Bluegrass revival: Music store owners notice more people discovering bluegrass

By Jenna Mink, The Daily News, Bowling Green, Ky.
Feb. 23--
Steve Jones is no stranger to string instruments. But he recently decided to tackle a new one.
"The mandolin, on a personal level, that is my goal this year," he said.
Jones has worked at Kentucky Music Co. on Russellville Road for 14 years and he recently purchased his first mandolin. In fact, Jones and others have noticed a piqued interest in bluegrass instruments over the past few years.
"In the last four or five years, there's been more of a demand for them," Jones said. "So, obviously we've upped our inventory."
While bluegrass instruments make up about 15 percent of overall sales, the shop carries a variety of those instruments, from banjos and resonators to fiddles and mandolins.
Over the past few years, bluegrass has crept back into mainstream music with many jam bands incorporating rural sounds in their songs and acoustic bands, such as Nickel Creek and Alison Krauss and Union Station, gaining popularity.
Locally, the bluegrass genre has been revived by the International Newgrass Festival -- a three-day concert event held in Oakland, which attracted about 1,000 people last summer and features bluegrass and newgrass bands. Newgrass is a nontraditional form of bluegrass music founded by the New Grass Revival, whose surviving band members performed at last year's festival and are scheduled to play this year, too.
Caleb Rowe, a sales associate at Musician's Pro on Campbell Lane, helped operate sound equipment at the Newgrass Festival and developed his own interest in bluegrass music as a result.
"I think that I have seen an increased trend and it may be because of my personal increased interest in it recently," he said.
Rowe is learning to play the banjo and... (Read on)