“Wheel Hoss” is a Bill Monroe instrumental, recorded by Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys in Nashville on 31 December 1954. The Bluegrass Discography tentatively places the session at Bradley’s studio. Monroe played mandolin, with Jackie Phelps on guitar, Hubert Davis on banjo, Charlie Cline and Bobby Hicks on twin fiddles, and Ernie Newton on bass. The same New Year’s Eve date produced two more instrumentals, Monroe’s “Cheyenne” and “Roanoke” (credited to Joe Ahr), along with a vocal, Harold Hensley’s “You’ll Find Her Name Written There.”
Decca held the side for most of a year. It came out on 17 October 1955 as the flip of “Put My Little Shoes Away” (Decca 29645), a vocal the band had cut the previous June. Its first LP appearance was Decca’s Bluegrass Instrumentals (DL 4601), issued in June 1965, which collected Monroe instrumentals from sessions between 1953 and 1963. Bear Family later reissued the original on the box set Blue Grass, 1950–1958 (1989).
The title is a spoken-English spelling of “wheel horse.” A wheel horse is the one in a team harnessed nearest the wheels, as opposed to the leaders, and the word also came to mean a person who does heavy work for a cause without seeking credit. Monroe kept the tune in his stage shows. A performance taped at New River Ranch in Rising Sun, Maryland, on 13 May 1956 was issued in 1993 on Smithsonian Folkways’ Live Recordings 1956–1969.
Other bands took it up early. The Hillmen, with Chris Hillman on mandolin and Vern and Rex Gosdin, recorded it at World Pacific Studios in Hollywood in 1962, and it appeared on their 1969 LP. Jerry Douglas recorded it on Fluxology (Rounder, 1979) with Ricky Skaggs, Tony Rice, Jack Hicks and Todd Phillips. Fiddler Blaine Sprouse cut it for Summertime (Rounder, 1982) with Roland White on mandolin.
