I don't really see why your command wouldn't work, unless there's just a really gigantic amount of files/data to search through. How long did you let it run? Depending on amount of data to search, it could take a while. Or, narrow down the search a bit, by giving a more specific path, or filename with wildcard(s).
Also, if you just want the name of the file(s) that contains the keyword, use
-lR (it's a lowercase "L") instead of just
-R.
You aren't literally using Bash to search, you're using `grep` - and as to what grep is and does, it searches through files, for lines containing keywords and regular expressions. Please see the man page!