“Blue Moon of Kentucky” was written by Bill Monroe in 1945 and first recorded by his Blue Grass Boys for Columbia Records on September 16, 1946, at the Wrigley Building in Chicago. Monroe’s original is a slow waltz in 3/4 time, a typical mountain ballad of heartbreak and longing. His earliest known performance of the song was on the Grand Ole Opry broadcast of August 25, 1945, predating the studio cut by just over a year.
The song’s second life began on July 6, 1954, when a young Elvis Presley recorded it at Sun Studio in Memphis with Scotty Moore on guitar and Bill Black on bass. Sam Phillips paired Presley’s uptempo rockabilly transformation with “That’s All Right” as the B-side of Presley’s first commercial single. The new arrangement — in 4/4, blues-driven, faster than anything Monroe would have considered — was effectively a different song.
Monroe responded by going back into the studio in September 1954, two months after Presley’s release, and re-recording “Blue Moon of Kentucky” in the new uptempo style. His version starts in the original 3/4 waltz on the first verse and chorus, then pauses and kicks into a 4/4 fiddle-driven arrangement faster than Presley’s. By accounts Monroe’s initial reaction to the Presley version cooled considerably once the songwriting royalty checks began arriving. The song stands as one of the foundational documents of the early rock-and-roll moment, where bluegrass and the blues collided.
