Every act played from the same repertoire, on the same instruments, in an attempt to capture exactly the same sound

Bluegrass festivals were a pretty weird proposition, all things considered. I tried to imagine a rock festival where everyone was expected to make at least half their set Lynyrd Skynyrd covers. Where every act played from the same repertoire, on the same instruments, in an attempt to capture exactly the same sound. But that’s what people came for. And when the bands weren’t singing old songs, or new songs crafted to sound like old songs, they were singing songs about how no one sang the old songs any more.

We got too far away from Carter and Ralph 

And the love of a sweet mountain girl 

We’re way down below that high lonesome sound 

And a far cry from Lester and Earl … 

I thought of Trevor: I knew that the bluegrass-on-bluegrass phenomenon caused him great irritation, because he regularly complained to me about it. ‘Whenever you turn on the radio there’s all these songs bragging on how great the music used to be,’ he would grumble, ‘and how it isn’t like it was in the old days. And all those bands are playing it like it was in the old days!’

E. John, Wayfaring stranger (2019), loc. 2,180

Why did it choose to confuse its instrumentalists with a ‘Foggy Mountain Special’ and a ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’?

There is one problem with songs that have limited chord structures and basic melodies, and that’s that they can start to sound quite similar. It might have been easier to tell the songs apart – and therefore play the notes in the right order – if they hadn’t, many of them, had such similar names, or covered such similar ground. For instance, there wasn’t just one song about someone ‘going down the road feeling bad’. There were dozens. Every other song seemed to be a hard-luck story about a man who’d worn out the soles of his shoes, and had no money to buy a new pair. Within a couple of hours, I had compassion fatigue. And why did a single musical genre require songs about a ‘Little Cabin Home on the Hill’, a ‘Blue Ridge Cabin Home’, and a ‘Cabin in Caroline’? Why did it need to pay tribute to both a John Hardy and a John Henry? Why did it choose to confuse its instrumentalists with a ‘Foggy Mountain Special’ and a ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’? There weren’t even lyrics to help you tell those last two apart. At one stage I mistook one for the other and caused the musical equivalent of a ten-car pile-up.

E. John, Wayfaring stranger (2019), loc. 343