Six Months Ain’t Long · Darling Corey

Before there was bluegrass there were the Monroe Brothers, and before there was a bandleader named Bill Monroe there was a younger brother holding down a mandolin while his older brother Charlie sang lead and played guitar. The two had worked their way north from Kentucky doing farm and refinery labor and playing music on the side; by the mid-1930s they were popular enough on radio that the Victor Talking Machine Company came looking.

Every Monroe Brothers record was made for Victor's Bluebird label at a makeshift studio run by the Southern Radio Corporation in Charlotte, North Carolina, in a tight series of sessions between February 1936 and January 1938. In just under two years they cut some sixty sides — old hymns, sentimental ballads, and hard-driving secular numbers — among them the breakthrough "What Would You Give in Exchange for Your Soul," along with "New River Train," "Roll in My Sweet Baby's Arms," and a fierce early "Will the Circle Be Unbroken."

What the records captured was a brother duet pushed to its limit: Charlie's steady guitar and easy lead against Bill's slashing mandolin and a tenor so high and intense it seemed to be straining against the song. The tempos were faster than anyone else's, the harmony tighter, and you can hear, already, the impatience that would drive Bill to invent a whole new music.

The brothers were also famously unable to get along, and in 1938 they split for good. Charlie formed the Kentucky Pardners; Bill formed the Blue Grass Boys. The Charlotte sessions are where the family argument that produced bluegrass was first set down on shellac.

Session details drawn in part from the Bluegrass Discography.