Forget Madonna. Forget Gaga. If you want music branding genius, look no further than Bluegrass
Image: pho-Tony
I am currently reading How to Make Gravy, memoir of Aussie
music poet (he’s not a fan of the bastardisation of the world ‘icon’), Paul
Kelly. For anyone with unabashed, tween-like infatuation of lyrics like me,
this book is something to be slowly savoured. Suffice to say I’m loving it so
much it’s made it to my list of Ideal Dinner Guests – Alive, Dead (or
Inanimate and Readable).
During his description of his foray into bluegrass, Kelly
introduces us to the origin of the genre that was the out-of-wedlock progeny of
folk and country music. Bluegrass came wailing into the world in the 1940s into
the hands of Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys.
That's right: a whole genre named after one band.
Bill and his pose are the Hoover, Google, Xerox and Kleenex
of a particular style of music; a proper noun that became so common it could
also conceivably – in slang - become a verb (to bluegrass?) and a geographic
reference (the bluegrass region).
Part of the genius was Bill’s popularity began when he innovated
a product with an already established audience of consumers of folk and country
music and re-invented it so beautifully that it sparked its own wave of devotees
(Apple anyone?)
Bluegrass began with a banjo, an instrument that became synonymous
with white, hillbilly country music but ironically originated in Africa.
Combined with super-speedy banjo, some strutting mandolin and some smoking
fiddle, these guys had listeners audibly gasping at this new style
of old music.
The thing was, Bill Monroe played his music his way, yet did
what he had to make it marketable (read: relatable and lovable) to his target
audience:
Something was going on, all
right. But canny Bill never forgot he was making music for farmers. Despite
having left home (as all heroes must), he named his band after the native blue
grass of his home state, Kentucky. None of his classic 1946 band came from
there and he’d left for lack of opportunities, making his living in
neighbouring states, but Kentucky became Bills idealised motherland, the pure
wellspring. He crafted a myth of continuity, of the old mountain home, speaking
of ‘ancient tones’ and presenting his music not as radical innovation but as a
return to the source.
Kelly, Paul (2010). How
to make gravy, Penguin Group (Australia)
Now that.
Is how to make Branding.
