great post...I fully agree...that's my point. Bluegrass developed in accordance with all these different styles mixed together. African musical traditions...jug bands, instruments and the styling of songs were mimicked by whites....the mixing of other European styles creates in turn created this very unique genre.
Blacks at the time infused elements of blues which was vital in shaping bluegrass as a genre along with introducing the banjo. The first whites to play banjo were mimicking the styles and songs of the black slaves they watched.
You are totally right about hardships people faced...it wasn't very easy being a poor white either. Sharecropping exploited everyone, regardless of race...along with the various hardships of immigrants.
For me I view old time music as working class music. The struggles of living in Appachia, working coal mines, sharecropping, poverty, dust bowls, heading west, disease, starvation, slavery...etc etc.....are all interwined with old time music.
The best part is just how uniquely American it is.
This PBS special on the banjo is amazing..must watch
A great link on the history.
http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/appalach.htm
"
ONE of the greatest influences on Appalachian music, as well as many popular American music styles, was that of the African-American. The slaves brought a distinct tradition of group singing of community songs of work and worship, usually lined out by one person with a call and response action from a group. A joyous celebration of life and free sexuality was coupled with improvisation as lyrics were constantly updated and changed to keep up the groups' interest. The percussion of the African music began to change the rhythms of Appalachian singing and dancing. The introduction of the banjo to the Southern Mountains after the Civil War in the 1860s further hastened this process. Originally from Arabia, and brought to western Africa by the spread of Islam, the banjo then ended up in America. Mostly denigrated as a 'slave instrument' until the popularity of the Minstrel Show, starting in the 1840s, the banjo syncopation or 'bom-diddle-diddy' produced a different clog-dance and song rhythm by the turn of the century.
Many of the African-American spirituals were discovered by mainstream America, particularly with the collection
Slave Songs from the Southern United States published in 1867 and popularized by a small choir of black students from Fisk University in Nashville. With emancipation, black music began to move outside the South. By the 1920s a whole body of parlour songs known as 'race music' became popular. Many Appalachian songs sung today that allude to 'children' in the fields or 'mother' have been changed from 'pickaninnies' or 'Mammys'"