Bill Monroe and Doc Watson

Rinzler had met Watson in 1960, when Watson was playing with Clarence Ashley’s old-time group, and set about bringing him to the college and coffeehouse audience of the folk revival. Monroe was harder to reach. After months of negotiation in 1962, helped along by the Stanley Brothers, Mike Seeger and Monroe’s bass player Bessie Lee Mauldin, Rinzler interviewed him for a long profile in Sing Out!, and he handed Monroe the new issue, with Monroe on the cover, at the University of Chicago Folk Festival in February 1963. Within a month or so they agreed that Rinzler would move to Nashville to manage and book Monroe, working alongside Jim Denny’s agency and Decca. Putting the two men on one stage served a double purpose: it introduced Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys to Watson’s young urban listeners, and it presented Watson as a traditional musician to Monroe’s country audience.

The pair first met in Los Angeles in the spring of 1963, when Watson was on his second California tour with the Ashley group and Monroe was booked into the Ash Grove for a stand that overlapped with Watson’s. They rehearsed for the first time in the living room of the house where Watson was staying. Watson suggested starting with songs Monroe had recorded with his brother Charlie, but after two or three of those Monroe proposed material he had never performed or recorded with anyone, among it “You Won’t Be Satisfied That Way” and the instrumental that became “Watson’s Blues.” That piece took shape when Watson found an introductory guitar run for a melody Monroe had built from an old song, “You’ll Find Her Name Written There,” and Monroe answered that since Watson had added to it, they should call it “Watson’s Blues.” Monroe was glad to work with Watson but wanted the Monroe/Watson sound kept apart from the Monroe Brothers’, and he was open to Watson’s ideas as well as his own.

Monroe Brothers songs were still the core of the act. “What Would You Give in Exchange for Your Soul,” first recorded by the brothers for Bluebird in February 1936, became the duo’s most successful number, and “Have a Feast Here Tonight,” which the Monroes had learned from the Prairie Ramblers, was among the first songs they rehearsed and appeared in almost every show. On “Where Is My Sailor Boy?” Monroe taught Watson a way of trading parts, so that lead and harmony swap at one or two points in the melody. Their “Foggy Mountain Top” follows the brothers’ 1936 record but leaves out its yodel, and “Banks of the Ohio” and “Midnight on the Stormy Deep” were in the set as well. Alongside the songs they played fiddle tunes, “Soldier’s Joy,” “Fire on the Mountain,” “Chicken Reel” and “Turkey in the Straw,” and Monroe brought in pieces of his own, “Kentucky Mandolin” and “Lonesome Moonlight Waltz.” Several of these he went on to record with the Blue Grass Boys: “Midnight on the Stormy Deep,” with Peter Rowan singing lead, in December 1966, “Kentucky Mandolin” in November 1967, and “You Won’t Be Satisfied That Way” at Bean Blossom in June 1973. Watson, for his part, brought “Memories of You” to their very first rehearsal, and they sang it on stage that night.

The surviving tapes come from the Ash Grove in 1963; Oberlin College in Ohio, New London in Connecticut, and Jordan Hall in Boston, all in 1964; and the fiddler Tex Logan’s home in Madison, New Jersey, in August 1966. After Carlton Haney’s first multi-day bluegrass festival in 1965 and the many that followed it, their festival bookings rose sharply. They came together once more on 7 August 1980, when President Jimmy Carter asked them to play for a large barbecue on the South Lawn of the White House; the Smithsonian filmed and recorded the event, and their “Paddy on the Turnpike” from that day closes the 1993 set.

That set, Live Duet Recordings 1963–1980: Off the Record, Volume 2 (Smithsonian/Folkways SF CD 40064), was compiled and annotated by Rinzler as a companion to a volume of Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys’ live recordings from 1956 to 1969. Rinzler had long hoped to bring the two into a studio, but his work at the Smithsonian always got in the way. An LP on the small FBN label, Bill & Doc Sing Country Songs, also carried ten of their duets, among them “Get Up John,” “Rawhide,” “True Life Blues” and “What Does the Deep Sea Say?”