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WORK TITLE: Bluegrass in Baltimore
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Baltimore
STATE: MD
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://bluegrasstoday.com/tim-newby-talks-baltimore-bluegrass/ * http://www.honesttune.com/staff/tim-newby/ * http://www.mcfarlandbooks.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-9439-2
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2015025865
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Newby, Tim, 1974-
Found in: Newby, T. Bluegrass in Baltimore, 2015: ECIP t.p. (Tim
Newby) data sheet (birth date: May 29, 1974)
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., SE
Washington, DC 20540
Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
PERSONAL
Born May 29, 1974.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and teacher. Honest Tune, features editor, beginning 2006.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Tim Newby is a writer, teacher, and features editor for the Honest Tune website. Although he grew up on various military bases, Newby calls the city of Baltimore home, and he is an expert on the music scene there. His 2015 book, Bluegrass in Baltimore: The Hard Drivin’ Sound and Its Legacy, reflects this expertise, and the volume draws on research and oral histories to provide a portrait of the overlooked Baltimore bluegrass scene during the 1950s and 1960s. In the book, Newby reports that Appalachian migration to Northern cities became common during the Depression, and it remained popular during the postwar years. Industrialized northern cities (including Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Baltimore) all offered better job opportunities than rural Appalachia. Baltimore was the sixth largest city in the country after World War II, but migrants there were met with prejudice and derided as hillbillies. Thus, migrants formed their own neighborhoods and communities, and music served a pivotal role in Appalachian migrant culture. Thus, Baltimore became a mecca for bluegrass music, at one point rivaled only by Nashville. Today, this aspect of Baltimore’s history has largely been forgotten, and Newby’s book sets out to redress this oversight.
As the author explained on the L4LM website, Baltimore “was similar to many other Midwestern cities that supported their own bluegrass scenes. But Baltimore separated itself from those cities with its unmatched talent- talent that, unfortunately, is not always as well-known as it should be, and that has been lost to the ravages of time over the years. And that is the story of Baltimore. The talented musicians who played their hearts out for a couple of bucks at some of the worst dive bars that the city has ever known, the influence they wielded, and the folks who regularly packed those places to see them play.”
Praising Bluegrass in Baltimore on the James Reams & the Barnstomers website, a critic called it “a work that is destined to be a bluegrass classic and must-have for any bluegrass historian.” Though Kevin Kehrberg in the Journal of Southern History felt that the volume is not without flaws, he announced that, “overall, Newby’s book delivers solid contributions to the historiography of bluegrass music, offering a fresh investigation of urban bluegrass in a working-class city.” Kehrberg then went on to conclude that “Bluegrass in Baltimore a welcome addition to literature documenting the importance of broader North America in the history and development of “southern” bluegrass and country music.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Journal of Southern History, November, 2016, Kevin Kehrberg, review of Bluegrass in Baltimore: The Hard Drivin’ Sound and Its Legacy.
ONLINE
James Reams & the Barnstomers, http://www.jamesreams.com/ (July 10, 2017), review of Bluegrass in Baltimore.
L4LM, http://liveforlivemusic.com/ (July 24, 2017), author statement.*
Tim Newby
newby
Start date: December 2006
Role: Features Editor
Lives In: Baltimore, Maryland
Bio: Tim Newby grew up a military-brat bouncing from base to base around the world. He eventually came back to the states settling in Baltimore, MD. A smattering of odd jobs, combined with the occasional spot of freelance writing led him to this point. Paying the bills by working as teacher during the day, Tim has contributed to a number of magazines, both online and in print. He has lost count of the number of hours he has spent traveling from live to show to live show in search of the perfect set of music.
Top 5 Live Shows from the past 5 years
1. Levon Helm Midnight Ramble, The Barn, Woodstock, NYC 1/17/09
2. Neil Young, DAR Constitution Hall, Washington D.C. 11/15/07
3. Radiohead, Nissan Pavillion, Bristow, VA 5/11/08
4. Allman Brothers, Beacon Theatre, New York, NY 3/12/10
5. The Bridge, 8×10, Baltimore, MD 8/22/07
Tim Newby talks Baltimore Bluegrass
Posted on January 21, 2016 by Richard Thompson
Country music and bluegrass music has been the subject of favorable treatment by academics with the International Country Music Conference (ICMC) and the Birthplace of Country Music, Bristol, TN/VA, being two of many organisations that stage seminars that present talks and discussion groups addressing certain aspect of bluegrass music and its cultural environment.
Recently the Baltimore City Historical Society invited Tim Newby, the author of Bluegrass in Baltimore: The Hard Drivin’ Sound and its Legacy, to talk entitled Appalachian Migrants and Bluegrass Music in Baltimore.
Appalachian migration to the north goes back as far as the Depression era, if not before, and as the disparity between living standards in Appalachia and the industrialised northern cities such as Detroit, Cincinnati, Philadelphia and Baltimore continued, emigration from the South continued after World War II and into the 1950s and 1960s and onwards.
As Newby notes in his recently-published book, many migrants brought bluegrass and old time music to those cities and Baltimore became a hot-bed for the emerging bluegrass art-form. Key figures in the city included Del McCoury, Earl Taylor, Walt Hensley and Hazel Dickens, and later Mike Munford.
Release Date
June 4, 2015
About
The story of Bluegrass in Baltimore and the influence it had across a broad musical landscape as told by the legendary players from this golden-age.
ISBN
978-0-7864-9439-2
Publisher
McFarland & Company Inc., Publishers
Awards
2016 Association for Recorded Sound Collections "Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research."
categories
Book
STORY
Due to an influx of Appalachian migrants who came looking for work in the 1940s and 50s, Baltimore found itself the recipient of an extraordinarily talented crop of musicians and for a brief time was the center of the bluegrass world.
Based upon interviews with many of the legendary players from this golden-age of bluegrass in Baltimore who had moved there in hopes of a better future and found it in music, this is the first book to take an in-depth look into how the music that was played in Baltimore came to wield influence across a broad musical landscape. It reveals the struggles these musicians from meager backgrounds had to face in a music industry that viewed the music they made as the “poorest example of poor man’s music.”
The journey of these musicians was not an easy one. There were missed opportunities, personal demons, and the always up-hill battle these pioneers had to fight because of the prejudice against their hillbilly backgrounds. Due to this many of these original Baltimore musicians found they were often resigned to the overlooked role of early innovator or forgotten influence.
‘Bluegrass In Baltimore’ Author Shares His Inspiration For New Novel
Posted by admin on Thursday October 1st, 2015
Author Tim Newby recently published Bluegrass in Baltimore: The Hard Drivin’ Sound And Its Legacy. The work takes an in-depth look at the way bluegrass and Baltimore’s histories coincided, as musicians relied on Americana music to bring people together during the tough, post-War times. We asked Newby to give L4LM readers a taste of his new work, and he responded by sharing this personal account of his inspiration and motivation for the novel. You can find out more about Bluegrass in Baltimore here.
“There was Nashville and then there was Baltimore,” explained bluegrass legend Del McCoury, “and Baltimore was really the hot town for bluegrass music back in the ‘50s and ‘60s.” I was interviewing Del in January 2011 about his upcoming album with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Legacies, for an article that I was writing for Honest Tune Magazine. During our conversation, he became sidetracked and began to talk in length about his formative years as a musician playing in the rough and tumble bar scene in Baltimore in the 1950s and 60s. As a Baltimore resident I was vaguely aware of the scene that had first flourished in the city as migrants from the Appalachian region moved north looking for work and had always been fascinated by this often overlooked musical scene that proved to be highly influential over the years. The story of this Baltimore scene was one that I felt needed to be told.
Baltimore was a prime destination for Appalachian migrants looking for work following World War II, as it was the sixth largest city in the country at the time, and home to a number of large factories. Upon their arrival, these migrants were confronted daily with prejudice against their hillbilly background. Pioneering singer Hazel Dickens remembers being confronted by signs that proclaimed, “No Dogs or Hillbillies” around town. These migrants clustered in neighborhoods around the city and relied on music to bond them together and remind them of their old-home place. At all night picking parties in the row, homes that lined the streets or in the dingy, beer and a shot bars that were on every corner in the city, the sounds of hillbilly and bluegrass emulated throughout the night.
[Bob Baker and the Pike County Boys, one of the first working bands in Baltimore]
Out of those corner bars and house parties, Baltimore fostered a scene that produced many key figures, including the pioneering duets of Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard, Earl Taylor and the Stoney Mountain Boys, who in 1959 became the first Bluegrass band to play Carnegie Hall, Bluegrass Hall of Famer Russ Hooper, who over the years would turn down multiple invitations to join both Flatt & Scruggs and the Country Gentlemen, Walt Hensley who recorded the first full-length banjo album, 5-String Banjo Today, on a major label, Mike Seeger (Pete’s half-brother) who produced the first full-length bluegrass album and was instrumental in preserving, recording, and keeping alive roots music, and the legendary Del McCoury who has established himself as one of the most important bluegrass musicians over the last fifty years.
The influence of this hard drivin’ scene, while a dominate force in the Mid-Atlantic region and especially on the burgeoning Washington D.C. scene, was also far-reaching and extended well beyond simple bluegrass boundaries. Everyone from Jorma Kaukonen (Jefferson Airplane, Hot Tuna), Chris Hillman (The Byrds, Flying Burrito Brothers), Pete Wernick (Hot Rize), Vince Herman (Leftover Salmon), Trey Anastasio (Phish), David Grisman, and countless others have spoken of the influence of Baltimore and the musicians the city helped produce. Sam Bush would sing about one the Baltimore scene’s most revered figures, banjo-picker Walt Hensley, on his 2006 album, Laps in Seven. The Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia, a long-time fan of Hensley and many of the other bands that emerged from Baltimore, would regularly include songs from those bands in his acoustic and bluegrass sets.
[The All Vue Inn May 14, 1966 (l to r): Kimball Blair, Chris Warner, Frankie Short, Hoppy Ledford]
Over the years, Baltimore would serve as a proving ground, a place for many young musicians to apprentice. It was similar to many other Midwestern cities that supported their own bluegrass scenes. But Baltimore separated itself from those cities with its unmatched talent- talent that, unfortunately, is not always as well-known as it should be, and that has been lost to the ravages of time over the years. And that is the story of Baltimore. The talented musicians who played their hearts out for a couple of bucks at some of the worst dive bars that the city has ever known, the influence they wielded, and the folks who regularly packed those places to see them play.
The celebration and influence of the music created in Baltimore still exists to this day. Entering its fourth year, the Charm City Folk and Bluegrass Festival has already established itself as one of the premier bluegrass festivals. Also a crop of new musicians have begun to emerge from the city including Mike Munford, who was named the 2013 IBMA banjo player of the year, Patrick McAvinue who recently was awarded the 2015 IBMA Momentum award and is one of the best young fiddlers in the country, singer/songwriter Cris Jacobs who is one of the most versatile guitarists around, Caleb Stine who is quietly simply one of the most engaging songwriters today, and a host of other young bands including Grand Ole Ditch, Letitia Vansant, and Charm City Junction, who all carry the torch of Baltimore’s rich history forward.
[Cover photo: (l to r) Frankie Short, Del McCoury, Dee Gunter at unknown Baltimore bar, circa 1970]
Bluegrass in Baltimore: The Hard Drivin' Sound and Its Legacy
Kevin Kehrberg
82.4 (Nov. 2016): p978.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Bluegrass in Baltimore: The Hard Drivin' Sound and Its Legacy. By Tim Newby. (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2015. Pp. viii, 235. Paper, $35.00, ISBN 978-0-7864-9439-2.)
Among cultural perceptions of North American music and geography, few are as strongly linked as country music and the southern United States. However, important recent studies are complicating this idea, examining the country music legacy of places and regions away from the core of the American South. Examples include the work of Keith Cady, Henry Glassie, Craig Maki, Clifford R. Murphy, and Douglas Dowling Peach. Baltimore, located on the fringes of the South, has similarly avoided scholarly scrutiny regarding its significance to this music. With Bluegrass in Baltimore: The Hard Drivin Sound and Its Legacy, Tim Newby aims to help rectify this shortcoming by examining the city's bluegrass music scene, revealing Baltimore's "permanent ... footprint on the history and development of bluegrass" (p. 7).
Beginning with an introduction, the book proceeds mostly chronologically. Chapters 1-5 tell the stories of key musicians--Hazel Dickens, Alice Gerrard, Russ Hooper, Mike Seeger, Earl Taylor--and their roles in the nascent Baltimore bluegrass scene of the 1950s and 1960s. The next three chapters each focus on an influential musician with strong ties to the area: contemporary bluegrass icon Del McCoury, old-time music luminary Ola Belle Reed, and the oft-overlooked banjo innovator Walt Hensley. In the last two chapters Newby traces the evolution of bluegrass in Baltimore from the 1970s to 2014, including profiles of Cris Jacobs and Patrick McAvinue, young mainstays of the current scene.
Overall, Newby's book delivers solid contributions to the historiography of bluegrass music, offering a fresh investigation of urban bluegrass in a working-class city. The book effectively expands the biographies of both long-revered artists (Dickens, Gerrard, McCoury, Seeger) and those less recognized (Hensley, Hooper, Taylor). The in-depth profile of Taylor's career and contextualization of his group's historic Carnegie Hall concert in 1959 are long overdue. In addition, the chapter on Reed incorporates illuminating discussions of Sunset Park and New River Ranch, two rural parks just outside Baltimore that were critical venues in the early days of bluegrass.
With an approach that reflects Newby's primary experience writing for music trade publications, the book may not satisfy readers hoping for a robust scholarly treatment. Oral interviews conducted since 2011 constitute a significant basis of his research, which can cause concern. For example, Newby's portrayal of the Baltimore bluegrass scene as a unique product of intermingling populations of Appalachian migrants and urban folk revivalists is compelling, but it relies chiefly on interview recollections and does not reference such relevant migration studies as those by Chad Berry and James N. Gregory. This writing style also affects the structure and character of the prose. Tangential anecdotes and asides sometimes clutter the clarity and direction of the narrative, and multiple statements unequivocally present certain music and musicians as "pure" and "authentic" (pp. 10, 42). However, these aspects of methodology and style do not outweigh the book's overall contributions, which make Bluegrass in Baltimore a welcome addition to literature documenting the importance of broader North America in the history and development of "southern" bluegrass and country music.
KEVIN KEHRBERG
Warren Wilson College
Kehrberg, Kevin
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kehrberg, Kevin. "Bluegrass in Baltimore: The Hard Drivin' Sound and Its Legacy." Journal of Southern History, vol. 82, no. 4, 2016, p. 978+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA470867724&it=r&asid=5030381835e1fe2f0bdf9d952ae4a6f4. Accessed 10 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A470867724
“Bluegrass in Baltimore” makes a great read!
By jamesreamsJul 1
Bluegrass in Baltimore Book JacketI was so excited to receive my copy of “Bluegrass in Baltimore: The Hard Drivin’ Sound and Its Legacy” by Tim Newby. A while back, Tim had asked me to contribute information about my hero and friend, Walter Hensley, which I was more than happy to do and then, quite frankly, I totally forgot about it.
To say I was thrilled by what I read is an understatement, I’m overjoyed and overwhelmed with gratitude to have been a part of this wonderful contribution to the genre I love so much. Not only did Tim capture the flavor of bluegrass in Baltimore, he conveyed its’ very essence. In a fluid style that captivates the reader from the preface to the final chapter, Tim’s passion and depth of knowledge regarding this rich and “woefully under-documented” history of bluegrass permeates every page. I couldn’t put it down. I was especially touched by the tribute this book pays to Walt as well as honored to be included in a work that is destined to be a bluegrass classic and must-have for any bluegrass historian. Hats off to Tim Newby for a delectable slice of bluegrass pie!