A former librarian helps define bluegrass with the comprehensive Bluegrass Discography

Fred Bartenstein knows Charley Pennell's massive database, Bluegrass Discography, will likely never reach the mainstream.

"It's more of a needle in a haystack than a flashing neon sign in Times Square," explains Bartenstein, a bluegrass musician, scholar, author and broadcaster. Pennell's project, launched in 1996, aspires to list every known bluegrass music recording in existence, from the mid-1930s to the present day. It's not the flashiest mission, but as the music continues to sprawl between physical and digital formats, it is perhaps more crucial than ever in firming up the foundation of what bluegrass is and what it can be.

"One of the big problems I have is that the universe of all these kinds of music is just getting so huge," Pennell explains. "You really can't keep track of all the recordings that people are just personally publishing and selling at their shows or offering from some website."

But he's trying: Pennell, who retired as the principal cataloger for metadata for N.C. State Libraries in May, received a distinguished achievement award for his work from the International Bluegrass Music Association at its first World of Bluegrass conference in Raleigh in 2013. As of last week, as he sorted columns on the desktop computer in his home studio, he had described 24,629 full recordings, altogether comprising 186,276 songs. Every few days, those numbers inch higher.

Talk to Pennell, and you'll soon find that much of the information in his database is duplicated in his head. A conversation takes the form of search requests. He retrieves the label information, a summary of the band's makeup, variations on the lineup and potential reasons why the personnel changed. He's a storyteller, too, offering the context that makes the music mean something more than sound. Pennell's discography enables such storytelling to interface with the music.

"You can't innovate without a foundation," says Hank Smith, a self-styled bluegrass ambassador who hosts a weekly music series at Raleigh's Tir Na Nog and masterminds Blu-Bop, a Béla Fleck tribute. "The music that came before is important because you're going to want to build off of that."

Like a lot of young bluegrass musicians now, Smith didn't grow up plucking a banjo next to his parents at the church barbecue. He discovered and learned the music through recordings, a process Pennell's discography is meant to goad and potentially guide.

"I heard banjo growing up on Hee Haw and The Dukes of Hazzard and thought it sounded cool, but then you start doing research and you figure out the tradition of things that came before," he says. "I heard Béla Fleck and the Flecktones before I heard Flatt & Scruggs, but I went back and learned the Flatt & Scruggs. I don't consider myself a traditional musician by any means, but I know how to play 'Whiskey Before Breakfast.' You have to know that before you can move into uncharted territory."

Pennell's discography offers a map of that territory, all 24,629 known colonies included.

As a teenager in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Charley Pennell would flip from Bob Dylan and The Beatles on the rock stations to Campbell's Corner, the weekly bluegrass show Alex Campbell and Ola Belle Reed ran out of their general store 30 miles away. The pair's soundsas well as The Greenbriar Boys, Red Allen and the New Lost City Ramblersled him to the 1965 Philadelphia Folk Festival. By the time he dispatched to Indiana's Earlham College in 1967, he was playing guitar, mandolin and banjo.

He and his wife, Joan, moved through Canada for graduate school, eventually settling in Toronto so he could attend library school. He found his calling in the cataloging courses. What had been shelves of bound volumes would soon become large databases in mainframe computers. Pennell learned these new retrieval methodologies just as research pioneers developed them.

"We were reading the seminal works of the people who invented information retrieval," remembers Pennell, who has the slight dishevelment of one whose mind is always partly occupied by an overarching task. Emerging from a somehow grizzled baby face, his voice seems slow until you realize it's just deliberate. "We had a grand time figuring out ways that we could organize information and coming up with a theoretical framework for it and all this stuff."

He was also having a grand time playing in a bluegrass band in Toronto at weekend meet-ups at parks or churches too. Bill Monroe's music had changed his life in college. After school ended in 1975, he and a pregnant Joan relocated to St. John's, Newfoundland, for a starting cataloger position at Memorial University of Newfoundland. His musician buddy Chuck Crawford suggested he get in touch with another bluegrass-cataloger hybrid therewhat are the odds?named Neil Rosenberg.

Rosenberg taught folklore at Memorial and played in a band called Crooked Stovepipe, which Pennell joined. Rosenberg was compiling a comprehensive discography of Bill Monroe's work using 3-by-5 cards.

"Neil was not computer literate at the time," Pennell says. "He recognized that, with a database, I could do things he wasn't able to do. He also recognized that he and I both liked doing the same kind of thing, sorting the results and seeing what kinds of juxtapositions you can get."

The examples now pour out.

"You can sort the results by date, and you can say 'on this particular date or time frame, the Osborne Brothers were in the studio recording a cover of a song that Lester Flatt had done x-number of years before,'" he explains, "or 'Mac Wiseman was the background vocalist at this point in time for Bill Monroe.' You could look at things by the recording labels and see the point at which Bill Monroe leaves Columbia because he's pissed at them for hiring Flatt & Scruggs and the Stanley Brothers to put records out using Bill Monroe's style of music. Neil was interested in that same mash-up stuff."

Pennell turned Rosenberg's cards into a sortable, searchable database. Pennell dove into every discography he could findthe Bear Family, the Journal of Country Music, Bluegrass Unlimited and others. He incorporated data from old record labels and collectors strewn about Europe.

When Pennell saw an opening for the head of cataloging at N.C. State's D.H. Hill Library in 1995, he moved his family south. The infant Bluegrass Discography came with him, to UNC's iBiblio site, which still hosts it.

"There was a guy at the N.C. State library named Eric Lease Morgan, an early experimenter with libraries and databases who invented MyLibrary," he says. "I remembered his name and that he was connected with N.C. State and thought, 'Ah, N.C. State is a really forward organization. That's the kind of place I'd like to go.'

He saw an old-time music show on Franklin Street during his visit, too, and that enhanced the draw. The rest is history, although a rapidly changing one.

"I appreciate Charley on a number of levels, notwithstanding his musical and archival abilities," Smith says. "History is paramount, especially for something as constantly evolving and as culturally significant as bluegrass. Charley, to me, is an extension of the original idea to catalog and preserve a cultural history."

Bartenstein takes a more practical view. On a recent visit to East Tennessee State, the epicenter of formal bluegrass education, Bartenstein visited the archives and was stunned by the volume of the collection.

"There is shelf after shelf of vinyl records, cassettes, 45s, 78s, audiotapes. If I was 20 years old and walked into that, I would be overwhelmed," he says. "I would have no idea where to start. I would need guidance, and Charley and I are trying to provide that guidance, the treasure maps."

Today, Pennell embodies a cross between a research library and a museum of natural history. Scholars and other researchers back their projects up to the Bluegrass Discography's loading dock, gathering crucial session dates and lineups to clean up biographical anecdotes or craft comprehensive liner notes. George Goehl, who directed the 2003 documentary King of Bluegrass: The Life and Times of Jimmy Martin, even listed Pennell in the credits.

Pennell also finds piles of records on his front stoop, fends off genealogy requests from people who want to know if their grandfather sat in with Bill Monroe and politely turns down sales requests with a chuckle. It's a discography, not Amazon or Ancestry.com.

"Look, if I had all the records that are listed here," he explains, "I would need to live in the Smithsonian."

Still, records find their way to him nonetheless. Pennell kneels to flip through a stack of 30 or so albums that he found on his top step one recent afternoon. From the back of the stack, he extracts the 70-Song Original Bluegrass Collection, a multi-album set with cover art that looks like an airbrushed van from the 1970s.

"This is a really rare recording that Rebel put out ages ago that I'd listed in the discography but never seen," he says. "And then it suddenly showed up on my doorstep."

Whoever dropped off a bunch of old Cajun recordings probably didn't guess how they connected back to the formative moment that seeded Pennell's career.

"The first thing that attracted me to traditional American music is, when I was a little kid and I lived up the hill from West Chester State College, they had a library with Folkways recordings," he says. "In the Folkways anthologies, I discovered Cléoma and Orthy Breaux and Joseph Falcon and Cajun music. I was really attracted to Cajun music more than the other music."

Ultimately, deep down in the database's code, that essence remainsthe music and its story, the musicians and their interconnections. The cataloger mind and the musician mind are one.

"Most of the people I play with just hear a tune, and they're not so much interested in the back history of it," Pennell says, running his eyes over a track list. "But I've always been intrigued by, 'Where's that coming from?' and then going back to try to find the original recording of it. How did they get that out of this?"