The Bluegrass Dance Floor
The origins of buckdancing, flatfooting and clogging are deep in Irish and Dutch clog dancing. Heavy wooden shoes were worn to produce sounds while moving the feet. Bluegrass dance choreography includes the same reel style of dance. Couples dance in large group formations moving in time to the music. In buckdancing, the body weight and sound emphasis lies mainly on the heels. In flatfooting, the scraping sound requires the whole foot to produce sounds while in motion. In clogging, the sound comes the striking of the soles of the shoes heavily against the floor. These dances are performed to bluegrass music on the blue grass dance floor.

1.) Some warm clothing. The environment can be just as wild and untamed as the music brought to you at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. Make sure you’re prepared and check up on the weather forecasts as the event in 2013 nears.

2.) A good pair of sunglasses. There may not be a pavilion this time around so you’re going to want to make sure you have a good pair of sunglasses so the sun doesn’t get in your eyes. Might also be a good idea to bring some sunscreen.

3.) A relaxed and fun disposition. The Telluride Bluegrass Festival, Planet Bluegrass and the genre in general are all about having fun and cutting loose. If you aren’t dancing with the rest of the crowd, then there’s something wrong with you.

If you remember these three things while planning and ordering your tickets, you’ll be all set to enjoy the single greatest Bluegrass event in the country.

This success has led to the release of eight studio albums, along with its ongoing “On The Road” series, which attempts to chronicle as many of the band’s live performances as possible.

The group has often been compared to other “jam” bands that rose to prominence in the early 1990s, such as Phish. While this is fair to say, considering that most of these groups dip into multiple genres to deliver strong live performances, The String Cheese Incident has kept its bluegrass influences at the forefront for much of its career. In fact, Bill Nershi, one of the guitarists in the group, has a side project called Honkytonk Homeslice, which plays strictly bluegrass music.

As the band continues to play different festivals across the U.S., its sound continues to evolve, revealing a variety of influences that delight and surprise fans at every tour stop.Want to know more? Go ahead: YarmonyGrass: RRE, Elephant Revival, Honkytonk Homeslice

The main instruments of the bluegrass style are the guitar; the resonator banjo; and the mandolin, which Monroe himself played.You can find a quick rundown here Each of these musicians took turns playing solo between verses, unlike “old time music,” where they played together throughout. The soloists improved extensively, as in jazz. Occasionally, other instruments were used: In his 1981 instrumental “My Last Days on Earth,” Monroe used an orchestral string ensemble.

Many of Monroe’s songs were gospel tunes; others were about work, lost love, or other subjects. His best-known song is “Blue Moon of Kentucky” others include “Uncle Pen,” “Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine,” and a version of Jimmie Rodgers’s “Muleskinner Blues.”

The sound was perfected in the south, but it is done in other areas that people would not believe. There are actually some bluegrass artists as far as Canada. These artists have captured a southern slang, but they have put a real Canadian spin on it.Want more? Click here.

Bluegrass even has a place in the mid-western states. There is a love for the harmony that is unparalleled to much of anything else. The reason that this music sounds so different is that the vocal harmony is wrapped around the sounds of the instruments. There have been many instances where the vocalists simply ride the rhythm arrangement of the melodies. This is true bluegrass at its best.

Lots of ladies that sing these bluegrass tones will practice together over and over again. They may practice singing without the music first. Then they practice with the band present.

The fiddle is similar to the violin and it is played using a bow that runs along the strings which are set upon a piece of wood called the bridge. This instrument is also often played in folk music. The mandolin is an Italian instrument that is plucked rather than played with a bow. It can have as few as four strings or as many as twelve. The banjo is round in shape and usually made of some sort of animal skin that is stretched over a round drum. It makes a unique sound as it can be strummed or drummed upon and it generally has four or five strings. The string bass is also known as the upright bass and this is the largest of the bluegrass instruments played by plucking.

Those early settlers began to move out to other areas of the new land that became Virginia, the Carolinas, Kentucky and Tennessee. As they pioneered the new land they created songs built on what they experienced in their daily lives. It took the invention of the phonograph and the radio in the early 20th century to transport the music from the mountains.

With Monroe and others bluegrass became a recognizable music form by 1945. However, it took Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt, who came onto the scene in the 1940s, to take bluegrass music to a wider audience. Scruggs and Flatt popularized bluegrass music to audiences from university students and television audiences to large venues and movies. Their popular song “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” became the Bonnie & Clyde movie soundtrack.