Bill Monroe: Remembering the Father of Bluegrass Music
Today would have been Bill Monroe’s 95th birthday.
For those of you who are not bluegrass freaks, Bill Monroe is widely seen as the Father of Bluegrass Music, which he presented to the Grand Ole Opry audience in the early 1940s.
Bluegrass music, contrary to popular belief, is not particularly old. True enough, Monroe based his style on the old time fiddle tunes he grew up listening to, but his music had a different beat, a drive that makes bluegrass music nearly impossible to dance to.
I never saw Bill Monroe live, but his music and his voice affected me deeply. His high keening tenor still makes the hair on my arms and neck stand on end, and it is difficult not to be overcome by emotion when I hear cuts like “Body and Soul”, “The Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake”,. or “Close By”. Instrumentals like “Tall Timber” and “Wheel Hoss” feature some of the most aggressive, competitive playing I’ve ever heard.
Some of my favorite performers are graduates of Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys: Jimmy Martin, Sonny Osborne, Tex Logan, Ted Lundy, Del McCoury, all legends in the genre.
Monroe was a powerful personality and a powerful man. His original banjo player, Earl Scruggs, has told of Bill laying a 2×4 across his shoulders, inviting the band to sit on the board, and then standing up, bearing the wieght of the entire band on his back. Bill could stand in a rain barrel and from a stationary postion jump out of the thing. He regularly put his band members to work on his farm when they weren’t out touring, which was just about never. Stories of his tours, for that matter, are legendary. The band drove around in an old limousine arriving in towns early in the day. As one guy would post fliers all over town, the rest of the band would set up a revival tent. This was in the days before Major League Baseball, and Bill’s band would play play any team from any town, after which Bill would challenge anyone to a bare-knuckle boxing match, which Bill would usually win. The band would then play a series of sets, after which Bill would try to lay any woman he could find (Bill never smoked or drank liquor: womanizing was one of his only vices). The band would tear out of town in the late hours of the night, the band sleeping sitting up, to the nxt tour date. As always, the Blue Grass Boys would race through the night to get back to Nashville in time for their mandatory Sunday night appearance on the Grand Ole Opry.
I encourage you to read Evan Reilly’s Reflections on the man we call Big Mon
