street in Dublin, London, Paris or Heidelberg.

Lying beneath the thin veneer of our differences is a common bond: our deep love of this music.

We do have characteristics that distinguish us from other genres of music.  We are open and approachable.  I think this openness comes, at least for me, from the exhilaration of finally finding someone else who liked bluegrass.  Please remember I grew up in a place where the weather was cold and everyone liked polkas!

Bluegrass artists are accessible to the general public.  We go out to the record table after the show, often to stand and sign autographs and talk to the very last person.

However, there are exceptions to the rule of going to the record table and meeting the people. I have witnessed first hand when it has become difficult, even dangerous to do so: when the business has grown to thousands of people in the lobby.  Meeting and shaking hands with everyone makes it impossible to play the next day.  (No hands, no show.)  Also, when the number of people in the autograph line exceeds the audience for the next band, it’s time to make the decision not go to the table.

My career has given me some insight into the realm of ignorance. Even though my predecessors on the Dobro paved the way for me, I was told by one of my musical peers that Dobros were “only good for taking solos away from the real bluegrass instruments,”  with “real” meaning banjo, fiddle and mandolin. This line of thinking is one which is parallel with the acceptance of bluegrass in the market place.  Thanks to some open ears, it appears that both bluegrass and Dobros are now more widely accepted.

It seems country music is happy to include us when we are selling CDs in numbers that end in lots of 0’s. Still, a more meaningful acceptance in terms of radio play eludes us.  I am afraid this will be the case because we do not conform to the cookie cutter mentality of the powers that be.  We do not meet the demographic defined by the programmers.

With one hit record by a bluegrass act such as Alison Krauss, however, every record company in Nashville is scouring the ground for someone to fill that spot on their roster.  Throw in a Dobro fill and even, God forbid, a banjo for color, and maybe they will have themselves a chance in that niche market.

You see, we finally have a market share of record sales in this country. The mere fact that a bluegrass chart exists in Billboard is proof.  But is it helping our sales?

A little, but not enough. It still takes money to buy the end cap position and colorful display to capture the consumers' attention while they browese the store.  During the "Down from the Mountain Tour" following the successes of O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the Down from the Mountain documentary, the bluegrass indie labels were invited to co-op in promoting CDs related to the movie and its artists.  The results were sales increases and more prominent visibility across the board.  Perhaps such a successful model could be employed again.

I believe a genre is shaped by the creativity of the inhabitants, both the musicians and their marketers.

Recently here in Nashville, there has been some major label shifting. The absorption rate of one company taking over another rivals anything Huggies ever conceived.  Soon we will be down to three conglomerate companies driving the country music economy.  This has sent a few heavy hitting artists to the street to start their own independent labels. 

Bluegrass music has had its up's and down's with the "moldy figs," but there are a few simple historic examples that galvanize us.

When Carlton Haney began promoting bluegrass festivals in 1965, the music began to grow at a pace never seen before.  With all the famous bands in one setting, the evolution began.  Bill Monroe, The Stanley’s with an ailing but still performing Carter and a host of others put on the shows that had only existed in our dreams. They didn’t just do their own shows and leave. They collaborated, with egos flying around above them like planes on a traffic controller screen. I can imagine both Bill Monroe and Chris Thile at Berryville in 1970.

My point here is there was just as much creative spirit then as now. Imagine Clyde Moody, Carl Story, Don Reno and Red Smiley, Bill Harrell, Red Allen and Frank Wakefield all on one stage.  I was the kid at the rail that ran along the sides of the stage. That rail was the only thing separating me from my heroes. There was even a Japanese Bluegrass band called Bluegrass 45, and a band from New Zealand who had a name that could have been from anywhere in the States, the Hamilton County Bluegrass Band. The world was really getting smaller. We were international!

The New Deal Stringband and New Grass Revival were there; Breakfast Special, too. But they were playing at a totally different time of the day. Being 12 years old, I was not allowed to go down to the stage area at that time of night. Something might happen to me down there amongst the hippies.  But I went anyway. . . .

Even then, the buzz was, “What’s going to become of ‘our’ bluegrass?”  The answer is the same now as it was then.  Bluegrass is in excellent condition!

But, do we want it to be?  This is a very real question to address in the privacy of your own mind.   

A friend of mine once sat at my kitchen table and wondered aloud, “Is it such a good idea to have a professional trade organization to make it popular?”  All the time he was one of the most admired and most magnetic personalities related to this genre.  “There may be a problem if too many people know about bluegrass. It will never maintain its  mystique. They will ruin it. It’s our music, and they can’t have it.”

My friend had made his money elsewhere—in the pop world.

Certainly, it is a good idea to have a trade organization.  I say, let’s inject them all with bluegrass!  Get Ken Irwin, Barry Poss, and eventually Tony Brown and Tim McGraw to go to Rascal Flatts concerts and pour bluegrass tonic in the water. As far as I know, there is no known antidote.

So many bluegrass musicians struggled early on, trying to make it playing the music they truly loved. Tired of not being able to make ends meet, they blazed different trails to become successful in other fields of music.  Chris Hillman, Clarence White, Emmylou Harris, Trey Anastasio and Mike Gordon of Phish, and David Lindley are just a few.  Steve Martin played the banjo, but he was funny too.

This is a physical music, as improvisation as pure jazz.  Bluegrass is a type of music that is hard to correctly articulate. It could qualify as a contact sport.

There are ground rules in the sport of bluegrass.  When in a band situation…

• If you want to be heard, you have to be competitive.  If you want to hear your fellow combatants, you must be compassionate.
• You do not really have to have a drawl or whine in your voice. You do not necessarily have to be Southern born, or have the mythical Kentucky/North Carolina soil under you fingernails, or in your DNA.  However, it helps.
• What you can not do is jump into a bunch of seasoned amateur pickers in Summersville, West Virginia or Dhlonega, Georgia and launch into a Kenny Chesney/Led Zepplin/Village People song.
• You have to be able to make a Lester Flatt G-Run, or at least know what it is.
• You should know that Chubby Wise came before Paul Warren, and so did Benny Martin.
• Maybe Earl didn’t invent the three fingered roll, but no one had, or to this day ever has used it the way he did. Kicking it off, handing it off, then coming back,  hydroplaning through the next solo.  It was so exciting, commanding encore after encore.
• And no one else has thrown the business end of a Lloyd Loar mandolin into a microphone and played “Rawhide” with the conviction and childlike joy of Bill Monroe.

But we are still trying. Someone is going to do it.  They’re going to pull it off, but are we going to recognize it?

Not just anyone can make it.  Bluegrass has been spread by the "blue collar express." Barn crooners and Southern porch warriors went off up north to find work.  There had to be somewhere they could go to tmake a better life for themselves.  There had to be somewhere they could go to make a better life for themselves.  The coal mines and tobacco fields couldn't be all there was.  Once they found a job, somewhere to live, started their familes and wrapped their hands around a bologna sandwich, they remembered the music.

Until then, they conformed to what was cool and current, putting down shallow roots to fight off the natives for the jobs.  That finished, guys like my dad took off their sheep’s clothing, picked up their guitars and blasted into “The Prisoner’s Song,” laying claim to the higher ground—shouting down to their clan to come on out.  And they did. Using code words like “warshed” and “feeshed” and “garsh,” they found each other. Then they built some new porches and cranked it all back up again.

In the smoky bars, Red Allen & J.D. Crowe (The Red Slipper Lounge in Lexington), Earl Taylor (Aunt Maudie's in Cincinnati), The Country Gentlemen (The Shamrock in D.C.), The Lilly Brothers with Don Stover and Tex Logan (The Hillbilly Ranch in Boston), and Vern and Ray out on the West Coast at The Cabale, which the Kentucky Colonels also frequented, held onto their instruments and played through the fights. Sometimes it took chicken wire to keep the bottles from scratching their new Martins.

Earl Scruggs once told me he was Bill Monroe’s road treasurer. Earl kept the money in a fishing tackle box. He probably could tell you what day they got a raise…or what day they should have gotten one.  

As news of their new style of picking spread, Lester, Earl and Bill were forced to retire the tackle box and began taking pillow cases of money out of the big revival-styled tents and high schools. It was mostly quarters—one per adult, a nickel for kids.

The high schools and bars are still in play, but the possibilities open to us now are unbelievable compared to Big Mon’s day. With the rising costs of transportation for both the listener and the performer, festivals are holding firm.  They remain the best vehicle for the traveling band. Still, for a few the concert halls have become the norm.  One of the biggest thrills a musician can have is the opportunity to present our music to new audiences. 

While sounding formidable, huge festivals and new horizons can be the most rewarding. Especially when you realize, as I did at Bonnaroo, that these young people know the tunes and often even know the words to all your songs.  They are young inquisitive minds, free from the musical barriers many of us had to overcome while, conversely, discovering more about the world beyond bluegrass.

More times than not, these new fans will search for the roots of music they like.

Eventually their paths will lead to Bill Monroe or other musical pioneers, while along the way they make discoveries that may lead to new favorites.  Every night I hear the comment, “Wow! I wasn’t sure what I was going to hear tonight, but I like it and I want to hear more! Where can I get it?”

Granted, the Jerry Douglas Band is not playing straight up bluegrass the entire show, but when I play, bluegrass is with me. I am a bluegrass musician first.  It is obvious. 

THE BAD STUFF

It seems that as any music grows and evolves, it seems necessary to go through a period of civil war.  In addition, it is not always civil.

I have heard it said, “If it doesn’t have a banjo, it isn’t bluegrass.”  This may surprise you, but I understand this statement!  When I think of bluegrass music, my favorite recordings were dominated by Earl Scruggs, Allen Shelton, J.D. Crowe, Sonny Osborne or Bela Fleck, Ron Block and Jim Mills.

That being said, to many people it doesn’t matter. It is the attitude of the music that counts.  So what do we do?  Fight it out over this question?

I’ve been nailed to the wall several times for replacing the banjo player. I guess it is widely felt if Bill didn’t have one, it doesn’t belong.  OK, that may be your opinion. It is not mine. And I will go to the wall on that.

However, for the fight to be incorporated, we ask ourselves some questions about the soul of bluegrass.

• Is it the vocal quality?
• The subject matter of the song?
• The stack of the vocals, high on top with the lead?
• Where you come from?  (What is your ancestry?  Scotch Irish, I hope.)

So when the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band won the second Bluegrass Grammy with a song written and sung by a Virginian of Irish heritage, there was holy Hell to pay. Oh yeah, he played piano on it, too. I played on that one.  So did Mark O’Connor and Roy Huskey, Jr.

I am sure there were better examples of pure bluegrass on that record, but there was no better set- up for bluegrass to be recognized as a music form to be dealt with in the eyes of the world.

Most of the people who voted in the category that year were not bluegrass business people in any way. They were industry people looking at the ballot, recalling the familiar Virginian’s name from another genre. They liked him, liked his music, and having no idea who the others were, checked that box without another thought.

You know what?  We have their attention now. They know who we are. They know our names. We show up in all the categories. We are fast approaching mainstream underground. We won’t go away.

To stay is going to require some concentrated teamwork.  We have a very well organized staff at the International Bluegrass Music Association. They are helpful and efficient.  The same combination has to be present in making any act successful. All the pieces have to be in place: a manager that understands your long term goals, a booking agent to get you to the people, and a publicist to let them know you’re coming and to tell them how wonderful you’ll be once you get there are a great start.

You must have faith that at the end of the day, all the people in your corner have done the best they know how and have had your best interests in mind above all else.

My friends, this music we love is in the most excellent condition it has ever seen. We have world-class talent on the biggest, brightest, most prestigious stages on the planet. We have fought long and hard to get here. And we have such great memories of the journey.  I do!

Finally, on a very personal note, I have had the great pleasure to know and become friends with some of the most wonderful and honest people to ever walk on this earth. In the recent past we lost Charlie Waller, Vassar Clements, Larry Rice and Louise Scruggs. They cannot be replaced, but we can keep what they loved alive.

Take pride in what you have accomplished.  You deserve it.  Congratulations.

Thank you very much.  Goodnight.

Thanks to: Ron Petronko for his historic pictures, Tom Kopp, Jill Douglas, Tina Potter, Herb Pedersen, Tim O’Brien, Alison Brown, Ron Block, Dan Hays, Sam Bush, Sharon McGraw and Ronnie Freeland.