“Methodist Preacher” comes from the fiddle repertoire Bill Monroe absorbed as a boy in Rosine, Kentucky, from his uncle Pendleton Vandiver, a fiddler known in the family and beyond as “Uncle Pen.” Vandiver (1869–1932) played for local dances and social gatherings, and his nephew backed him on guitar or mandolin. After Monroe’s father died in 1928, the teenager lived with Vandiver for about two years and learned a wide range of tunes from him. In a 1966 interview Monroe told Ralph Rinzler he wanted those tunes put on record “as near the way that he played ’em” as he could.
“Methodist Preacher” was the second piece recorded for that project. Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys cut it on 29 April 1969 at the Columbia Recording Studio in Nashville, with Monroe on mandolin, James Monroe on guitar, Rual Yarbrough on banjo, Joe Zinkan on bass and Kenny Baker on fiddle. It opened side one after “Jenny Lynn” on Bill Monroe’s Uncle Pen, which Decca held back until 1 June 1972. Every tune on the album carries Monroe’s name as composer, and the fiddle collections credit this one to him. Monroe himself, speaking when the record came out, said he did not think his uncle wrote any of them: “they were just tunes that he played.”
The tune is in G major and has four parts. Transcriptions differ over how many times the third part comes back (ABCDC in David Brody’s Fiddler’s Fakebook, ABCDDC in Stacy Phillips’s collection, which follows Kenny Baker’s playing), and the Fiddler’s Companion notes that it ends on the D part. Richard Greene, who had fiddled with the Blue Grass Boys in 1966, recorded it with David Grisman on mandolin for his 1977 Rounder album Duets. He returned to it with the Grass Is Greener, Bill Keith on banjo and David Grier on guitar, on Traditional Bluegrass Instrumentals (Rebel, 1995). The mandolinist Butch Baldassari recorded it in 1987 with Stuart Duncan on fiddle and Ron Block on banjo.
