“Shenandoah Breakdown” is a Bill Monroe instrumental. He recorded it with his Blue Grass Boys at the Columbia Recording Studio in Nashville on 27 March 1963. Monroe played mandolin, Bill Keith banjo, Kenny Baker fiddle, Jackie Phelps guitar and Bessie Lee Mauldin bass. It came during Keith’s short stay in the band. A week earlier, on 20 March, the same group had recorded “Salt Creek,” “Devil’s Dream” and “Sailor’s Hornpipe.” The 27 March session also produced “Pike County Breakdown” and “Santa Claus.”
Decca held the recording for more than a year. It was released on 31 August 1964 as Decca 31658, backed with “Mary at the Home Place.” Monroe went on playing it with later lineups. A concert at Orchestra Hall in Chicago in October 1964 has Don Lineberger on banjo and Benny Williams on fiddle, and that performance was later issued in Japan.
Other musicians took it up from 1970 on. The New Deal String Band recorded it for Sire that year. Kenny Baker, the fiddler on Monroe’s original, recorded it again with the Dobro player Josh Graves on their 1974 album Bucktime. It also reached the fiddlers’ conventions: Mike Cluverius’s performance is on Heritage’s record of the 40th Old Fiddler’s Convention at Galax, Virginia, in 1975. Monroe’s title may also lie behind the old-time fiddle tune “Shenandoah Falls.” The Portland Collection editors Clyde Curley and Susan Songer write that the Vermont fiddler Pete Sutherland learned that tune untitled and named it, perhaps because it reminded him of “Shenandoah Breakdown.”
