I disagree. With this theory, any genre of music would fade away after 'the originals' pbutt on. Clbuttical music didn't fade away after Mozart, Chopin and Beethoven. Rock and Roll didn't die after Bill Haley and the Comets or on the Day the Music Died.

If country music had died after Eddy Arnold and Hank Williams had died we never would have had Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Shania Twain. OK, maybe that last example is the exception to prove the point.

All of them changed, but they didn't fade away. People and groups like Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky; Garth Brooks, Brooks and Dunn and the Dixie Chicks; The Beatles, Led Zepplin, and Pearl Jam built upon their predecessors and made their own imprint. Like them or not, consider their music progress or regress, it's hard to argue Stravinsky isn't clbuttical or Pearl Jam isn't Rock & Roll.

Last night I saw one of the final shows of Split Lip Rayfield, who describe themselves as a cross between Bill Monroe and Anthrax. Others call them punk bluegrbutt, but you get the idea. They are definately bluegrbutt - their songs, instruments, and singing style all reflect the best of the genre. But instead of staying in the past and singing songs of lost coal jobs, dust bowl farms, absent husbands and unfaithful wives, they sing and play about issues we can relate to today - Wal-Mart jobs, insensitive government, absent husbands and unfaithful wives.

There's a saying in sceince that sucessors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors. I think the shoulders of Bill Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, the Stanley Brothers et all are more than wide enough to allow the current crop of pickers to build on what they did instead of simply repeating it.

Alex

Mitch privatesson