ABSTRACT
AN INTRIGUING MUSICAL movement is under way in the hills of Appalachia that stretches well beyond the secluded mountains and notoriously independent inhabitants. This phenomenon is the rebirth of bluegrass music which now is becoming as ‘hot’ as rap and hip-hop among the musical cognoscenti and tastemakers. What is fascinating about this is that it echoes the underlying mythology that informed the attribution of authenticity to urban hip-hop as a musical form a decade earlier (George 2005; Kitwana 2003; Chang and Herc 2005; Watkins 2006). Just as urban blacks are seen as having a genuineness of experience that is communicated to the rest of us through their music, and the ‘street-cred’ of black singers and musicians is evaluated both within and outside the community by references to violence, prison time and gang membership (Kitwana 2003), the rural whites who are the source of bluegrass are evaluated using the same ‘down and dirty’ criteria of authenticity, yet they are geographically situated in dense green rugged mountains instead of sagging cityscapes.
