Buzz Busby: Father of Washington Bluegrass, by Kip Lornell and Tom Mindte
As the title suggests, Buzz Busby was a local hero. Bill Monroe was the Father of Bluegrass, while Busby was the acolyte who popularized a new rural genre in that northernmost Southern city, Washington D.C. The mandolin-playing Busby came to D.C. in the ‘50s from bayou Louisiana; he probably called his music “hillbilly,” but as the country industry sorted itself out, he was tagged as bluegrass.
Tom Mindte grew up in D.C., became a member of Busby’s band in latter years, and had access to hours of cassette monologues in which the mandolinist made sense of his life. Kip Lornell is an ethnomusicologist who puts the story in context. Busby was self-destructive, irascible but gregarious, a talented player who recorded and crossed paths with Jack Clement and other names from American music history. Lornell and Mindte tell his story well.
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