Bill Monroe – Doyle’s Space: Music Hall of Fame

He left school while still in the fifth grade, and the death of his parents made his childhood especially difficult. His mother died when he was about ten and his father died several years later, leaving Monroe essentially orphaned while still a teenager. He went to live with family members and eventually followed his brothers north to the Chicago area,

where he worked at an oil refinery during the Depression. Music increasingly became his life. He and his brothers performed at dances and on radio, including Chicago’s WLS National Barn Dance, where Monroe also participated as a square dancer. In 1934, he and his older brother Charlie Monroe

left their day jobs and began performing professionally as the Monroe Brothers, with Bill on mandolin and Charlie on guitar. The Monroe Brothers became one of the most successful brother duos of the 1930s, particularly after they moved into the Carolinas and gained exposure through Charlotte radio station WBT. Their recordings for RCA Victor included songs such as “What Would You Give in Exchange for Your Soul,”

“Drifting Too Far From the Shore,” and “New River Train.” Their sound was already unusually energetic, with Monroe’s rapid mandolin playing giving the music a distinctive drive. The brothers’ relationship, however, was volatile, and they broke up in 1938. Monroe then created the Blue Grass Boys, a band whose name eventually gave the new musical style its name.

His breakthrough came in 1939 when he successfully auditioned for the Grand Ole Opry with his powerful adaptation of Jimmie Rodgers’ “Mule Skinner Blues.” He became a lifelong member of the Opry and remained associated with it for more than half a century. During the 1940s, Monroe gradually assembled the musical ingredients that would become bluegrass.

His high, penetrating tenor voice, hard-driving mandolin, close vocal harmonies, acoustic instrumentation, and intense instrumental solos created a sound that was faster and more forceful than much of the country music of the period. The addition of banjo player Earl Scruggs and guitarist and singer Lester Flatt in the mid-1940s was particularly important. Scruggs’s revolutionary three-finger banjo style,

combined with Monroe’s mandolin and the playing of musicians such as fiddler Chubby Wise and bassist Howard Watts, helped establish what became the classic bluegrass sound. Flatt and Scruggs eventually left Monroe in 1948 to form their own highly successful partnership, but the Blue Grass Boys continued to serve as a training ground for generations of important musicians,

including Jimmy Martin, Don Reno, Sonny Osborne, Mac Wiseman, Vassar Clements, Del McCoury, Peter Rowan, Kenny Baker, and many others. Monroe was much more than an instrumentalist. He was a songwriter, singer, bandleader, businessman, showman, and tireless promoter of the music he helped create. His compositions included “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” “Uncle Pen,”

“Raw Hide,” “Blue Grass Breakdown,” “Kentucky Waltz,” and “Jerusalem Ridge.” “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” recorded by Monroe in 1946, became one of the most enduring songs in American music and was later transformed into an early rock-and-roll hit by Elvis Presley. Monroe toured extensively with tent shows and even

incorporated a semiprofessional baseball team into his traveling operation. In 1951 he purchased a country music park at Bean Blossom, Indiana, and beginning in 1967 he established an annual bluegrass festival there that became one of the most important events in the history of the genre.

Although bluegrass initially appealed primarily to rural audiences in the South and border states, Monroe’s music found a new audience during the folk revival of the 1960s. Folklorist Ralph Rinzler helped introduce Monroe to younger urban and college audiences, and the growth of bluegrass festivals gave the music a national and

eventually international following. Monroe continued recording and touring for decades, traveling throughout the United States and appearing in countries including Japan, England, Ireland, Holland, Switzerland, and Israel. He performed for presidents and appeared at venues ranging from rural festivals to major performing-arts centers and the White House.

Even into his seventies and eighties, Monroe maintained a demanding touring schedule because he regarded performing as central to his existence. Monroe’s personal life was considerably quieter than his professional career. He married Carolyn Brown, and they had two children, James and Melissa; the marriage eventually ended in divorce.

He later married Della Streeter in 1985, but that marriage also ended in divorce. His only son, James Monroe, eventually became a musician and performed with his father before forming his own group. Despite the enormous influence he exercised over other musicians, Bill Monroe was known as a private, sometimes stern and intensely competitive man who was deeply protective of the musical style he had developed.

His dedication to bluegrass remained remarkably strong throughout his life. The honors Monroe received reflected his extraordinary importance to American music. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1970 and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1971. He received a National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship in 1982 and the International

Bluegrass Music Association’s Distinguished Achievement Award in 1986. His album Southern Flavor earned the Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album in 1989, the first Grammy awarded specifically for bluegrass. He was inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Honor in 1991 and received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993.