There has been a great conversation starting up between Ted Lehmann and some others on social media in bluegrass music as well as how to involve a more diverse and younger set of people in this musical genre that many of us love. See Ted’s guest blogger Dustin Ogden’s recent piece on these issues, including a link to an exciting use of bluegrass sampling by rap artists. I recently posted a long post about Twitter on the Google group resoguit-l, a great group of resonator guitar (Dobro) players, luthiers, and such. As a way of connecting more directly to the conversation of Ted, Dustin, et al., I’m reposting that piece here, slightly revised:
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I’ve been trying to establish a greater presence on Twitter for the resonator guitar by tweeting and retweeting on that and related topics at http://www.twitter.com/DobroSwamp. I suspect that resoguit-l members run the gamut from active users of Twitter to those who have no idea what Twitter is. Most are probably in between, thinking Twitter just sounds like a dumb fad and isn’t this post pretty off-topic? I’m writing to encourage the latter folks, especially, to check out Twitter, because it matters for folks interested in the resonator guitar and in bluegrass more generally. I would love to have lots of folks much more knowledgeable than me telling folks on Twitter about this great instrument.
Twitter is a “microblogging” service that allows anybody to post short messages and to connect to other members (think Facebook friends, only for short messages of text). But it’s really more than that. It is a giant index of what well-wired folks are thinking about at any point in time. You don’t have to sign up for Twitter to be able to see what people are thinking. And sometimes they’re thinking and sharing information about the dobro.
Here are some reasons why I think Twitter matters, both in a general sense and for the dobro:–You can use Twitter to learn about stuff and to make connections with others who are interested in the same things that you are.
- You can publicize yourself. For example, see
http://twitter.com/stringdusters - It is quicker than adding to a blog or changing a website.
- There is free stuff to be had. Bands, venues, and publishers wanting to add to their Twitter readers often give away tickets, cd’s, free downloads, and stuff.
- You can reach a young audience. Clearly educational venues like http://www.etsu.edu/das/bluegrass/ , Joe Val Kids’ Academy http://www.bbu.org/BAWebsite/JVKA.html, and http://www.berklee.edu/focused/roots/ mean that bluegrass is alive and kicking with the young. But I imagine that most of us know or are married to someone who sees bluegrass as fringe music for weird old
people. I’d like to make bluegrass more accessible to everybody and more widely appreciated. Twitter an help do this. - You might just change a life: Twitter might be how the next Rob Ickes connects with a mentor. Maybe she’s growing up in South Dakota and wondering how to find out where the other dobro players are within
a hundred mile radius. And she’s on Twitter. - You can easily keep in touch with people at an event if everybody agrees to post messages with the same hashtag, like, say, #ibma2011. (A hashtag is a way of dropping metadata directly into a Twitter message. You type the hashtag into Twitter’s search function and you can see everybody’s posts on that topic.)
Despite these good motivations to get on Twitter, there are certain challenges one encounters upon trying to look up the word “dobro” on Twitter. It’s a common word in a couple of foreign languages, so simply searching for “dobro” brings up a lot of unrelated stuff. Best to search for a combination of terms like “bluegrass dobro” or “dobro player.” And “resonator guitar” is too long a phrase to be used much in a short medium such as Twitter. I’m advising folks to include the hashtag #resoguit in the text of posts that are dobro-related. I hope to see many of you on Twitter soon. If you have a reason to have a website, you have a reason to have a Twitter stream.
Here are some interesting folks who have Twitter accounts already:
- Luthier Abraham Wechter http://twitter.com/AbrahamWechter
- The Ryman Auditorum http://twitter.com/TheRyman
- Rounder Records http://twitter.com/rounderrecords
- The Bluegrass Blog http://twitter.com/Bluegrass_Blog
- Alison Krauss http://twitter.com/AlisonKrauss
If you’ve read this far and want to know more about Twitter, you can see my 2009 article on Twitter in _Environment_ magazine:
http://www.environmentmagazine.org/Archives/Back%20Issues/September-O… or http://tr.im/envirotweet . Though the article is about environmental stuff, much of the Twitter information still applies. Apologies for a couple out-of date links in the environment piece–it’s a static publication. And thanks for hanging in through this long post.
