Czech Bluegrass: Notes from the Heart of Europe by Bidgood, Lee

Abstract

Czech Bluegrass is an important, original and highly personal contribution to the defining characteristics and development of one of the more unlikely (but nonetheless significant) forms of musical expression in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. Bidgood’s approach, which is broadly ethnomusicological, renders his work accessible to a range of readers with a general interest in Czech culture and folk-spectrum music, as well as to musicians and musicologists with a more specialist knowledge of and/or liking for bluegrass. I am very much in the former category, and can claim no expertise in the making or interpretation of music, but I still found much of the content engaging and perspicuous.