Pickin' at the Heartstrings: A Rhetorical Analysis of Love and Bluegrass Music (2012)

Undergraduate: William Johnson

Faculty Advisor: Jordynn Jack
Department: Business Administration

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Bluegrass, as a genre, is a purely American invention. Born from the convergence of Celtic Folk music with the Blues, Bluegrass is prototypically structured around a string band with emphasis on musical improvisation, contrasting instrumental textures, and multipart vocal harmony. All technical jargon and organizational structure aside, subject matter in the early days of bluegrass stemmed from the stimuli of rural life. Today, bluegrass music features a broader group of musicians and a broader group of thematic explorations. There is, however, a singular theme that has remained a constant subject of exploration over the course of the genre: love. I contend that bluegrass provides a regional definition of love through both lyrical and musical means, and the following paper discusses and evaluates the effective rhetoric of love through analysis of bluegrass music, its history, and origins.