James Monroe

He had grown up around the music, and as a boy of five or six heard the 1946–47 Blue Grass Boys practice in the family’s living room, but as a high-school pitcher he had hoped to play baseball, and he learned no instrument until Bessie Lee Mauldin left his father’s band and he took up her bass. He was playing it with the Blue Grass Boys by the summer of 1964, when he was twenty-three, and Sandy Rothman, who filled in on guitar that summer, recalled showing him his first guitar chords as the band toured the South. From March 1965 he was the bass player on his father’s Decca sessions in Nashville, through the years when Peter Rowan, Richard Greene, Roland White, Vic Jordan, Byron Berline and Kenny Baker passed through the band; his bass is on “The Long Black Veil” and “I Live in the Past” (1965), “When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again” and “Pretty Fair Maiden in the Garden” (1966) and the instrumental “The Gold Rush” (1967).

In 1969 he moved to guitar, a chair that in the Blue Grass Boys went with singing lead. On 26 March 1969 he and his father recorded their first duet, “I Haven’t Seen Mary in Years,” with James singing lead to Bill’s tenor, and Decca issued it that May. On 17 December 1969 at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, he recorded “Bonny” and “Sweet Mary and the Miles in Between” with his father on mandolin, released in March 1970 as a single under his own name. He played guitar on his father’s sessions through the early 1970s, among them “Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine” (1969) and the 1971 remakes of “Muleskinner Blues” and “Rocky Road Blues.”

The duet album was cut at Bradley’s Barn on 14, 15 and 21 March 1972, produced by Walter Haynes, with Jack Hicks on banjo, Kenny Baker and Tommy Williams on fiddles and Monroe Fields on bass, and MCA released it as Father & Son in March 1973. It included “Sweetheart You Done Me Wrong,” “Tall Pines,” “Walls of Time” and “Mother’s Only Sleeping.” At his father’s Bean Blossom festival in June 1973 he had a set of his own on the live album MCA recorded there, singing “Love Please Come Home,” “Bonny” and “When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again,” and he joined his father for “Roll On Buddy.”

Not long after Father & Son he formed the Midnight Ramblers and began recording for the Atteiram label in Georgia: Something New, Something Different, Something Good (1974), James Monroe’s Midnight Blues (1976), made at Perfection Sound in Smyrna, Georgia, and Memory Lane, recorded at Fireside Studio in Nashville in February 1976; a fourth Atteiram album, A Satisfied Mind, followed in 1984. He still recorded with his father: he is on the MCA sessions of 1975 to 1978, and in January and February 1978 the two made a second duet album, Together Again, released that June, with “Those Memories of You” and “Six Feet Under the Ground.” In 1981 he opened the Monroe Manor and Steakhouse Lounge outside Nashville as a venue for his father’s band.

In later years he turned more to the business side of the music, including the Bill Monroe Bluegrass Festival at Bean Blossom, Indiana. When his father died in 1996 he took over the running of the estate and its large catalogue of songs, and in 1998 he sold the Bill Monroe Music Park at Bean Blossom to the former Blue Grass Boy Dwight Dillman. He sang at the Ryman Auditorium tribute to his father in April 1997 and recorded My Father: In Memory of Bill Monroe (Raintree, 1997), followed by the gospel album I Can Live Forever (2001) and The Way I Am (Raintree, 2003). He died on 24 June 2026, at the age of eighty-five.