Collegiate Bluegrass Programs in Colorado and Tennessee Working Together to Help North Carolina Storm Victims

In many places in the U.S., at most small universities, depending on the location, a full-fledged bluegrass program can be hard to sustain. But, that is exactly what has happened at Colorado College, located near Colorado Springs, Colorado. 

A private university founded in 1874; Colorado College was created when the so-called “Wild West” period was still in full tilt. To put it into perspective, this college was formed out of whole cloth two years before General Custer met his fate against the Lakota Sioux Tribe 560 miles north in Montana, and before Billy The Kid had killed his first man in Arizona. The school was also founded one year before Bat Masterson would become the Assistant City Marshall of Dodge City, when Wild Bill Hickock would be shot dead in the Dakota Territory, and seven years before the shootout at The OK Corral happened in Tombstone. 

The key to all of this civilized building of higher education institutions, of course, was the completion of the First Continental Railroad in 1869, which brought proper civilians and Civic Clubs and other attempts at a dignified life to a still-wild and crazy part of the world as the Original Tribes unsuccessfully tried to hold their ground.     

Fast forward a quick 71 years into the future and there is Bill Monroe walking onto the stage of the Grand Ole Opry in 1945 to perform in front of some high-tech ‘lectrical listening sticks known as radio microphones so that his new form of music is heard throughout a large swath of the mainland of the U.S. 

Just as the 1700s and the 1800s saw the nation’s expansion to the West, bluegrass music also made its way west two decades after the genre solidified into a new art form. Bluegrass music took root in Colorado in the 1960s and ‘70s where big, wide open spaces and a freer mindset led to a more loose and experimental side of Monroe and Scruggs’ music. 

That phenomena is the focus of the current Colorado College Bluegrass Program that was featured in Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine’s Bluegrass Goes To College edition in 2022. Nowadays, the program is still run by its founder, bluegrass musician and academic Keith Reed.

The latest cool news is that there was an outreach that happened that has resulted in the Colorado College Bluegrass Program collaborating with the famed East Tennessee State University (ETSU) and its Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Roots Music Program located 1,400 miles away in Johnson City, Tennessee.

The goal of the partnership between these two music schools is to create an EP recording of original tunes that will be intentionally made to benefit the folks in Western North Carolina, East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia who experienced the devastation of Hurricane Helene in September of 2024. 

Keith Reed’s story starts in Ireland where his grandparents were born. After they made the trek across the pond to America, the family settled in New York and Pennsylvania. When Reed’s dad was younger, however, he moved his family out west to Oregon, which put Reed west of the Mississippi River. 

Reed began to play the guitar as a kid but by the time he was ten, after hearing his dad’s Flatt and Scruggs records, he fell in love with the banjo. By the time he had reached high school, Reed also befriended some new friends who had moved to Oregon from North Carolina and West Virginia and their fathers had bluegrass record collections that were wide and deep.

“My friend’s dads were record collectors and they had sides by the Stanley Brothers and every other band you can think of, meaning they had moved out west and brought their Appalachian culture with them in the form of vinyl albums,” said Reed. “We all became friends and played music all of the time together, and that is when I really began to work hard on playing the banjo. Then, when I was a little older, I went to school at South Plains College the same year that Mike Bub and Stuart Duncan were there, and Stuart helped me tremendously with the banjo. He lived right across the hall and he would come to my dorm room and I would record him when he would show me all kinds of stuff. Mike Bub was also a great banjo player then as well, and that helped him because when he played bluegrass bass, he knew all of the changes in the banjo tunes. This was before Alan Munde began to teach there.”  

Reed then moved to Boise, Idaho, where he got a degree in classical guitar. Though a far different line of study than bluegrass, Reed learned a lot about music theory which helped him play both styles of music. 

Then, for many years, Reed worked in the semiconductor industry as an R&D technician before his company shut down after the 9/11 attacks, so then he came back to the bluegrass world and the began to record and tour with the group Open Road. He began to teach bluegrass at Colorado College in 2004 and the students so loved his class that a new department was formed. 

“There are only about 2,000 kids that go to Colorado College and I became the student’s lifeline when it came to bluegrass music,” said Reed. “I play the guitar, mandolin, and banjo and I can show them what to do on the bass, and I can use the mandolin to teach kids who are used to playing classic violin how to play the melody. Then, I will bring someone like bluegrass musician Josh Goforth out here to show them how to bow the fiddle, purposely bringing in someone from Asheville or another Appalachian community. I have 50 students in three classes. We study from the Carter Family on up to the modern bluegrass of today.”

After Hurricane Helene blew up the mountains, the idea was hatched to collaborate with ETSU.   “Being out west, we know that we are outsiders in the bluegrass world and that is why I wanted to do a project with the ETSU Bluegrass program faculty and students there,” said Reed. “I thought it would be good to make an EP featuring both schools and get it published and raise some awareness about it and hopefully raise some money for the storm victims. And, it would be cool for our students to meet musicians from another part of the country where there is a banjo player behind almost every tree, yet it would work because they still have the same bluegrass music in common.”

The Colorado College–ETSU EP collaboration, as of press time, will consist of a song by the CC students along with an original song by mandolin great Mike Compton and yet another original song by Tim Stafford and Thomm Jutz. The goal is to record a tune using students from both schools as well.

Lee Bidgood is a Professor and the Graduate Coordinator for the ETSU Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Roots Music Program, which is a part of the Department of Appalachian Studies. He is also a long-time bluegrass musician.  “When Keith approached me with this collaboration, we both brainstormed on it a little bit and I thought it would be a good idea for our students to do something together,” said Bidgood. “And, I’m eager for our students to engage with them because not only can they learn a lot from the music of our region, but there is definitely a lot of attention here by our students for what is going on with their music out west, including the jamgrass scene and everything else that emerged there. So, it is an exciting two-way street for all of the students.”

One aspect that Bidgood is strong about concerning this inter-school collaboration, considering he is a history buff, is to educate folks about the true tales of disasters in the Appalachian Chain region.  “Our Appalachian Studies graduate program can provide some context for them when it comes to this EP by thinking about Appalachia and the disasters that have happened here and the demographics of the folks that live here,” said Bidgood. “Then, there is the musical community that lives here to learn about. There are many physical locations to learn about here that are so important to many of the key legacies connected to the music and the local lore. This music that we love is wrapped up in past disasters and this disaster as well.”

Bidgood is thrilled that original music about the storm will be on this EP when it is released later in the year.  “For instance, for this project, Mike Compton wrote a really cool tune about what happened on the Nolichucky River in and near Erwin, Tennessee, when Hurricane Helene hit last November,” said Bidgood. “With Erwin being just 15 miles from us here in Johnson City, it was the closest disaster zone to us. The flooding and destruction there was just unfathomable. Mike Compton has been working on the song with Roy Andrade and Kalia Yeagle, and I love it because the tune is more than telling the story, because words are not enough to describe what happened. 

“Then, we have a song by the great songwriter Tim Stafford, who is our program’s Artist In Residence,” continues Bidgood. “Tim and the equally talented Thomm Jutz wrote a song for the project that is so simple yet so powerful about a family and their relationship amid the horror of the disaster going on around them. The song puts you inside the same compressed timeline as the families dealt with as the storm and the floods came upon them so fast. Tim even wove in the true and harrowing events that happened in that hospital in Erwin that day, when the staff had to carry every patient up some maintenance stairs to the roof as they were surrounded by the rising water.”