From The Sunny Side of Appalachia, Bluegrass from the Grassroots
by Betty Dotson-Lewis (B. L. Dotson-Lewis)


My Near Brush with Bluegrass
by B. L. Dotson-Lewis

I can’t remember when bluegrass music was not a part of my life. This acoustic music came with living in the Appalachian Mountains, part of our roots the way I understand it, but I was never confronted head on with this music until my father took it up.

My family moved west while I was still in high school and it didn't seem a big deal that I would stay behind with my sister and finish school in West Virginia. I was around 15. Like most teenagers I was heavy into listening to popular rock n roll.

When my father moved from West Virginia to the west coast he refused to give up his citizenship to Appalachia. His roots were in Buchanan County, Virginia, Jim Fork and later, Nicholas County, West Virginia. I have heard my father say that he wasn't looking for a western culture, he loved Appalachia. What the west could provide for him was taller mountains, bigger game and a closer relationship with nature. My father was born and raised in Southwest Virginia and his love for everything Appalachian, including mountain music, especially bluegrass never left his veins.

The way I see it, this romantic attachment to our unique culture makes my father totally responsible for my near brush with bluegrass.

You see, I was visiting my parents the summer between my senior year in high school and going off to Berea College. There, I would engage in a life of studying fine arts, foreign languages, and my entertainment would be symphonic concerts on the greens of a renowned institution of higher learning. I was seeking a liberal arts college degree. My father’s formal education went up to the 8th grade but he had common sense and a flare for writing.

Early on that summer shortly after my arrival at my western home, my father traded one of his hunting dogs for an old fiddle. He decided to take up playing bluegrass. The fiddle was his instrument of choice. No, he didn't read music.

The fiddle came in an old worn-out, banged up black case. The latch was broken on the case so a piece of hay baling twine was wound around and . . . (read moe in my book)