I was so much older then ...

When I was 16, bluegrass was storming through D.C. If you were a hippie, it was the local music. Zeitgeist. Like being a punk in New York in the late '70s, or a folkie in Boston in the mid-'60s. You didn't really have a choice if you wanted to be hip to what was going on. This was 1972, and right on the heels of the most explosively inventive period for one popular genre -- rock and roll -- bluegrass was opening up to its own new worlds of sound.

As I remember it, a single pivot encouraged, validated and through the force of his impeccable cred allowed the full breadth of this merging of rock, jazz, folk and blues into bluegrass. Earl Scruggs. The crucible of the civil rights movement brought Scruggs in close touch with people like Dylan, the Byrds and Mahalia Jackson. It opened his ears, too. Scruggs got a lot of flack as the first outspoken champion of civil rights in a bluegrass world deeply embedded in redneck tradition. It stands to reason that the mutual respect that arises under that kind of pressure would spread from politics and morals to the music itself, and that a spirit of inclusion would, too.

By 1972, bluegrass festivals were wild and rangy things, with Sam Bush and the New Grass Revival going atonal, David Grisman and John Herald going Eastern European, John Hartford going nutty, and Earl Scruggs and the Dillards going fully electric. I remember the afternoon when Doc Watson persuaded a shy Vassar Clements to duet with him on hardcore mountain blues songs. Vassar shook his head no for a good two minutes of cajoling before Doc got his way. As he crossed the stage to join Doc, Vassar bent down and whispered something to him. Doc burst out laughing, and related to the audience: "Vassar says he's never played pure blues before." When it was over, you'd have thought Vassar was a sideman for Muddy Waters.

The Scruggs version of You Ain't Goin' Nowhere was our anthem. Here's a video that includes Scruggs playing it with the Byrds, from whom he learned it. This was the version of the Byrds that included Clarence White, who had established his virtuosic legend first as a guitarist with the bluegrass Kentucky Colonels:

It was weird when I returned to bluegrass ten years later to learn that the young upstart Ricky Skaggs and other traditionalists had virtually done away with the blending of genres and forms. Thirty years younger than Scruggs, twenty years younger than Dylan, Skaggs should have known better. But he got his way. Bluegrass festivals in the '80s were whitewashed of Dylan and blues, and barely supported the visions of Grisman and Bush and Hartford. Under the Skaggs rule there was a trust in pure virtuosity -- perfect harmonies and speedy instrumental work -- which in any music limits the range of expression. Some things of beauty have everything to do with what is not played. Monk and Miles Davis and the Band were particularly fine at expressing silence and depth without showing off their chops.

I missed the free-for-all of early '70s bluegrass. In high school, we spent Friday nights at the Childe Harold club in D.C. with the raveup blues of Liz Meyer. That was bluegrass. And returning the next night, Saturdays were when Emmylou Harris stilled us with dreary, soulful Hank Williams songs, one after another after another. That was bluegrass, too.

Warren Hellman's Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival has always had that '70s feel. When Patti Smith and Dry Branch Fire Squad can share the same festival, magic can happen. For the traditionalists, here's some Dry Branch:

A couple of years ago, Doc Watson and Earl Scruggs were onstage at Hardly Strictly with Ricky Skaggs. Earl's son Gary emceed. He said something like this: "I want to introduce my father Earl, who's 85, and Doc Watson, who's 86, and Ricky Skaggs, the oldest one of the bunch."