The last trains passed through Salem, Indiana in 2008. This paper examines the enlistment of noise in the production of local railroad memory. I draw on participant-observation at the Depot, a public museum that invites visitors to imagine the heyday of Indiana’s Monon Railroad. The artifacts on display, from mail hooks to dining car dinner ware, testify to a time when passenger trains stopped along a corridor of nearby farm communities. I argue that a key to the Depot is its appeals to the ear. In this presentation, I turn to an elder volunteer named Jim Smoak as a primary interlocutor and expert practitioner of “train sound.” During the 1950s, Smoak was among a small handful of three-finger banjo stylists to make it in Nashville. At 91, now living in Indiana, he splits his music time with volunteer shifts at the Depot. I approach the social world of the Depot through Smoak, describing multiple activities that elicit locomotive acoustics in the space of the museum. These curatorial gestures range from the performance of loco-motivic bluegrass music to the demonstration of a pneumatic train whistle. Interpreting acoustic practices as a channel of local critique, I consider the sound culture of the Depot alongside authorized social analyses of the railroad soundscape (Leo Marx, Michel DeCerteau, R. Murray Schafer). Additionally, I offer the Depot case as a way to rethink the connection of soundscape to musicality, granting popular traditions of machine mimicry greater purchase with respect to one of ethnomusicology’s core theories: acoustemology.

This paper examines the gathering spaces of string band music as sites where questions of legitimacy, sustainability, and cultural authority are negotiated amid shifting practices of formality and institutional affiliation. As traditional American folk musics increasingly intersect with institutional frameworks, particularly within higher education, new modes of convening have emerged alongside longstanding practices such as fiddlers’ conventions, jam sessions, and regional and national festivals. I analyze multiple institutionalized gatherings across this spectrum, from large, industry-centered bluegrass events such as IBMA to subgroups within existing academic conferences, as well as independently organized meetings including the String Band Summit and the Black Banjo Gathering. These meeting spaces provide a lens through which to analyze the evolving relationship between traditional music communities and the academic and professional institutions that both support and study them.

Through ethnographic inquiry and my ongoing practices of being-in-community as both scholar and participant, I examine how these spaces balance accessibility with tradition, expansion with preservation, and institutional support with grassroots values. While conferences and summits may provide resources and scholarly legitimacy, they also introduce hierarchical structures that can challenge the participatory and intergenerational dynamics central to string band practice. This work builds on and contributes to an ongoing body of scholarship on old-time, bluegrass, and related string band traditions that has reflexively examined the bidirectional impacts of institutionalization on community-based music making.

This paper argues that stylistic fusion in Béla Fleck’s banjo practice operates not primarily through genre hybridization or stylistic borrowing, but through the renegotiation of instrumental roles, technical practices, and performance authority across musical contexts. Through comparative analysis of two contrasting projects—Perpetual Motion (2001), which adapts Western art music repertoire for banjo-centered ensembles, and Thrown Down Your Heart (2009), a documentary project documenting Fleck’s collaborations with West African musicians—the paper examines how fusion is enacted through shifting configurations of leadership, learning, and ensemble interaction. In Perpetual Motion, Fleck’s arrangements of works by composers including Bach, Beethoven, Liszt, and Debussy involve the development of new banjo techniques and ensemble orchestrations that substitute bluegrass instruments for classical ones, resituating Western art music within an American vernacular performance framework while maintaining the banjo’s central musical authority. In contrast, Thrown Down Your Heart positions Fleck as a participant-observer within local musical systems, where authority and decision-making are frequently ceded to collaborating musicians, reshaping both musical outcomes and modes of transmission. By foregrounding sonic structure, instrumental technique, and interactional dynamics, this paper demonstrates how Fleck’s fusion practices reconstitute the banjo from a conventionally leading bluegrass instrument into a flexible, context-responsive musical agent. More broadly, the paper proposes an ethnomusicological approach to fusion that emphasizes performance roles and instrumental identity as socially negotiated processes rather than stable genre categories.

Since the mid-19th century, Japan and the United States have participated in political and cultural exchanges that have influenced Japanese identity. Americana in Japan is a useful means of analyzing Japan’s relationship with the United States and U.S. culture. I argue that Bluegrass music, which has been performed in Japan since the mid 1940s, as a kind of americana offers a particular articulation of imagined class-based, regionalized, and racialized articulations of U.S.-ness. These imagined articulations of U.S.-ness, both temporally contingent and enmeshed in broader cosmopolitan dynamics. By focusing on the imagination, I attend to the complex processes through which Japanese musicians and enthusiasts constitute their identities. To do so, I identify expressions of personal significance, communal meanings, and anxieties connected to participating in these music cultures. In this paper, I focus on divergent meanings tied to imaginaries cultivated within bluegrass music as a type of americana by highlighting periods of engagement that correlate with heightened geopolitical encounters between Japan and the United States, such as the Japanese anti-Vietnam war protests and accompanying Folk Boom in the 1960s-70s. I suggest that the history of bluegrass is also a Japanese history, furthering an ongoing conversation that repositions bluegrass as a global music. In doing so, I continue conversations within ethnomusicology that examine Japanese consumption and performance of transnational cultural forms while pushing back on overly particularizing discourses of Japanese cultural uniqueness.