In the last several years, multiple book-length studies have examined locales of bluegrass and country music that complicate the longstanding cultural perception of such music as essentially southern—that is, of the southern United States—and rural.Footnote 1 With Czech Bluegrass, Lee Bidgood has written the first such monograph examining bluegrass in a place outside of North America altogether, where according to the foreword by Tony Trischka, “immersion in bluegrass has had the deepest roots and has been the longest lasting” compared with other international scenes (viii). It is the sixth book from University of Illinois Press in the series Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World, a joint endeavor that also includes titles from the University Press of Mississippi and the University of Wisconsin Press.
Bidgood is an ethnomusicologist as well as an accomplished performer, and his approach to the topic is grounded in these aspects of his scholarly identity. His book represents years of fieldwork conducted during lengthy research stays in the Czech Republic that spanned over a decade from 2000 to 2013 and also produced a documentary film, Banjo Romantika: American Bluegrass Music and the Czech Imagination (2013). Bidgood is quick to emphasize that his book is not a thorough history of Czech bluegrass. Rather, he proceeds from the entangled nature of his own experiences with those of the “Czech bluegrassers” that he writes about (5). “This book is about Czech bluegrass,” he states in the introduction, “but it also includes the story about how I discovered it, how I have come to understand it, and how I see it fitting into the larger worlds of music and society” (xvii).
Bidgood uses the first chapter to set the stage for his work and detail the theoretical framework of his study. Illustrated with anecdotes from his fieldwork and informed by an array of scholars including Christopher Small, Richard A. Peterson, and Deleuze and Guattari, Bidgood's methodology eschews predictable questions concerning the heritage, influence, and regionalism of US bluegrass in relation to the Czech scene. Instead, he adopts a concept of “in-betweenness” that engages Czech bluegrass and its politics of representation on their own terms, where practitioners “draw from and perform both Czech and American elements to create something that is ‘in between’: uniquely linked to both, but distinct from either” (5–6). For Bidgood, this is all part of what he calls “being [Czech] bluegrass” (9), an idea that foregrounds the processes, activities, and human relationships of musicking over artifacts and fixed understandings.
Chapter 2 contextualizes Czech Americanism and locates the origins of Czech bluegrass music. Bidgood explores the music of tramping, a Czech pastime of outdoor recreation that became popular in the early twentieth century and celebrated notions of the American West. He considers tramp songs to be the basis of Czech bluegrass and country music making, as tramping became a process for Czech Americanism to entertain “imagined folklores” (26). After World War II, radio broadcasts of bluegrass and early country music reached Czech listeners via the American Forces Network. Bidgood recounts the bizarre and fascinating quest of one of those listeners, Marko Čermák, to learn bluegrass banjo during the 1960s, at the height of cultural isolation that Czechs endured under communist rule from the late 1940s through the 1980s. Čermák eventually became a founding member of the Greenhorns, a pioneering Czech bluegrass band that was one of the first to replace the English song texts of US bluegrass classics with Czech lyrics, an intriguing process through which the songs became “retexted and reterritorialized” for use in the Czech bluegrass community (42). After he follows the influence of the Greenhorns and other early artists on Czech bluegrass through the fall of communism in 1989, Bidgood briefly explains the dynamics of the contemporary bluegrass scene in the post-socialist Czech Republic, which became the setting for his fieldwork.
The next three chapters offer case studies scrutinizing different facets of Czech bluegrass. Within each, Bidgood explores his concept of in-betweenness as a way to help explain “the value that Americanness has for today's Czechs” (69). He specifically investigates how Czechs approach marketing their bluegrass performances and products, playing and learning bluegrass fiddle, and performing gospel repertoire, respectively. The first case study draws upon Bidgood's extensive involvement as a sideman in various Czech bluegrass bands over the years, as well as his relationships with Czech luthiers who specialize in bluegrass instruments. In particular, certain Czech banjo makers have become world-renown for the superior craftsmanship and quality of their work. Bidgood's examination of Czech fiddling stems from his own experience and identity as a bluegrass fiddler. He profiles five Czech fiddlers in an attempt to “address the problems and possibilities they encounter in re-creating bluegrass-related music styles today” (70). Four of them are younger-generation musicians whose encounters with bluegrass occurred after the fall of communism, allowing Bidgood to consider how such individuals negotiate Americanness on the fiddle in a post-socialist Czech society. In the last case study, Bidgood engages the musical, social, and personal complexities involved in Czech performances of bluegrass gospel material. He argues that the secular milieu of Czech bluegrass requires bands to navigate a delicate balance of inspired performance and ethical integrity, resulting in a “complicated terrain of ‘in-between’ spaces and performative expressions” where musicians endeavor to honor and accommodate both ideals (103).
A short concluding chapter follows the three case studies, and Bidgood aptly titles it with a metaphor borrowed from bluegrass performance practice, “A Tag: America/Amerika.” Here, he presents two final anecdotes to reinforce the notion of in-betweenness that underpins his thinking about Czech bluegrass. Each one provides a compelling example of how Czech bluegrassers have fulfilled their Americanist desires by “choosing things and places that are Czech” (120). The subsequent back matter begins with a small section titled “Notes on Language,” which summarizes idiosyncrasies in both the written and spoken forms of Czech, discusses Czechs’ penchant for name variations and nicknaming, and clarifies Bidgood's understandings of “Americanism,” “Americanist,” and other derivatives of the word “America” that appear in the book. The final contents also feature endnotes, a glossary of Czech terms, references, a useful list of recommended media, and an index.
Overall, Czech Bluegrass makes a unique contribution to literature on bluegrass music that also holds broader relevance to audiences interested in ethnomusicological studies of transnational and/or translocal musics and subcultures. Bidgood demonstrates a keen familiarity with previous scholarship covering a range of disciplines, and he uses it to formulate nuanced arguments and bypass tired issues that can plague bluegrass discourse. He does not wade into genre definitions, or “What is bluegrass anyway?”—a debate common enough among bluegrass fandom to possess its own acronym (WIBA).Footnote 2 Rather, his analysis underscores the processes by which Czechs bluegrassers themselves engage these kinds of questions in distinctive and signature ways. Scholars with an interest in bluegrass, country, and other related musics will appreciate Bidgood's thought-provoking and original treatment of the topic, as will ethnomusicologists studying translocal music communities. Although his richly informed writing may be challenging for some undergraduate students or too specialized for use in a bluegrass or country music survey course, the book has much to offer upper-level undergraduates and graduate students interested in US vernacular musics and the communities that support them. Some may find Bidgood's attention to certain critical issues lacking, and this may be a casualty of the book's brevity (124 pages). His profile of a fiddler from the marginalized Roma ethnic group provides some stimulating discussion of race and class within Czech bluegrass (89–91), but it remains brief and leaves the reader hungry for more consideration of these important matters. The subject of gender receives even less treatment, occupying only a couple sentences amidst Bidgood's rather lengthy vignette of a female Czech fiddler (86). However, these aspects of omission also point to further topics of research based on Bidgood's solid foundational work, and they do not outweigh the book's overall contributions.
With Czech Bluegrass, Bidgood has led the way in the thorough examination of bluegrass—a music that carries relatively strong cultural associations with the US—as it lives and thrives in an international community outside North America. Such scholarship begs future studies of not only additional European sites (France, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, etc.), but also longtime and nascent scenes in such global locales as Japan, Australia, and Argentina. As Bidgood has shown, bluegrass in these areas is much more than simply a reproduction of US sounds. Rather, it represents an altogether unique story that deserves its own telling.
