The tone is set for the essays to follow by Phil Obermiller’s opening article: “Appalachian Migration: Setting the Musical Stage for Southwestern Ohio.” This theme continues to the next-to-the-last contribution: “Bluegrass Music and Urban Appalachian Identity” by Nathan McGee. "My family left Jackson County, Kentucky, in the late 1950s to find work in Ohio. The sounds and songs from home naturally tagged along with us. Riding around in Dad’s truck there as a kid, the first music I remember hearing was the Osborne Brothers and Flatt and Scruggs on WPFB. Industrial Strength Bluegrass brings to life how bluegrass developed in the Cincinnati/Dayton region. I love the vivid stories of how the genre came of age and all the fascinating characters who catapulted it onto the world’s stage."--Dan Hays. “The barroom bluegrass of Southwest Ohio spawned by Appalachian transplants who had taken the 'trail of the bologna rinds' was just as good and often more exciting than the bluegrass of the traveling professionals who first developed the music. When the two met here, it split the bluegrass atom."--Ron Thomason. Editor Fred Bartenstein teaches music at the University of Dayton and editor Curtis W. Ellison is professor emeritus of history and American studies at Miami University of Ohio.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. 220 pages with an Index, Foreword by Neil V. Rosenberg, appendices, maps, and photos. Trade paperback.