Bluegrass

Quite when the concept of coolness became a thing is uncertain, even to etymologists. As early as 1884, an academic paper noted the expression ‘Dat’s cool!’ among African-Americans. But it’s about 100 years since ‘cool’ entered the lexicon as an unambiguous description of something to aspire to (via jazz, inevitably), and it’s still a crucial concept in the world of pop: it’s being cool that meant the Strokes could attract 50,000 or so people to east London, even though most of those present were at primary school when the band released their two first two albums, which are the two on which their reputation rests, and songs from which comprised nearly half their set.

The banjo was present at the creation of jazz but, like the clarinet and the fiddle, it fell from favor, and for similar reasons. The saxophone and the electric guitar were easier to play, more expressive and much, much louder. The banjo was on the way out even as it was on the way in — in the Hot Five recordings of December 1927 that instituted the jazz solo as we know it, Johnny St Cyr played both banjo and guitar — but the banjo had somewhere else to go. The fleet-fingered took their four-and fivestringers to the hills — the Appalachians, for instance. There, the banjo thrived with those other refugees from early jazz, the fiddle and the steel-strung guitar. Metropolitan contempt caught up with it in the Seventies.