“Memories of Mother and Dad” is a song written by Bill Monroe, and it is among the most personal in his catalog. Monroe lost his mother when he was ten and his father not long after, and the song is a plain, grieving remembrance of both, set against the lonely, silent home their deaths left behind.
Monroe recorded it with his Blue Grass Boys in the mid-1960s. By a much-told account, the young Del McCoury, then singing lead in Monroe’s band, struggled to deliver the lyric until Monroe stopped on a trip through his home country, walked McCoury to his parents’ graves in Rosine, Kentucky, and had him read the tombstones so he would understand what the song was about.
That depth of real feeling gave the song lasting power among the “true songs,” as Monroe called them, drawn from his own life. The version heard here is by Ricky Skaggs and Tony Rice, from their 1980 duet album “Skaggs and Rice.”
