When the Monroe Brothers broke up in 1938, the older brother did not vanish into the shadow of the younger. Charlie Monroe — the guitarist and easy-voiced lead singer of the duo — formed his own band, the Kentucky Pardners, and spent the next decade and a half as a substantial recording and radio star in his own right.
Charlie's instincts were more traditional and more openly commercial than Bill's. Where Bill drove his music toward the fierce new thing that became bluegrass, Charlie kept the Kentucky Pardners closer to the sentimental songs, gospel numbers, and good-natured showmanship that had made the Monroe Brothers popular in the first place. He recorded for RCA Victor and its Bluebird label from the late 1930s into the 1950s, cutting numbers like "Down in the Willow Garden" — the old murder ballad his version helped turn into a standard.
The Kentucky Pardners were a working southern radio band, based for long stretches in Kentucky and the Carolinas, and a number of fine musicians passed through the lineup over the years. Charlie's records sold well across the rural South, and on the strength of them he ran one of the busiest tent-show operations in the business.
He never claimed to have invented anything, and history has filed him a long way behind his brother. But Charlie Monroe's singles preserve the other half of the family sound — the warmer, more genial style the brother act had been built on before Bill took his share of it somewhere new.
Session details drawn in part from the Bluegrass Discography.
Tracklist
- 1 They Didn’t Believe It Was True
- 2 Rosa Lee McFall alt version
