“Northern White Clouds” is one of the later tunes Bill Monroe wrote. The fiddle teacher Tristan Scroggins, writing for Peghead Nation, places it with the more experimental pieces of Monroe’s last years and dates it to sometime between 1986 and 1988, when Billy Joe Foster was fiddling in the Blue Grass Boys. According to that account, Monroe had just written the tune, which had no name yet, and played it onstage with little rehearsal. Foster tried to remember how it went, ended up making up a good deal on the spot, and that improvisation became the basis of how other fiddlers played it. The mandolinist Mike Compton has said that the version now played owes a lot to Foster.
Two stories are told about the title. In one, Monroe said he was inspired by the sky while riding in the band bus. In another, which Compton has attributed to Foster, Monroe saw a truck advertising Northern brand bathroom tissue. A third account has it written and named at Frontier Ranch near Columbus, Ohio, where the stage faced east and Monroe looked north to a cloudy sky.
The earliest commercial release of Monroe playing it is a live performance from Mountain Stage at the Capitol Plaza Theater in Charleston, West Virginia, on 11 May 1989, with Tom Ewing on guitar, Blake Williams on banjo, Clarence ‘Tater’ Tate on fiddle and Billy Rose on bass; it came out in 1999 on Blue Plate Music’s Live from Mountain Stage. A second live recording from Bean Blossom, Indiana, on 16 June 1990, with the same band, was issued on Rural Rhythm’s Live, Volume 1 (2001). Jimmy Campbell, who fiddled for Monroe, recorded it for his solo album Young Opry Fiddler (Pinecastle, 1993), and Richard Greene recorded it with the Grass Is Greener on Traditional Bluegrass Instrumentals (Rebel, 1994), working from a transcription of one of Monroe’s breaks. Michael Cleveland and Flamekeeper recorded it for Leavin’ Town (Rounder, 2008).
