Bessie Lee Mauldin
Bessie Lee Mauldin (1920–1983) played string bass with Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys from 1953 to 1964, a stretch that took in most of his Decca albums of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Monroe called her “the Carolina Songbird,” and she shares the writing credit with him on the gospel song “A Voice from on High.”
She was born on 28 December 1920 in Norwood, North Carolina. “A Voice from on High,” credited to her and Monroe, was first recorded by the Stanley Brothers on 25 November 1953, and Monroe made his own recording of it in Nashville on 25 January 1954.
Her first studio session as Monroe’s bass player was at Owen Bradley’s studio in Nashville on 16 September 1955, with Charlie Cline on guitar, Joe Stuart on banjo and Gordon Terry among the fiddlers, which produced “Tall Timber” and “Brown County Breakdown.” Over the next eight and a half years she played on more than thirty of his Decca sessions, and only the fiddler Kenny Baker played on more of Monroe’s recordings. Those sessions filled the albums Knee Deep in Bluegrass (1958), the gospel set I Saw the Light (1958), Mr. Blue Grass (1961), Blue Grass Ramble (1962), Blue Grass Special (1963) and I’ll Meet You in Church Sunday Morning (1964). Around her the band changed constantly: her rhythm partners included the guitarists Edd Mayfield, Jack Cooke, Carl Butler, Jimmy Maynard and Del McCoury, the banjo players Don Stover, Curtis McPeake, Tony Ellis, Lonnie Hoppers and Bill Keith, and the fiddlers Bobby Hicks, Dale Potter, Buddy Spicher, Vassar Clements and Kenny Baker. She was on the March 1963 sessions that produced Keith’s “Salt Creek” with Baker, and on McCoury’s session in January 1964.
When the folklorist Ralph Rinzler spent the summer of 1962 trying to persuade Monroe to be interviewed for Sing Out!, Mauldin was one of those, with the Stanley Brothers and Mike Seeger, who helped bring him round; the interview led to Rinzler becoming Monroe’s manager the following year. Her last studio session with the band was on 9 April 1964, when it recorded “Louisville Breakdown,” “Never Again” and “Fire on the Mountain,” and she left the Blue Grass Boys that year. She later returned to Norwood, and she died on 8 February 1983.
