The title of this diary is taken from the song "Uncle Pen", written by the late Bill Monroe, the "Father of Bluegrass." It was probably his best known song, and has been covered by many others. If, like me, you are a Bluegrass aficionado, and go to one of the many, many bluegrass festivals that are held around the country, you'll certainly hear this song be played. This is a diary about the man who wrote it, and the musical genre he created.
It might surprise you to learn that Bluegrass, though it sounds like old timey, Appalachian folk music, is actually a fairly modern musical style. The term Bluegrass" itself wasn't even coined until the middle of the 20th century. It comes from the name of the band that Bill Monroe formed: Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys. Monroe was born in Rosine, Kentucky (pop. 41 as of 2000), and though he moved away when he was 18 and formed his first iteration of the band in Georgia around 1939, he wanted people to know he was from Kentucky, and named his band The Bluegrass Boys. It was only after his nand enjoyed great popularity in the late 40's and throughout the 50's that his style of music began to be called "Bluegrass."
Enjoy his song Uncle Pen, and set and visit a spell below the fold.
Bill Monroe was born in 1911 on his family's farm in rural Kentucky. He had 7 brothers and sisters, many of whom were also musically talented. They grew up playing music at home and at neighbor get togethers, but instruments were expensive for a farm family. Bill's older brothers took dibs on the guitar and fiddle, leaving him with only a mandolin to play. The mandolin was considered to be well down in the musical pecking list of instruments at the time...merely a rythym instrument. Bill turned it into a lead instrument, and made it sing. Today, you can't think of Bluegrass without hearing the sweet tones of a mandolin run in a song.
His mother died when he was 10 years old, and his father passed away 6 years after that, leaving Bill and some of his siblings without a home. For a time, he moved in with his maternal uncle, an accomplished fiddle player by the name of Pendleton Vandiver (Uncle Pen). When he was 18 years old, Bill struck of to Indiana with a couple of his brothers to find work in an oil refinery. He and his brothers, Birch and Charlie, formed a band and played local dances and house parties in the area. Their popularity enabled them, eventually, to quit their jobs at the refinery and pursue a career as musicians. They were offered live radio gigs in the region, and began touring as the Monroe Brothers throughout Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska and the Carolinas.
Touring was a hard grind. Six of them would cram into a car, with the standing bass tied to the roof, and drive from gig to gig. Bill's brothers eventually tired of a life on the road, and quit the band in the late 30's. Bill moved to Atlanta, and put together the first lineup of his Bluegrass Boys. They drove to Nashville and he got his first big break in 1939 when he auditioned to become a regular on The Grand Ole Opry, with a rousing version of the song "Mule Skinner Blues."
Monroe was still experimenting with the sound he was searching to create, and decided to add a banjo player to his lineup in 1942. He had previously included an accordion player, but decided to drop that instrument from the band. His first banjo player was David Akeman, better known to most as "Stringbean" from his stints on Grand Ole Opry and the 60's show "Hee Haw" (yes...I confess, I used to watch it.) But Monroe's band really took off when they replaced Akeman with a gifted banjo player from North Carolina by the name of Earl Scruggs. Scruggs played the banjo like nobody else at the time, innovating a style called "three finger picking", or later simply "Scruggs style." The banjo became a lead instrument, not merely a rythym instrument.
This was in 1945, and the Bluegrass Boys had finally coalesced into the musical lineup that would endure throughout Bill's musical career, and that characterizes what we all now think of as the Bluegrass sound. The band had Bill, of course, on mandolin, Lester Flatt on guitar, Earl Scruggs on banjo, fiddler Chubby Wise and bassist Howard Watts. Note that these are all string instruments. The roots of the music were always in the string band tradition, but Monroe added the banjo, instrumental virtuosity, the tenor vocals that came to be known as the "High Lonesome" sound, the breakneck tempos and the solo breaks on each instrument that sound as old as the hills but were actually his own innovation.
They signed a record deal with Columbia, and recorded a string of hits over the next 3 years, the most famous of which was "Blue Moon of Kentucky."
Note that Monroe changes to an uptempo in the middle of this version of the song. He originally recorded the song as a slow ballad. In 1954 a young Elvis Presley recorded his version of the song as the B-side of his first record with Sun Records, and the song found both a new audience and a new interpretation. Presley's success with the song prompted Bill Monroe to rerecord his original hit with a faster tempo as well. Here's Elvis' version:
The roots of Bluegrass music run all the way back to the original Jamestown colony. They are to be found in the musical traditions of the Scottish folksongs and Irish reels. As the first settlers branched out into the more remote regions of Virginia, and south into the Carolinas, the music took on aspects of what could properly be called "Mountain Music." The string band tradition remained, while the song lyrics began to reflect the daily life (and death) experiences of those living in the Appalachian region. It always included a strong tradition of gospel and other sacred songs, as well. It was Bill Monroes interpretation of that traditional music, and his instrumentational innovations, that transformed it into Bluegrass as we know it.
He introduced elements of jazz. One can hear similarities between his mandolin playing and that of Django Reinhardt, a jazz guitarist who was born just one year before Bill was. He incorporated elements of the Country music of his day, as well as Blues. It's probably fair to say that one tends to think of Bluegrass as being as "White" a musical genre as there is, but one of Monroe's early influences was a Black fiddler and guitarist by the name of Arnold Shultz, the son of a former slave who was also born in Ohio County, Kentucky, near Bill's birthplace. Shultz introduced Bill Monroe to the Blues, and gave him his first paid gig playing in Shultz' band at a square dance. Shultz was a virtuoso guitar player, and his "thumb picking" style was a major influence on Chet Atkins and Merle Travis.
Flatt and Scruggs left the Bluegrass Boys in 1948 to form their own band, The Foggy Mountain Boys, and went on to become giants of the genre in their own right. In fact, the lineup of Monroe's Bluegrass Boys was in flux throughout the band's career, but it always included great musicians and became a springboard for some of the most accomplished musicians of the style. Jimmy Martin, Vassar Clements, Charlie Cline, Carter Stanley and Peter Rowan are just some of the former alumni of Bill Monroe's band.
The heyday of Bluegrass and of Bill Monroe was during the Fifties, but by the end of that decade the musical style was on the wane as Country Music audiences began to gravitate to what was called the new "Nashville Sound", more pop oriented. Monroe never stopped playing his style of music, though his touring was largely confined to the southern/mountain circuit of venues. Flatt and Scruggs enjoyed greater popularity during the Sixties, as they were more in tune with the changing demographics and musical changes taking place in the country. They weren't shy about reaching out to younger audiences, and when the Folk Renewal of the Sixties occurred, they played to audiences and in venues that the more traditionalist Monroe was slow to warm up to. He had a stubborn streak that was a mile wide, and disdained anything he deemed to be not pure to the musical style.
That stubborness is best demonstrated by a famous story about his trusted mandolin, a 1923 Gibson F5. He purchased the instrument in 1943 for $150 after seeing it for sale in the window of a barber shop in Florida. Over the years of constant use the face of the mandolin had become well worn, and the neck had become cracked as well. He sent it in to Gibson for some very specific factory repairs, including recasting the neck, new tuning pegs, a new fret board and refinishing. After four months Gibson sent the instrument back to him, but all they had done was repair the cracked neck. When he complained, the company said they had no records of any other repairs being requested, and basically said to him "buh bye."
Monroe was disgusted by the episode and used his pocket knife to gouge out the pearl inlaid Gibson name on the headstock of his mandolin. He refused to advertise for them, but he loved the sound of the instrument too much to quit playing it. For years he played that mandolin with the gouge mark clearly visible on the headstock. This happened before Bill Monroe's reputation as the Father of Bluegrass became firmly established. For years Gibson tried unsuccessfully to make amends for the misunderstanding, offering to do the repairs for free and to provide him with a new mandolin free of charge, and for years Monroe rebuffed their attempts. He finally made peace with them in 1980, much to their delight. He was, by then, a legend among Bluegrass fans and mandolin players. They retrieved his mandolin, flew it to their factory (even purchasing a separate first class ticket just for the instrument so that it would not incur any damage in flight) and repaired it to his satisfaction.
After Monroe's death in 1996, his 1923 Gibson mandolin, purchased for $150, went up for auction in New York City by Christies. It was sold for $1.2 million dollars. As for the headstock that he had deliberately defaced with his pocket knife? That small, 7 inch piece of black pear wood was also auctioned in 2008 by Christies, and sold for $37,500. His repaired mandolin is now housed in the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville.
I've always enjoyed Bluegrass music. The sad ballads are drenched in pathos, and the reels are irresistably joyous. It's hard not to want to move your feet when you listen to them.
I'll leave you with one last song, another of my favorites, from Bluegrass Boys alumnus Jimmy Martin, as well as a youtube clip of an interview that Martin did for the documentary "The Pioneers of Bluegrass." Listen to the interview first...listen to his simple, rural diction and the story he tells of how he sacrificed to buy his first guitar. It speaks to the love that he and his brethren feel for the music, and how imporatnt it was to them to just be able to play.