Bill Monroe

He was born William Smith Monroe on the family farm near Rosine, Ohio County, Kentucky, on 13 September 1911, the youngest of eight children. His father, James Buchanan “Buck” Monroe, farmed and also ran timber and mining operations; his mother, Malissa, passed on dance steps and old folksongs to the children. His older brothers had claimed the fiddle (Birch) and the guitar (Charlie), so Bill took up the mandolin. He left school in the fifth grade, was working as a labourer at eleven, sang bass in the Rosine Methodist youth choir at twelve or thirteen, and was orphaned in his teens. Two players shaped him as a boy. One was his uncle Pendleton “Uncle Pen” Vandiver, a fiddler; the other was Arnold Shultz, a Black fiddler and guitarist with a bluesy, syncopated style. Monroe backed both of them on guitar at local dances, and he also counted Jimmie Rodgers and the Prairie Ramblers of the WLS National Barn Dance among his early influences.

Following his brothers to the Chicago area, he worked in a Sinclair Oil refinery, danced in an exhibition square-dance team on WLS, and played on local radio with Charlie and Birch. When Birch dropped out, Bill and Charlie left their day jobs in 1934 to work as the Monroe Brothers, a mandolin-and-guitar duet. They were first heard on stations in Iowa and Nebraska, and from 1935 they were based mainly at WBT in Charlotte, North Carolina. Eli Oberstein recorded them for RCA’s Bluebird label at the Hotel Charlotte in six sessions between 17 February 1936 and 28 January 1938, sixty sides in all; the first session alone produced “What Would You Give in Exchange,” “Drifting Too Far from the Shore,” “Nine Pound Hammer Is Too Heavy” and “New River Train.” Early releases sold well, but the brothers quarrelled and the act broke up in 1938.

Monroe first led a group called the Kentuckians in Little Rock, Arkansas, which lasted about three months, and then formed the first Blue Grass Boys, named for Kentucky, in Atlanta, with singer and guitarist Cleo Davis, fiddler Art Wooten and bassist Amos Garren. After working Carolina radio he auditioned for the Opry, and in October 1939 WSM’s George D. Hay, Harry Stone and David Stone hired him on the strength of his version of Jimmie Rodgers’s “Mule Skinner Blues”; he became a life member, and the Opry’s NBC network segment carried his name nationally. He first recorded the song with the band for Bluebird at the Kimball House in Atlanta on 7 October 1940, with Clyde Moody, fiddler Tommy Magness and bassist Cousin Wilbur, and returned to Atlanta for a second Bluebird session on 2 October 1941. In those years the band played in a raggy, syncopated style with the fiddle out front. By 1943 he was grossing some $200,000 a year from show dates, many of them with his own Opry tent show, and in the 1940s he also toured with a semi-professional baseball team, playing shortstop himself. During the war he added the banjo of David “Stringbean” Akeman and briefly tried accordion and harmonica, and in February 1945, at his first Columbia session, in Chicago, he recorded “Kentucky Waltz” with Sally Ann Forrester on accordion; it reached number 3 in 1946.

Earl Scruggs’s arrival late in 1945 completed a five-piece lineup of mandolin, guitar, fiddle, banjo and bass, with Lester Flatt and Howard Watts; Chubby Wise, away from the band for almost a year, was back on fiddle by March 1946. By then Monroe was playing the 1923 Gibson F-5 “Lloyd Loar” mandolin that remained his instrument for the rest of his career. That band’s Columbia sessions in Chicago in September 1946 and October 1947 produced twenty-eight songs, among them “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” “Toy Heart,” “Molly and Tenbrooks,” “Wicked Path of Sin,” “Little Cabin Home on the Hill” and “Blue Grass Breakdown”; several sacred numbers, sung in four parts over mandolin and guitar, were credited to the Blue Grass Quartet. “Wicked Path of Sin” and “Little Community Church” reached the top 15 in 1948, and “Toy Heart” number 12 in 1949. Flatt and Scruggs left in 1948 to form the Foggy Mountain Boys. Monroe’s last Columbia session, at Castle Studio in Nashville on 22 October 1949, had Mac Wiseman singing lead and Rudy Lyle on banjo. When Columbia signed the Stanley Brothers, whom Monroe saw as imitators, he moved to Decca. His first Decca session took place at Castle Studio on 3 February 1950, with Jimmy Martin and Vassar Clements in the band.

The Decca records of the 1950s brought autobiographical songs such as “Uncle Pen,” recorded on 15 October 1950, along with faster tempos and, in time, twin and triple fiddles. With Jimmy Martin singing lead, Rudy Lyle on banjo and fiddlers such as Red Taylor, Charlie Cline, Bobby Hicks and Vassar Clements, the band recorded “My Little Georgia Rose,” “On and On” and “Memories of Mother and Dad” and instrumentals such as “Roanoke,” “Big Mon,” “Stoney Lonesome,” “Get Up John” and the mandolin feature “Raw Hide”; Carter Stanley sang and played guitar with him for a short time in 1951. By then the Stanley Brothers, Jim and Jesse and Reno & Smiley were playing their own versions of the style. In 1954 Elvis Presley recorded “Blue Moon of Kentucky” as the B-side of his first Sun single. Monroe gave the cover his blessing and recut the song himself in a faster arrangement. “Scotland” reached number 27 in 1958, but by the late 1950s rock and roll and the Nashville sound had cut into his record sales and bookings. Over his whole career he recorded more than 500 selections, most of them for Decca and its successor MCA, and he wrote or co-wrote more than 200 songs and instrumentals.

In 1951 he had bought the Brown County Jamboree park at Bean Blossom, Indiana. From 1963 the folklorist Ralph Rinzler, briefly his manager, promoted him to the urban folk audience; a long profile Rinzler arranged in Sing Out! was the first to call him the “father” of bluegrass. Monroe played the Newport Folk Festival in July 1963, and Rinzler, who also managed Doc Watson, booked the two together at colleges and festivals, where they revived the Monroe Brothers’ duets. Musicians from outside the South joined the band in this period, among them Bill Keith and Peter Rowan from Massachusetts, Gene Lowinger, Lamar Grier, Steve Arkin, Roland White and Richard Greene. In 1965 the promoter Carlton Haney built the first multi-day bluegrass festival, the Roanoke Bluegrass Festival at Fincastle, Virginia, around him, and in 1967 he started an annual festival of his own at Bean Blossom; a double album recorded there with Jimmy Martin, Lester Flatt, Jim and Jesse and others came out on MCA in 1973. He was made an honorary Kentucky Colonel in 1966.

In 1972 Decca issued Bill Monroe’s Uncle Pen, an album of the fiddle tunes he had heard from his uncle. He and Flatt ended a long estrangement at Bean Blossom in 1973 and shared a stage at Vanderbilt University on 19 March 1974. On 10 March 1975, at Bradley’s Barn near Nashville, he recorded “Jerusalem Ridge,” with Kenny Baker on fiddle, and his later instrumentals included “Old Dangerfield” and “My Last Days on Earth,” both on Master of Bluegrass (1982); Ricky Skaggs’s recording of “Uncle Pen” reached number one in 1984. Two duet albums followed: Bill Monroe and Friends (1983), with country stars such as Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings and the Oak Ridge Boys, and Bill Monroe and Stars of the Bluegrass Hall of Fame (1985). He toured all fifty states and Canada as well as Japan, England, Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Israel, and on 7 August 1980 he and Doc Watson were at “A Georgia Barbecue,” hosted by President and Mrs. Jimmy Carter at the White House. In June 1985 he picked up the bill at the Nashville lunch meeting that led to the founding of the International Bluegrass Music Association. His album Southern Flavor (MCA, 1988) won the first Grammy given for bluegrass, and that July Kentucky’s statutes named “Blue Moon of Kentucky” the state’s bluegrass song. A 1989 live album marked his fifty years on the Opry, and on 7 April 1990 he played Farm Aid IV in Indianapolis.

More than 150 musicians passed through the Blue Grass Boys. Among them were Clyde Moody, Mac Wiseman, Jimmy Martin, Carter Stanley, Don Reno, Sonny Osborne, Bobby Hicks, Kenny Baker, Del McCoury, Bill Keith, Peter Rowan, Roland White, Richard Greene, Byron Berline and his son James Monroe. His last performance was on 15 March 1996, and a stroke in April ended his touring. He died in Springfield, Tennessee, on 9 September 1996, four days before his 85th birthday, and after memorial services at the Ryman Auditorium and in his home town he was buried at Rosine. In 1999 a stretch of Indiana State Road 135 from Morgantown to Nashville, Indiana, was named the Bill Monroe Memorial Highway.

• 1966: honorary Kentucky Colonel
• 1970: Country Music Hall of Fame
• 1971: Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame
• 1982: National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts
• 1986: IBMA Distinguished Achievement Award
• 1988: “Blue Moon of Kentucky” designated Kentucky’s bluegrass song
• 1991: IBMA Hall of Honor, first class
• 1993: Lifetime Achievement Award from the Recording Academy
• 1995: National Medal of Arts
• 1997: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as an early influence
• 1998: Grammy Hall of Fame, “Blue Moon of Kentucky”; 2009, “Mule Skinner Blues”
• 2002: “Blue Moon of Kentucky” added to the National Recording Registry