The Songs of Charlie Monroe & the Kentucky Pardners: Vintage Radio Recordings from 1944 was released by County Records in 1974 (County 539). Its sixteen tracks were taken from 16-inch glass-base transcription discs made in 1944 for broadcast on several radio stations in North Carolina. Charlie Monroe had kept the discs for thirty years, and the liner notes, written by Bill Vernon, thank him for making them available and say that clicks and pops were edited out where possible. More of the same material appears on County 538, Charlie Monroe on the Noon-Day Jamboree. Monroe spent much of the early 1940s in Greensboro, North Carolina, at radio station WBIG, where he was featured daily on a show called the Noonday Jamboree, and in 1944 and 1945 he also worked at WSJS in Winston-Salem.
The credits list Charlie Monroe on guitar and vocals, Tex Isley on guitar, Paul Prince on fiddle, Tommy Edwards on mandolin, Birch Monroe singing bass and Lester Flatt singing tenor. Flatt had played mandolin and sung tenor in the Kentucky Pardners in 1943 and became known with Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys in 1945. The songs include “Little Liza Jane,” “Bile Them Cabbage Down,” “Sourwood Mountain,” “Down in Caroline” and “Walk That Long Lonesome Road.”
