“Brown County Breakdown” is a Bill Monroe instrumental, and its title names the Indiana county where he kept a summer base. Monroe had known Indiana since 1929, when he was eighteen: his brother Charlie had a job at the Sinclair Oil refinery in Whiting and sent for Bill and their brother Birch. Two decades later Monroe was playing the Brown County Jamboree, a country variety show at Bean Blossom that Mae and Francis Rund had run for thirteen years. He bought the grounds from the Runds and took over the show for the 1952 season. Sunday-night shows ran there from May to November.
Monroe recorded the tune for Decca on 16 September 1955 at Bradley Film & Recording in Nashville. Charlie Cline played guitar, Joe Stuart banjo and Bessie Lee Mauldin bass, and Bobby Hicks and Vassar Clements played twin fiddles. “Tall Timber” came from the same session. Decca held “Brown County Breakdown” back for almost ten years. It first came out on Bluegrass Instrumentals (Decca DL 4601), released on 14 June 1965, a set of twelve instrumentals from 1951 to 1963, several of them previously unissued. Ralph Rinzler wrote the album’s liner notes, and they give recording details for every track. The Fiddler’s Companion lists the tune in E major.
Kenny Baker, who played fiddle with Monroe, brought it back in 1976. He recorded it in Nashville on 29 March 1976 for Kenny Baker Plays Bill Monroe (County 761), with Monroe himself on mandolin, Joe Stuart on guitar, Vic Jordan and Bob Black on banjos and Randy Davis on bass. Other versions include Byron Berline and the L.A. Fiddle Band (1980), the Dreadful Snakes on Snakes Alive (1984), the Bluegrass Album Band on Bluegrass Instrumentals, Volume 6 (1996) and Bryan Sutton on Ready to Go (2000). In 2013 banjo player Noam Pikelny re-recorded the whole Baker album as Noam Pikelny Plays Kenny Baker Plays Bill Monroe, and he kept “Brown County Breakdown” as its second track.
