Image and Stereotype: Bluegrass Sound Tracks

Abstract

sound of bluegrass music, especially the five-string banjo, is heard frequently in contemporary audio-visual media. On television it ripples along behind advertisements or in situation comedies. In movies it accompanies chases, slapstick comedy routines, country themes, or some combination of these. use of a certain kind of music to accompany a certain range of visual images indicates that it is one of the sound track conventions of the film and video industries. Historical descriptions of bluegrass music note that the spread and success of bluegrass music as a popular genre resulted, in part, from its popularity in the visual media.' Sound tracks from successful movies and television shows often sell well as records. There have been three such hits with bluegrass music in the past two decades: The Ballad of Jed Clampett from television's Beverly Hillbillies (1962), Foggy Mountain Breakdown from Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and Dueling Banjos from Deliverance (1972). These three recordings are the best-selling records in the history of bluegrass. success of each reinforced and expanded the use of such music as a dramatic convention in visual media, giving added cultural meaning to the music. development of this convention, with its various connotations, began in the early 1960s. In the summer of 1961 Joe Anderson, a film director in the department of photography at Ohio State University in Columbus, put together a short movie consisting of time-lapse shots taken at Ohio State football games.2 In the time-lapse technique a movie camera is run at a slow speed so that fewer frames per second are exposed. When the film is projected at standard speed, the visual action appears rapid but jerky. Time has been compressed, motion fragmented. technique is familiar to most of us from classroom biology films, which show how seeds sprout and buds flower. During the early days of silent film, movies were shot at a smaller number of frames per second, and these, when played back on modern projectors, give a time-lapse effect to human motion that often seems strange, even funny.