This is kind of a rant and a discussion. I’ve been getting more into bluegrass recently and keep getting demotivated by how niche it is. I’ve loved bluegrass since I was a teen, but now that I’m actively trying to play it, it’s very demoralizing.
Granted I live in a more urban area, but it’s very hard to find jams, and even just other players, around unless I drive at least an hour.
It also feels like there aren’t many “masters” to study. For guitar it’s basically Tony Rice, Bryan Sutton, and Clarence White.
Then to top it off, even the “big” acts still aren’t well known so your chance of jamming to some Billy Strings or Molly Tuttle is next to nil. Bluegrass players only want the standards, non bluegrass players won’t even know the artist at all.
I do hope this newer generation makes the genre a little less rigid, but even then, that’ll be 10-20 years down the line. Anyway, rant over. Figured it was worth posting just for some activity here.
Standards are a blessing and a curse. It can get boring after a while playing ‘old home place’ for the 100th time. The flip side is standards allow a group of bluegrassers to jam together even if they’ve never played together before.
One thing you can do is learn tunes that use the same old chords, but are more obscure. Mostly people will be fine with that, and at least the words are different.
Nice thing about a more advanced jam is people will pull out tunes with a bunch of chords like the Hobo Song. If you can, try to recruit people that want to play jam busters and have a jam of your own where you play that stuff. Might find you’ve started a band that way!