Bluegrass...that's Country and Western music, right?

Jbird and I both have this crazy love of bluegrass.  After our wedding we walked down the aisle together to some real good old timey stuff, I think it was this song - please have a listen and let yourself smile.  People seem to wrinkle their nose or grimace when I mention that we like bluegrass - if they know what it is, in the first place.  It's had a bad rap in NZ and is often judged as hick country music.  It's not! I like nearly all genre of music but country has been all but black-listed from my ipod.  Feel free to sit down with me one day and we'll have a little comparison session.

Because it's not popular in NZ, I've only been to one bluegrass gig in my life.  Old Crow Medicine Show have visited Auckland a few times and we caught them at the Powerstation in 2008.  It was a wicked gig, I'm talking life changing, the venue was perfect.  Nice and small, not too crowded.  I was the Music Specialist at a school at the time.  Guess what the focus was in class that week!?

Jbird has this story he tells about his first night living in upstate New York.  He was fresh off the boat for what has become nearly 6 years in this fine country.  The story goes that he spent that night sitting around a camp fire, playing fiddle with a bluegrass band.  It sounded too good to be true and I've heard the story enough times that it's almost mythical.  

When we were given the loan of the car for this recent holiday, we then had to make a decision about what to do and where to go.  We were trying to decide between going north to cold and windy yet ever so famous-to-us Chicago, Illinois, or south to warm, Music City, Nashville, Tennessee.  Jbird emailed that same band he always talks about and they offered us a room to stay in.  The decision became obvious: Nashville, Tennessee it was.  

I'm beginning to realise that we've moved to the land of bluegrass, the great Midwest.  It's not all corn and beef after all.