MR. KOJO NNAMDITune in to the Bluegrass' Top 50 and you might be forgiven for not knowing it's all bluegrass. That song with the catchy beat sounds a little like it could be on the pop charts, and that tune with the sad lyrics and soulful melody sounds a lot like a country song to the untrained ear. And, in fact, traditionalist in the bluegrass world would dispute that electric guitars and other contemporary trends are bluegrass at all. But the mixing of styles and instruments isn't really new either.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIBluegrass originated with Scott-Irish immigrants who incorporated African-American music and instruments, and many of today's top musicians discovered bluegrass through a love of other styles and genres including folk and rock. Joining us to explore where bluegrass is and where it's going, our WAMU's own Lee Michael Demsey, host of "The Lee Michael Demsey Show" on WAMU's Bluegrass Country. Lee Michael, I should say welcome, but I see you every day. So thanks for joining me is what, I guess, I should say.

MR. LEE MICHAEL DEMSEYYes. Nice to see you, Kojo.

NNAMDIAnd Chris Teskey, who I also see every day, is the senior music producer for WAMU's Bluegrass Country. Chris, thank you for joining us.

MR. CHRIS TESKEYOh, thank you, Kojo.

NNAMDIIf you'd like to join the conversation, you can call us, 800-433-8850. Are you a fan of bluegrass? What do you love or hate about contemporary bluegrass music? 800-433-8850. Send us a tweet, @kojoshow or email to kojo@wamu.org. Lee, apparently this is not an easy question to answer, but what exactly is bluegrass?

DEMSEYYou start us off with the hard question.

NNAMDIYes, the hard ones first.

DEMSEYWell, it's -- I guess it's largely an acoustic-based version of country music. It doesn't usually have drums like country music does. It doesn't usually have electric instruments other than possibly the bass, doesn't have a, you know, all these other instruments. Well, contemporary country music isn't really country music. Let's lay it on the line. But, you know, country music of 20 or 30 years ago is really country music.

DEMSEYBut, it's, you know, related to country music, but it's more acoustically based. And the themes are a little bit more home-based and family-based than most country music you've heard in the last 20 years.

NNAMDIChris, remind us where and how did bluegrass music originate.

TESKEYWell, at one time bluegrass music and country music were pretty much the same thing. And Bill Monroe, the -- who is acknowledged as the founder of bluegrass music, put a band together in the '40s. And really what changed things was Earl Scruggs banjo playing. His three-finger style of banjo playing just revolutionized the music. And since then, banjo, guitar, bass, mandolin and fiddle pretty much define a bluegrass band. And if you play a Beatles song with those five instruments, then it's a bluegrass song.

DEMSEYMm-hmm. Absolutely.

NNAMDILee, we are far from the mountains and coal mines of West Virginia, yet there are some strong bluegrass traditions that developed right here in Washington. How did that come about, Katy Daley, but go ahead.

DEMSEYWell, a lot of people came to the D.C. area, I guess, back in the '40s and '50s up from the Appalachians and looking for work, government work especially. And a lot of those folks had backgrounds and families who played that kind of music or exposed to that kind of music, and that's how it really caught on in the D.C. area, I guess, mainly in the '50s. People like Buz Buzbee were very important in the formation of the Washington bluegrass scene. And then the Country Gentleman came along and later the Seldom Scene and some other folks like that.

NNAMDIWhere -- some of the trends right now in bluegrass involved musicians that traditionalists might not categorize as true bluegrass artist, correct?

DEMSEYThat's true. The line as to what is bluegrass has, you know, changes from time to time, and a lot of the -- especially the younger folks have their own brand of bluegrass that some of us older folks are kind of hesitating to call bluegrass.

DEMSEYBut if the music is to stay strong into the future, you have to have new influences that come along with maybe jazz influences, like David Grisman brought into the music a number of years ago and Tony Rice, people like that, or whether it'd be kind of more a Grateful Dead influence, kind of jam bands that are going pretty strong now and are drawing huge crowds at festivals.

NNAMDIChris, some of the -- some people called these new trends -- call these trends new grass. And you see one trend that you call Nashvilization of bluegrass. Can you explain?

TESKEYOh, well, I do think that bluegrass has gotten a little sleek, and that's the country music influence and the fact that Nashville can make great records. I mean, the records that come out of Nashville sound fantastic. Everything about them is perfection. But I don't know that perfection is really what you want, and so there's a sameness about the -- about a lot of the bands. They can all play like crazy. They can all sing like crazy. And a lot of it leaves me a little bit cold. It doesn't seem to have the same soul that the earlier stuff did.

NNAMDIChris Teskey is senior music producer for WAMU's Bluegrass Country. He joins us in studio along with Lee Michael Demsey, host of "The Lee Michael Demsey Show" on WAMU's Bluegrass Country. You, too, can join us, 800-433-8850. Are you a purist when it comes to your music, or do you enjoy music that mixes genres and musical styles? Call us at 800-433-8850, or go to our website, kojoshow.org. Join the conversation there. Lee, this is an anniversary year for you. You've been hosting Bluegrass Country for 25 years on WAMU. Happy anniversary.

DEMSEYThank you. I started, I guess, doing bluegrass in '82, and so it's really probably closer to 30 by now.

NNAMDIYes, 29 going on 30.

DEMSEYBut I may have started a specific show in '85 or '86 and maybe that is considered my start of time. But I started at the station in '75, doing rock shows and engineering for Fred Fiske -- our good friend, Fred Fiske -- and for Diane Rehm in the '80s too. And then got my own show doing bluegrass and kind of was thrown into it. Didn't really know much about bluegrass when I started in '82, but I had a crash course, partly thanks to Katy Daley, who helped me out back in those days.

NNAMDINative Washingtonian.

DEMSEYPretty much. Well, Katy is...

NNAMDIKaty is.

DEMSEYYeah, and I've been here since 1960, so my first seven years were in California, but I'm basically a Washingtonian.

NNAMDIYou, like me, are now Washingtonians.

DEMSEYYes, indeed.

NNAMDIHow did you and Chris meet?

DEMSEYWell, we haven't actually met that many times in person, maybe just a couple before he came to the station a couple months ago.

NNAMDIBut...

DEMSEYWe met at, I guess, the Folk Alliance Conference once or twice, but we've had a lot contact through the years through the Bluegrass Unlimited charts. He has been one of the reporting stations for the chart for many years because he had to show up in Connecticut for, what, 30 years or more?

TESKEYYeah, 30 years. And so I'd send Lee my chart every month...

DEMSEYMonth, yeah.

TESKEY...so we were in touch all the time and actually never saw each other.

DEMSEYYeah, hardly at all. But now we see each other every day in the office.

NNAMDIAnd I see you both every day. And, Lee, you've been creating the top 50 contemporary bluegrass hits for Bluegrass Unlimited for at least 20 years...

TESKEYYeah, 21.

NNAMDI...what many consider the definitive bluegrass chart. Tell us about that.

DEMSEYYeah. Pete Kuykendall, the founder of Bluegrass Unlimited, and I were having a conversation and we thought, gee, there's all these other charts. Why don't we have one for bluegrass? And we figured we have to have at least 30 or 40 stations reporting to us to be able to come up with a list that means anything. And we have about 60 stations nowadays to come up with the top 30 chart that is published in the magazine every month, and there's usually about six or seven new number one songs a year.

DEMSEYAnd some of the songs stay on the chart for as long as a year, unlike, you know, country music where a song will hit the top of the charts and then six weeks later, another single comes out by that artist.

NNAMDIWell, here's a song on this month's top 50 chart by Balsam Range. It's called "Trains I Missed."

NNAMDIBalsam Range, "Trains I Missed." We got an email from Richard. "Your guests seem to have defined Patsy Cline, say, as not a country singer, huh?"

DEMSEYWell, no, she was a country singer, but she was a pop singer too. A lot of her stuff crossed over into pop music. And, yes, she used electric instruments, but she would never be considered a bluegrass musician. She's influenced bluegrass musicians with her singing style certainly. People like Alison Krauss really have a lot to owe to Patsy Cline's kind of pop-country sound. And "Trains I Missed" kind of represents the softer side of bluegrass music. It has the instrument and the drive, but it's kind of a slow drive.

DEMSEYThat song that was named IBMA's, the International Bluegrass Music Association, Song of the Year this past year and it comes out in the top 10 on the top 50 countdown show that I'm gonna be doing on New Year's Eve.

NNAMDIPatsy Cline was big in my native country Guyana, so I was listening to her before I even came here.

DEMSEYOh, really? She was from West Virginia, I believe.

NNAMDIYes, she was, I think. Chris, many bluegrass songs still do touch on what we think of as traditional bluegrass themes, working-class people trying to get by. There's one by Alison Krauss called "Dust Bowl Children." Do you see trends in the themes of bluegrass songs?

TESKEYWell, you know, it's always about heartache and loss and change. I guess just like rock music and jazz and, you know, I mean, the themes are really universal. And in the case of bluegrass music, they're from the -- mostly from the southeast part of the United States, so they're songs about, you know, cabins on the hill and things like that.

TESKEYBut -- and the song you just mentioned is written by Peter Rowan and actually is about the Dust Bowl of the 1930s that -- in fact, when I first heard that song, I thought it was written by Woody Guthrie. But, yeah, it's about hardship and change and just kind of keeping on.

NNAMDISome songs, as you pointed out, are not about hardscrabble lives we usually associate with bluegrass, rather they're about things that sound very familiar to many of us. "Somewhere South of Crazy" is about a woman staring at her computer screen at work and wishing she was on a beach. I can relate.

NNAMDICan't you? Yeah, we can certainly relate to that. Lee, we're soon gonna be taking a short break. And going into the break, you'll hear some bluegrass from someone more familiar to most people as an actor and director. Tell us about Steve Martin's bluegrass career.

DEMSEYYeah. Well, he's been playing the banjo for a long time, and even in his comedy act in his early days when he was first successful, he would have it in there, kind of as a just a change of phase. But he was a serious banjo player, and he's learned from some of the best players in the business, Tony Trischka and Bela Fleck, people like that.

DEMSEYAnd he's really helped the image of bluegrass music with his touring with the Steep Canyon Rangers this past year, and they were named entertainers of the year at the IBMA awards. And he's become sort of an ambassador for bluegrass music. And he's quite -- he's become quite a good player in his own right.

NNAMDIIs he known in bluegrass because he was already a celebrity? Or was his bluegrass playing fairly respectable?

DEMSEYHe was pretty good from the start. I mean, it just been two or three years, I guess, since he sort of emerged on the scene. And then he joined an established band called the Steep Canyon Rangers to do some touring. And it's brought their image up, too, as a recording act. And he does a very good job in representing the music and, you know, being playful with the tune, making jokes. He's been on a lot of late-night TV shows and always talks up bluegrass music. So we were really proud of that representation.

NNAMDII've seen a little bit of those. This tune going into the break made the chart. It's called "Jubilation Day."

NNAMDIWelcome back. We're talking bluegrass with Lee Michael Demsey, host of "The Lee Michael Demsey Show" on WAMU's Bluegrass Country, where Chris Teskey is the senior music producer. They both join us in studio. If you have already called, stay on the line. We will get to your calls. Chris, most people think of bluegrass as belonging to the mountains of Appalachia, southern and rural. But that's not how you came to bluegrass. You're from Connecticut.

TESKEYWell, that's right. And, you know, I know two guys that I went to high school with who are bluegrass guitar players. And we grew up in a gritty town in Connecticut, a post-industrial town called Bridgeport. So I don't really know how this happened, but I do know that I knew people -- some of my father's friends were in World War II, and they met Southern guys and heard the music, and I think that -- I think the being in the service had a lot to do with the spread of the music in the North.

NNAMDIAnd Lee Michael Demsey mentioned earlier Grateful Dead. It's my understanding that you were hooked on bluegrass because you were listening to Jerry Garcia and Grateful Dead along with other musicians that we might not necessarily associate with bluegrass.

TESKEYWell, that's right. I was doing radio in Connecticut, and you had to hear everything that Garcia played, and he was playing the banjo. And a record came out in 1973 called "Old and in the Way," David Grisman and Jerry Garcia and Peter Rowan and Vassar Clements, so it was all top players. And that kinda blew everybody's mind in the rock world. And actually, that was a really great-selling record too. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies. So it was a big hit. But then the...

DEMSEYThe band only did about, you know, 10 gigs altogether.

TESKEYThat's right.

NNAMDIReally?

TESKEYYeah, yeah. They were really short-lived. But then the other thing that happened was that The Seldom Scene played in Connecticut. And the producer of the show called me and said, have you heard of The Seldom Scene? And I said no. And he sent me all the records, and that really pretty much blew my mind as well. So I was totally hooked at that point.

NNAMDIWe are pretty familiar with The Seldom Scene around here. Here is Rick in Washington. Rick, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

RICKHi, Kojo. I was calling about, of all things, a Russian bluegrass band called the Bering Strait. I wonder if you've heard of it.

DEMSEYI know there was a documentary made about them. They're not really -- haven't been played a lot in this country, but I know a documentary was made about them a couple years ago, I think, it was.

RICKYeah. I didn't see the documentary, I think, but I was familiar with the band. I heard some of their music being played on air and a story about how they were college students at a school of music in St. Petersburg. A professor had the albums and they liked them, and they started their own bluegrass band. And allegedly, the producer for their CDs went to a biker bar in Alabama or something and nobody at the bar could believe that they were not from the South and that they were Russian.

NNAMDIWell, both Lee and Chris can also tell you about bluegrass being big in a lot of other fairly surprising places like Japan and Australia. Why do you think that the music has taken root in places far from its roots, Lee?

DEMSEYWell, I guess it's sort of a universal language. The topics are kind of universal. There's a great band in Sweden called G2. One of our top hosts on Bluegrass Country is Mike Kear, who does a bluegrass show from Australia. And it's -- I think some of the bands went over to, say, Japan. I think The Country Gentlemen went over there in the '60s and again in the '70s, and people were just enthralled by their music.

DEMSEYAnd some of those people didn't even speak much English and didn't really know what they were singing about, but they were enthralled by the musicianship, the dexterity on the mandolin of a John Duffey or an Eddie Adcock on the banjo and took up those instruments and began playing them. And, you know, back in the '60s and '70s, and it's still going strong in those places. And it's wonderful.

DEMSEYThere's a European World of Bluegrass organization out there that's going strong. So it's not quite as strong as it is in the United States, but I'd say it's going pretty strong.

NNAMDIWhat's your theory, Chris?

TESKEYWell, I think as far as Japan goes, the Japanese just love to consume American culture. You know, Bob Webster, who's on -- another one of our host on Bluegrass Country, was just telling me earlier today that when The Country Gentlemen went to Japan, people were ripping the buttons off of their clothes.

DEMSEYThey love the Beatles.

TESKEYYeah, Beatlemania for The Country Gentlemen, very strange. And there's a book put out by a Japanese guy who collected thousands of classic American banjos that were worth millions of dollars. It's a collector's item now, the book is. But this guy was so enamored of American instrument-making that he collected all these great Bacon and Day banjos and Gibson banjos from the '20s and '30s. And he spent millions and millions of dollars and had to build a building to house all the banjos.

NNAMDIAbsolutely amazing. We're gonna play a song that a lot of people will recognize. It was a big hit in the 1970s by Seals & Crofts. This is the Dale Ann Bradley bluegrass version.

NNAMDIFirst heard this song, this version, in Barbados, believe it or not, where they love bluegrass and country, as a matter of fact. Lee, it's not new for bluegrass artists to adopt pop or rock or other songs.

DEMSEYNo, it really goes back -- I mean, The Country Gentlemen, who were based in this area back in the '60s, were known for taking, you know, pop and country songs and giving them a bluegrass a spin. It's really happened a lot more since then, of course, with The Seldom Scene. And Dale Ann Bradley herself, who has been named IBMA's female vocalist of the year four out of the last five years because of that gorgeous voice of hers that can sing any style of music -- she sang a Janice Joplin song in one of her recent albums. And U2 also, right? She did...

TESKEY"Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For."

DEMSEYYeah.

TESKEYAnd it's great. You'd never know that it was a rock tune.

DEMSEYThese people grew up on other kinds of music than just bluegrass, and it's natural for them to take up songs and find a way to give them a bluegrass spin with a fiddle break or Dobro break in it. And it's only natural, so it's just part of the progression of the music.

NNAMDIHere's Sue in Washington, D.C. Sue, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

SUEHi. Yes. My husband is Eddie Adcock's nephew, and I grew up in Buffalo and came down here and married into somebody that had a great influence on bluegrass. And he said he was in The Country Gentlemen and The Seldom Scene, Eddie.

DEMSEYHe was in The Country Gentlemen, but not in The Seldom Scene. Ben Eldridge has been the banjo player in The Seldom Scene since the beginning of that group 40 years ago. But Eddie is a very influential player. He's still playing. He just put out a new CD. He's had some health issues in recent years, but he still plays very well. He and his wife Martha still make great music together, and I guess he's probably in his 70s now.

TESKEYI would think, yeah.

SUEYeah. We met up with him a couple of months ago. He does -- he had his third operation on his brain.

DEMSEYBrain. Brain.

SUEAnd he's doing well. He -- we talked to him a little while ago, and we just got his new CD. And...

NNAMDIGood for you, Sue. So now you're obviously a fan, right, Sue?

SUEYeah, especially when he's my family member now. He's my uncle.

NNAMDIObligatory fan, but you seem to enjoy it also. Sue, thank you very much for your call. Chris, it's part of the debate about what bluegrass music is. But as we've said, there are a number of bluegrass bands that were influenced by other genres, and there are a number of bands that are just hard to categorize, are there not?

TESKEYMm-hmm. Well, yeah. The New Grass Revival was certainly one. They played rock tunes and they played original tunes. And there's a famous story of Bill Monroe being really upset with Sam Bush for the way that he did Bill's tune "I'm Going Back to Old Kentucky." But what it boils down to is that people like Sam Bush and Bela Fleck can play bluegrass as well as anybody. And so it's almost as though they are bigger -- their talent is bigger than the genre, so they go outside the genre. But they always come back home.

DEMSEYIt's funny that Bill Monroe supposedly -- and it's not necessarily true, but he would say about music that he didn't think was really bluegrass, he'd say, that ain't no part of nothing.

TESKEYThat ain't no part of nothing.

NNAMDIThat ain't no part of nothing. But, you know, some of the ways the lines blur among country, folk, pop and bluegrass, some traditionalists object. But there are contemporary bluegrass artists who see no issues at all with blurring the lines.

DEMSEYAlison Krauss is certainly an example.

NNAMDIOh, yeah.

DEMSEYShe's done major things for bluegrass music, opening people's eyes to the music who never thought they would be a fan of bluegrass music. But even though her hit songs are mainly played on the country charts and are more kind of pop-country ballads, her concerts feature a lot of bluegrass...

TESKEYOh, yeah.

DEMSEY...and that really brings a lot of people over to it. And she's a great fiddle player too.

NNAMDIHere's John -- you were gonna say, Chris?

TESKEYOh, I was just gonna say about Alison Krauss, you know, she had a big hit record, a big breakthrough record for herself in bluegrass that sold a couple of million copies on the Rounder label, and it was a compilation. And the interesting thing they did was they only put songs on that didn't have the banjo on it. There's no banjo on that, and that's how they broke Alison Krauss, by making it a little less bluegrass. It just was enough to get the public to pay attention.

NNAMDIHere now is John in Fairfax, Va. John, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

JOHNThanks, Kojo, for taking the call. I remember fondly Lee's all-acoustic show in the afternoons on WAMU flagship.

DEMSEYI was on during this time slot, actually.

NNAMDIExactly right.

JOHNI'm calling because of one of the antecedents of bluegrass or maybe a parallel development was Upper Piedmont string band music. A very, very beautiful album was put out by Roy Clark about the 1970s. He gathered all his uncles and cousins and everything from Southside Virginia, and they put out a banjo-less bluegrass album, basically, and they're wonderful, all instrumentals.

NNAMDIA banjo-less bluegrass album. John...

DEMSEYIt does happen.

TESKEYYeah.

DEMSEYTony Rice has done a lot of touring without having a banjo in his band, but he's still considered to be bluegrass.

TESKEYAnd I asked him about "Manzanita," you know, because that was a breakthrough record, really, and it didn't have a banjo on it. I was interviewing Tony, and I asked him, what gave you that brilliant idea? And he said, oh, I didn't have a brilliant idea. J.D. Crowe was sick and he couldn't make the session, and we did it without him.

DEMSEYFunny how things happen like that.

NNAMDIJohn, thank you very much for your call. Lee, we can't go without you telling us about your New Year's Eve show.

DEMSEYMm-hmm. Yeah. We decided to do a countdown show, the top 50 songs of the year gone by, based largely on my -- the charts that I put together every month for Bluegrass Unlimited magazine. And some wonderful music has come out this past year. It's been a good year for both traditional and contemporary bluegrass music, and both are represented on the chart. We've got the newcomers like Sierra Hull and some of the veteran performers who have been around for many, many years, all having success.

DEMSEYAnd we're gonna be counting that down from nine to midnight, Eastern Time, New Year's Eve, on our bluegrasscountry.org and our 105.5 signal, where we're going stronger than ever with our new tower that we're on. So a lot more people can hear some of these...

NNAMDII'm so glad you mentioned Sierra Hull because we're going out on Sierra Hull's "Bombshell." Lee Michael Demsey is the host of "The Lee Michael Demsey Show" on WAMU's Bluegrass Country. Lee, thank you so much for joining us.

DEMSEYThank you, Kojo.

NNAMDIChris Teskey is the senior music producer. Chris, thank you for joining us.

TESKEYYou're welcome, Kojo. Thank you.

NNAMDISierra Hull, "Bombshell." I'm Kojo Nnamdi.