“Southern Flavor” is a Bill Monroe composition in E minor, recorded January 4, 1988, and the title track of Monroe’s eighteenth studio album Southern Flavor (MCA, 1988). The record won Monroe the 1989 Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Recording — the first Grammy ever awarded in the bluegrass category — a public recognition that arrived fifty years into a career that had defined the form. The minor-key tonality, a mode Monroe returned to throughout his writing life, gives the piece a reflective gravity appropriate to a title track named after the regional identity he had spent his career representing.
The mandolin uses cross-tuning that produces a tonally ambiguous melodic line: the melody carries many minor thirds against an E root, creating an ambiguity between minor and major that Monroe left intentionally unresolved. The tune functions as Em when an ensemble accompanies it that way, but an approach in E major works too — a harmonic flexibility unusual for a composed piece and part of what gives it an open, uncommitted quality.
The Southern Flavor album featured Tom Ewing on guitar, Blake Williams on banjo, Clarence “Tater” Tate on bass, and Bobby Hicks, Buddy Spicher, and Mike Feagan on fiddle — a tight working band that Monroe led with full authority well into his late seventies. A notable recording is the original from that session.
