Czech Bluegrass: Notes from the Heart of Europe. By Lee Bidgood. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017.

Abstract

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. 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.