Mt. Lebanon’s John Mackin got his first taste of bluegrass music as a young boy in the mid-1950s.
Mackin, 74, recalled listening to two women sing “FoggyRiver” as a man accompanied them on fiddle inside a barn on a Monroeville farm. The farm is long gone, having given way to suburban sprawl.
While Mackin said bluegrass concerts mostly took place in rural areas during his youth, that’s not the case anymore.
Bluegrass musicians and devoted followers regularly get together at bars, festivals and homes in Pittsburgh neighborhoods and suburbs. And late last year, Grammy Award-winner Billy Strings and his bluegrass band performed two sold-out nights at Pittsburgh’s Petersen Events Center — a testament to the niche genre’s popularity in Western Pennsylvania.
“Bluegrass lives just under the surface. If you don’t know it’s there, you’ll look right past it. But once you become aware of it, you’ll start seeing it everywhere,” said Apollo’s Luke Bundy, 39, who plays banjo with two bands, Dirty Old Mill and Better Late.
From Bill Monroe to Blawnox
Bluegrass songs traditionally speak to the beauty of the Appalachian countryside where the music was created, the quality of the corn liquor its residents produced and the hardscrabble reality of romance, life and death in the hills and hollers of places like Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee and Pennsylvania.
A song like “Banks of the Ohio” sounds beautiful — until you listen to the lyrics and realize it’s about a man who stabs and drowns his girlfriend when she refuses his marriage proposal.
The Kentucky-born Bill Monroe, often called the Father of Bluegrass, first popularized the music in the 1940s. His Blue Grass Boys band originally featured Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, who would go on to form their own highly successful group.
While many bluegrass musicians never attained mainstream success, the world has taken notice of bluegrass on occasion.
Flatt and Scruggs scored a hit on the pop charts with the theme song to the 1960s sitcom “The Beverly Hillbillies.” In the early 2000s, the soundtrack for the film “O Brother Where Art Thou,” featuring an array of bluegrass and Americana tunes, rose to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart and won a Grammy for album of the year.
Locally, bluegrass has found a home at the Starlite Lounge in Blawnox for the past quarter-century.
There, pickers young and old gather Tuesday nights to play favorite songs, occasionally learn a new one and enjoy the company of fellow bluegrass lovers.
“Originally there was a local band that would play a set, and then they’d open up the stage for jamming,” said Lew Scheinman, 80, of Pittsburgh’s Point Breeze, a regular at the weekly jam who was part of a small group that took charge of it when the host band proved unreliable.
“I started sending out emails to anyone I knew who might be interested, and the people at the Calliope Songwriters group in Pittsburgh helped us get the word out as well,” he said. “We slowly started building a bluegrass community.”
For years now, it has drawn a regular group of pickers in addition to those who come to listen to the music and order the Starlite’s popular pierogies.
“Bluegrass is a niche genre, but it’s a big community,” Scheinman said. “It shows up all over the place, whether it’s on a stage or in someone’s living room.”
In addition to the Starlite, bluegrass jams regularly take place in Pittsburgh’s Strip District and Lawrenceville neighborhoods, at the Saxonburg Inn in Harrison, Unity Brewing in Unity and the Red Barn Winery in Salem.
From the late 1970s to the mid-’1990s, it showed up just south of Pittsburgh at the Elizabeth Moose Lodge, where owner Rod McNeil regularly brought in big names.
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McNeil booked roughly 40 bands a year, and made such an impression that bluegrass guitarist Tim O’Brien wrote a song named after him with the lyrics, “I’ll never forget the way he made me feel/A big man with a bigger heart, named Rod McNeil.”
“Mac Martin was the first bluegrass band to play there, but for $2, you could see the Osborne Brothers, the Johnson Mountain Boys, major bluegrass bands,” said Ingram’s Bruce Mountjoy, 64, who hosts WYEP 91.3 FM’s Sunday-night bluegrass radio show.
Bill “Mac Martin” Colleran, who grew up in Pittsburgh and got his start playing bluegrass on the Greensburg radio station WHJB before playing regular gigs at Walsh’s Lounge in East Liberty, was Mackin’s uncle. Probably the best-known bluegrass musician to come from Western Pennsylvania, he died in 2022 at 96.
In Westmoreland County, bluegrass showed up at the Waterford Volunteer Fire Department in Ligonier Township, where elder members started an annual weekend festival as a fundraiser in 2003.
“We have 27 acres and a couple of stages. We have lots of parking and it’s an ideal situation,” said Chief Rob Beaufort. “ I didn’t grow up listening to bluegrass, but since it started, the whole company has kind of all gotten on the bandwagon and it’s a really nice weekend.”
The Ligonier Valley Bluegrass Festival, which is back for the first time since the covid pandemic, will take place June 28-30, featuring 11 regional bands. Tickets are available at LigTwpVFD1.org.
A bit farther east, the 16th annual Laurel Hill Bluegrass Festival, which is free, will be held Aug. 17-18, offering another opportunity to spend a weekend camping and listening to mountain music at Laurel Hill State Park.
Ice Jammin’
Scheinman said one place he truly feels the pull of Pittsburgh’s bluegrass community is the annual January Ice Jam festival.
This year, it celebrated its 26th anniversary at the Ramada by Wyndham in Beaver Falls, with the hotel filled to capacity with musicians and listeners. More than 20 local bands took the stage over the course of the weekend and seemingly every hotel room was crammed full of homegrown picking circles — an entire hotel full of miniature Starlite jams, including a lot of the same musicians.
Below, see local group Border Ride playing at Ice Jam 2023:
“I think the fact that we sell out the entire hotel, and have for many years, should be a demonstration of just how prevalent bluegrass music is in Western Pennsylvania,” said Apollo’s Bundy. “I know some people who come from Ohio and West Virginia, but the vast majority are from the greater Pittsburgh area.”
Jim Kuzemka, 42, of Indiana Township, has attended the Ice Jam for years, originally as guitarist and singer for former Pittsburgh band the Mon River Ramblers. These days, he’s switched to mandolin and plays with local bluegrass group the Sweaty Already String Band.
“We got drunk and we had instruments,” Kuzemka said when recalling the Mon River Ramblers’ origins. “My brother and one of his friends got really into (the jam-grass group) Yonder Mountain String Band, and pretty soon they got into Ricky Skaggs and a lot more traditional stuff that guys like Skaggs played at a million miles an hour — we wanted to do that.”
Over the years, they got their chance. From the Laurel Hill Bluegrass Festival in Somerset County to the once-annual “bluegrass day” at the Three Rivers Arts Festival to a weekend evening at any number of the region’s microbreweries, one doesn’t have to look far to find Pittsburgh-area venues hosting live bluegrass.
A shared tradition
There’s no mistaking that bluegrass gets passed down partly through families.
Mackin became immersed in bluegrass through his uncle and got his start playing in 1968 with a folk band whose members had moved from Ohio to Pittsburgh for work.
“We played at Mahoney’s (in Downtown Pittsburgh), and I was underage,” Mackin said with a laugh. “Not long after that I met my wife Wendy, we got married, started playing together and have been doing it ever since.”
Their son, Jack, now plays in the John & Wendy Mackin Band.
Below, watch the Mackins perform “Cold Rain and Snow” at a 2022 Starlite jam.
For those who didn’t grow up around the music, discovering it can be a little more happenstance.
In the late 1960s, a significant segment of the Grateful Dead’s jam-band audience got turned onto bluegrass by way of Jerry Garcia’s side gig playing banjo with Old & In the Way. The group also included two former members of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, guitarist Peter Rowan and fiddler Vassar Clements.
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For Pam Nutt, 43, of Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood, bluegrass was an element of her youth that she would rediscover after years of attending jam-band concerts.
“As far back as I can remember, there was music on both sides of my family,” Nutt said. “On my dad’s side in particular it was a lot of old country, bluegrass and especially fiddle music.”
Nutt’s great-grandfather, Robert Brown, was raised in Fayette County in the early 1900s, and learned to play fiddle. Nutt said she can remember attending picking circles in Brown’s kitchen.
“He’d stomp his foot so hard when he played, it was really a sight to see as a kid,” she said.
Nutt’s great-grandfather was a member of the Old Time Fiddlers of Western Pennsylvania, based in Dunbar. The group hosted music at Strickler’s Barn near Perryopolis, eventually outgrowing it and moving to the Fiddler’s Building at the Fayette County Fairgrounds where they still meet today.
Nutt’s father inherited Brown’s 1948 Martin D-28 acoustic guitar, a Pennsylvania-made instrument from the company’s most coveted era. For an idea of just how treasured such an instrument is, another ‘48 D-28 is currently listed for $25,000 at the Carter Vintage Guitars website.
Like a lot of children, Nutt didn’t exactly gravitate to the music her parents and grandparents enjoyed. She ended up rediscovering bluegrass music when her love of jam bands like the Grateful Dead eventually led her to Billy Strings.
“That was the biggest thing that turned me onto it, younger artists like Billy (Strings), Greensky Bluegrass, Sierra Farrell, who were making it more accessible for someone like me,” Nutt said. “I like all kinds of music but initially kind of shunned the music I grew up around. But now I really appreciate it, and it’s great to come back and learn more about it.”
Widening the circle
In addition to selling out arenas across much of the country, Billy Strings also has a tendency to divide opinions, particularly among older bluegrass fans, which is nothing new for the genre.
In the 1960s, one of the first progressive bluegrass groups, The Country Gentlemen, was criticized for recording bluegrass covers of songs by popular artists like Bob Dylan and The Beatles. Many bluegrass traditionalists take exception to elements of jam-band music creeping into the genre.
Billy Strings plays directly into their worst fears, covering pop tunes, sometimes using a MIDI synthesizer guitar and jamming songs out into the occasional 18-minute musical space odyssey.
Scheinman is part of that older generation — but he doesn’t understand what people are upset about.
“When I got the email saying he was playing two nights in Pittsburgh, I just couldn’t believe it,” Scheinman said. “He’s damn good. He’s a phenomenal picker.”
Bill Springer, who has organized and hosted bluegrass shows for years in northern Fayette County, agreed.
“I like that he’s introducing younger people to the music,” Springer said. “I like everything he does. It just widens the circle.”
Bundy said the divided opinions about Strings are an old storyline in bluegrass.
“You’re always going to have your purists, and that’s OK,” Bundy said. “But Bill Monroe was a revolutionary. He had a different sound than everyone else at the time. Earl Scruggs was a revolutionary. Sam Bush when he started New Grass Revival, Don Reno, Bill Keith, Jerry Douglas, Tony Rice, Vassar Clements, Bela Fleck — they were all revolutionary and they changed the way their instruments were played within the genre. And they also brought new fans with them.”
What is today considered traditional bluegrass was once a strange, new sound, Bundy said.
Nutt took her father to the first night of Billy Strings at the Petersen, a risky proposition given his traditional leanings, she thought.
It turned out great.
“I think it was the perfect night for my dad’s first Billy show, because the setlist had a lot of older tunes. After the first song, he whistled and hollered and I knew it would be good,” she said. “He turned to me and said, ‘Never in a million years would I think I’d come to a bluegrass show in an arena like this.’”
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Patrick Varine is a TribLive reporter covering Delmont, Export and Murrysville. He is a Western Pennsylvania native and joined the Trib in 2010 after working as a reporter and editor with the former Dover Post Co. in Delaware. He can be reached at pvarine@triblive.com.