Participation Type
Performance
Session Title
Session 3.16 Music
Presentation #1 Title
Documentary Film Screening: “Banjo Romantika”
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Banjo Romantika is a project by director Shara Lange and ethnomusicologist Lee Bidgood, drawing on Bidgood’s decade-long ethnographic fieldwork. The feature length (67 min) film presents an intimate, observational portrait of people making bluegrass music in the Czech Republic - shedding light on the global manifestations of a musical form with roots in Appalachia and other rural American locales. Czechs first heard bluegrass when the Armed Forces Network broadcast American music for soldiers in Germany in the 1950s. The film provides historical context for even earlier Czech engagement with American culture, as well as illustrating the domestication of bluegrass and the banjo through the communist period and after the 1989 “velvet revolution." The film’s survey of Czech bluegrass-related scenes includes concert footage of groups like Druhá Tráva and Reliéf, interviews with banjo innovator Marko Čermák and luthier Zdeněk Roh, as well as informal pub jams and a visit to a Czech bluegrass festival. The recurring framing device, a concert featuring musicians from Tennessee performing Czech bluegrass songs, leads viewers to in-between spaces in which regional and musical differences are recast as possibilities, not limitations. The sounds and stories of this film allow us to consider where music belongs and how it can connect us in ways that we might not expect.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Lee Bidgood is a musician and scholar working on American string band music, historically-informed performance practice, improvisation, sustainability, and faith. A faculty member in the Department of Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University, he also teaches courses in Bluegrass, Old Time and Country Music Studies.
Documentary Film Screening: “Banjo Romantika”
Banjo Romantika is a project by director Shara Lange and ethnomusicologist Lee Bidgood, drawing on Bidgood’s decade-long ethnographic fieldwork. The feature length (67 min) film presents an intimate, observational portrait of people making bluegrass music in the Czech Republic - shedding light on the global manifestations of a musical form with roots in Appalachia and other rural American locales. Czechs first heard bluegrass when the Armed Forces Network broadcast American music for soldiers in Germany in the 1950s. The film provides historical context for even earlier Czech engagement with American culture, as well as illustrating the domestication of bluegrass and the banjo through the communist period and after the 1989 “velvet revolution." The film’s survey of Czech bluegrass-related scenes includes concert footage of groups like Druhá Tráva and Reliéf, interviews with banjo innovator Marko Čermák and luthier Zdeněk Roh, as well as informal pub jams and a visit to a Czech bluegrass festival. The recurring framing device, a concert featuring musicians from Tennessee performing Czech bluegrass songs, leads viewers to in-between spaces in which regional and musical differences are recast as possibilities, not limitations. The sounds and stories of this film allow us to consider where music belongs and how it can connect us in ways that we might not expect.
