A GENTLE CORRECTION: "GREENSKY BLUEGRASS"

This comment was made to my earlier post regarding a coming concert: " Roger, you are correct. they are not very typical. more of a jam band/bluegrass band. They officially go by "Greensky Bluegrass." Thanks, Mark Bruscino, you are totally correct of course.  I had referred to them as the "Greensky Boys."  This brings up a subject not discussed on this blog for sometime: What music was played in the southeastern U.S. before "bluegrass" which came into being in the 1940's?  Well, some just called it "mountain music" which evolved from the tunes which came with the Scots-Irish who settled around North Carolina during colonial times and later..  During the 1930's and especially with the advent of live radio, duets often brothers, became popular.  These usually featured guitar-mandolin or guitar-clawhammer banjo accompaniment  They included the Monroe Brothers, Bill and Birch; Carter and Ralph Stanley, and later the Louvin Brothers and even the Everlys.  Another very early group was the BLUESKY BOYS and I don't recall if they were more than a duo. Anyway the Blue Sky Boys were probably in the back of my mind when I wrote:  "Greensky Boys."  In fact they were likely how the Green Skies picked their moniker as well.

This also proved to be a major problem when Bob Massey and myself started the bluegrass group in Billings  The Massey's were originally from Georgia, but had belonged to a bluegrass club in Omaha called the "Great Plains Bluegrass and Old Time Music Association." That general name was used in Minnesota and elsewhere, too. Our new board finally decided to call us the Northern  Plains  Bluegrass and Old Time Music Association."  What we did not understand was that "old time music" simply referred to the mountain music prior to bluegrass.  So we ended up with folks who wanted to perform lots of tunes outside of bluegrass and it's predecessors.  We still have that problem even though the name was changed to the "Yellowstone Bluegrass Association."  As I said to another leader of our local group, "Bluegrass is basically hillbilly music and we don't have many hillbllys in Montana, but we have lots of cowboys."  As a result the YBA will likely never be a pure bluegrass club.  Darn it anyway!