Burugurasu Ongaku [Bluegrass Music]

Toyohashi, Japan: Traditional Song Society, Aichi University, 1967. First Edition. Octavo (21cm); jade green wrappers with French flaps, with titles printed in black on spine and front cover; 164pp; illus. Text is in Japanese. A few faint creases to extremities, with light fading to spine; Near Fine. Uncommon, historic work by Mitsui, a professor of English at Kanazawa Univeristy in Japan, and his country's foremost scholar on country music. In his bibliographical survey of bluegrass material, Scott Hambly notes the existence of three book-length historical surveys of the genre: Mitsui's Burugurasu Ongaku (1967), Steven D. Price's Old as the Hills: The Story of Bluegrass Music (1975), and Bluegrass by Bob Artis (1975) [cf. JEMFQ 16, no.59 (Fall 1980), pp.118-120]. While a number of shorter articles on the genre had been publisher earlier, Mitsui's work is widely considered the first full-length scholarly study on Bluegrass, illustrated with black and white photographs of Bill Monroe, Rusty York, Tex Ritter, and The Louvin Brothers, et al. Extensively researched by Mitsui, and long unavailable to American audiences. Rare; we find no copies in the trade (2013), with OCLC noting 2 copies in American institutions (Indiana University and UNC Chapel Hill), 2 others in Japan.