William Smith Monroe (September 13, 1911 – September 9, 1996) was an American musician who helped develop the style of music known as bluegrass, which takes its name from his band, the "Blue Grass Boys," named for Monroe's home state of Kentucky. Monroe's performing career spanned 60 years as a singer, instrumentalist, composer and bandleader.
Bill Monroe was born in Rosine, Kentucky. Credited as "The Father of Bluegrass," the music he created evolved from the folk and country music he heard growing up in a musical family as the youngest of eight children. As a child, he also backed up his uncle Pendleton Vandiver ("Uncle Pen") at local dances.
Orphaned by age 16, Monroe eventually moved to Chicago and formed a group with brothers Birch and Charlie, with Bill on mandolin. While in Chicago, he worked in an oil refinery and as a square dancer on Chicago's WLS National Barn Dance. Birch soon dropped out, but Bill and Charlie continued on as the Monroe Brothers, finding their most enthusiastic audiences at Charlotte, N.C.'s radio station WBT. They soon recorded several sides for RCA's Bluebird label, including "John Henry,""Nine Pound Hammer" and "What Would You Give in Exchange for Your Soul."
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| Charlie & Bill Monroe |
In 1938, the highly successful duo split up, and Bill formed his first band, the Kentuckians. It was a year later that Monroe changed the name of the band to the Blue Grass Boys and soon set his sights on Nashville. Monroe was only 28 years old when he joined the Opry cast on Oct. 28, 1939. Introduced by George D. Hay, the Opry's founder, Monroe performed a the Jimmie Rodgers hit "Muleskinner Blues" and got three encores that first night at the War Memorial Auditorium. He quickly became an Opry favourite.
In the 1940s, Monroe began adding lyrics to his melodies and wrote such classic hits as "Blue Moon of Kentucky" and "Uncle Pen." He hired banjo picker Earl Scruggs, singer-guitarist Lester Flatt and fiddler Chubby Wise on fiddle to create what is widely recognized as the most important bluegrass band ever. In 1948, Flatt & Scruggs left the band to form the Foggy Mountain Boys. (Wise also left the band that year.)
The early 1950s turned out to be a golden era for Monroe and his music. He wrote and recorded such classics as Footprints In The Snow, Kentucky Waltz, Uncle Pen, Roanoke, Scotland, Walking In Jerusalem and I’m Working On A Building. A young Elvis Presley chose to sing a cover of Blue Moon Of Kentucky when he auditioned for the Grand Ole Opry in 1954 and recorded the song for his first Sun Records single. Presley later apologised to Mr. Monroe for changing the arrangement of his song.
Monroe's fortunes began to improve during the "folk revival" of the early 1960s. Many college students and other young people were beginning to discover Monroe, associating his style more with traditional folk music than with the country-and-western genre with which it had previously been identified. The word "bluegrass" first appeared around this time to describe the sound of Monroe and similar artists such as Flatt and Scruggs, the Stanley Brothers, Reno and Smiley, Jim and Jesse, and the Osborne Brothers.
While Flatt and Scruggs immediately recognized the potential for a lucrative new audience in cities and on college campuses in the North, Monroe was slower to respond. Under the influence of Ralph Rinzler, a young musician and folklorist from New Jersey who briefly became Monroe's manager in 1963, Monroe gradually expanded his geographic reach beyond the traditional southern country music circuit. Rinzler was also responsible for a lengthy profile and interview in the influential folk music magazine Sing Out, which first publicly referred to Monroe as the "father" of bluegrass. Accordingly, at the first bluegrass festival organized by Carlton Haney at Roanoke, Virginia in 1965, Bill Monroe was the central figure.
Monroe was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1970, and he earned the National Endowment for the Arts' esteemed Heritage Award. His Southern Flavour LP won the first Grammy award ever given for bluegrass music in 1989, and he earned the Grammy's Lifetime Achievement award in 1993. In 1995, he was awarded a National Medal of Honour by President Clinton at a ceremony conducted at the White House.
Monroe's last performance occurred on March 15, 1996. He ended his touring and playing career in April, following a stroke. Monroe died on September 9, 1996, in Springfield, Tennessee, four days before his 85th birthday. A year later, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted him as an early influence of rock 'n' roll.
Monroe described his beloved bluegrass as music with "a hard drive to it. It's Scotch bagpipes and ole-time fiddlin'. It's Methodist and Holiness and Baptist. It's blues and jazz, and it has a high lonesome sound. It's plain music that tells a good story. It's played from my heart to your heart, and it will touch you. Bluegrass is music that matters."
(Info edited from CMT & Wikipedia)