Metro Pulse/Gamut/Bill Monroe

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Two new books explore the influential life of the father of bluegrass

by Lee Gardner

Jazz, the imperial Duke Ellington once said, is "the music that somebody likes to look down on." The equally imperial Bill Monroe surely would have known what his fellow bandleader was talking about in regards to "hillbilly music," a term which limited and devalued his own work. No one calls bluegrass hillbilly music anymore, the way even Billboard magazine once did, but it still carries the hillbilly taint. Even most fans of glitzed-up contemporary country music would probably hightail it at the sound of a high, lonesome bluegrass tenor and a rolling banjo run, despite the two genres' deep common roots.

But bluegrass was not created by nameless hillbillies in an unrecorded rural past. The music is a modern innovation; a 20th-century synthesis, albeit a rural one, created by one extraordinary artist—Bill Monroe. Two new books attempt to redress years of ignorance and misperception about Monroe and his music: Can't You Hear Me Callin': The Life of Bill Monroe, Father of Bluegrass (Little Brown, $25.95) by Richard D. Smith and The Bill Monroe Reader (University of Illinois Press, $29.95), edited by Tom Ewing. The former is the first-ever full-length biography of the man and his music; the latter is an anthology of articles and other writings in which music-industry promoters, journalists, folklorists, and admirers viewed and interpreted Monroe during his life-span and beyond.

The facts of Bill Monroe's early life and career are the stuff of legend among those who know them. As related by Smith in clear, deft prose—and told over and over again by various tellers in the Reader—Monroe was born the youngest of eight children in 1911 in the tiny Western Kentucky hamlet of Rosine. Shy and cross-eyed, by 1928 he was alone; his parents had died and most of his older siblings had gone off to industrial jobs in the Midwest. Overlooked and picked on as a child, the teenage Monroe so feared teasing that he hid in the barn whenever strangers passed the family farm. Monroe eventually moved in with his mother's broken-down bachelor brother, Pendleton Vandiver, a renowned local fiddler.

When the Monroe children first started following in their mother's musical footsteps and playing old-time string-band music, older sons Charlie and Birch chose guitar and fiddle, leaving tag-along Bill to pick up the mandolin, a distant third in desirability. But under the tutelage of his beloved Uncle Pen and a black blues guitarist named Arnold Shultz, the teenage Monroe found confidence as a musician, backing up his uncle and Shultz at local dances and honing his individual style.

In 1929, Bill joined his brothers as a laborer at an oil refinery near Chicago, moonlighting with live performances at dances and on the Windy City's legendary country radio station WLS. Within a few years, Charlie and Bill had left their day jobs behind to tour and record as the Monroe Brothers. After a fractious split, Bill struck out on his own with a backing band he dubbed the Blue Grass Boys after his home state's indigenous turf. In 1938, Monroe and his band auditioned for The Grand Old Opry radio program on Nashville's WSM with a new sound, one that centered on the leader's insurgent rhythm playing and high, tenor harmony. When they finished, Opry impresario George D. Hay told Monroe, "Well, you're here, and if you ever leave, you'll have to fire yourself."

The Kentuckian played the Opry most Saturday nights for the next 58 years while keeping up a grueling 200-plus-dates-a-year touring schedule and making hundreds of recordings. Along the way, Monroe refined his own idiosyncratic musical invention, shaping a keening, high-speed blend of Southern string-band music, white gospel, deep blues, close vocal harmony, and virtuoso solo improvisation performed on acoustic instruments. Folklorist Alan Lomax memorably tagged it "folk music with overdrive." Everyone else would eventually co-opt the name of Monroe's band and call it bluegrass.

Monroe's peculiar music thrived in part because he taught it directly to the best string-band players of several generations as they passed through his band; the list of former Blue Grass Boys includes Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, Don Reno, Carter Stanley, Mac Wiseman, Kenny Baker, Del McCoury, Peter Rowan, Richard Greene, and dozens of others (Reader editor Ewing himself is a former Monroe sideman). In return, players such as Scruggs, Martin, and Baker lent distinct musical voices to Monroe's personal vision. But even as he absorbed the contributions of others, the auteur was self-consciously protective of his music's purity. The Reader features a 1966 interview in which Monroe tells a questioner, "You could get easy bluegrass to swinging, you know, and get it too modern...and I don't want it that way. The biggest job of bluegrass is to keep out what don't belong in it." Smith documents the friction generated when the '60s and '70s introduced electric instruments and pop flavorings to create "newgrass," another term and concept for which Monroe bore a healthy dislike.

The arrival of rock 'n' roll is traditionally credited with crippling the careers of Monroe and other country and bluegrass artists for decades. But, as Can't You Hear Me Callin' and the Reader document, the truth of Monroe's career trajectory is a little more complicated. Proud, stubborn, prone to grudges, and mistrustful of music-industry machinery, he was already in commercial decline by the time Elvis Presley sang his rocked-up version of Monroe's signature song, "Blue Moon of Kentucky," on the Opry in 1954; Monroe fell victim to changing tastes among country fans and his own haphazard approach to managing his career. Even as the folk revival of the '50s and '60s brought a new, Northern, urban audience for acoustic performers, Monroe was locked in a feud with former Blue Grass Boys Flatt and Scruggs; when the duo became the hottest bluegrass stars in the land, they studiously made no mention of their old boss or their formative stint in his band. Though the folk-boom fans eventually rediscovered him, Monroe never sat for a formal, in-depth interview until 1962, when musician and future Monroe manager Ralph Rinzler told his story for Sing Out! magazine (Monroe was 52 years old at the time). He was never profiled in a mainstream magazine until Newsweek ran a piece in 1970.

Both articles are included in the painstakingly compiled and researched Reader, which is a must for any serious Monroe fan (and any serious bluegrass fan is a Monroe fan). The selections progress from jovial write-ups from early programs and songbooks, telling of a hillbilly musician who started out traveling to gigs on muleback; to the first inklings in folkie magazines of his true contributions; to the loving tributes rendered as news of his death in 1996 spread around the worldwide bluegrass community by e-mail. It is crammed full of information about his music and career, and Ewing and the University of Illinois Press are both to be commended for their effort, which would honor any artist so favored.

Smith's bio goes the Reader one further and delves into Monroe's personal life, peering behind the magisterial public reserve the singer maintained most of his adulthood and reading between the lines of the Reader articles written by adoring folkies and politic Music City reporters. The shy, cross-eyed country boy grew into a strapping man who never smoked, rarely drank, plowed his fields with a mule until he was old man, and battled back from car crashes and life-threatening illnesses until a stroke finally laid him low. But as physically intimidating as he could be, Monroe was not without his weaknesses. The singer never quite got over his family's abandonment and brooded on it the rest of his life. (Former sideman Del McCoury recalls that Monroe once explained a dark mood after a trip back to Rosine by saying "Sometimes I get to thinking about how they treated me when I was little, and it just makes me mad;" Monroe was in his 50s.) Smith theorizes that Monroe's uncertain and painful early years made him prone to the cut-off relationships and cold feuds that plagued his life and his career. The author also maintains that his early emotional neediness made the singer a compulsive womanizer.

Monroe's romantic howlings at the moon were an open secret in Nashville, but Smith's book gives the first full public accounting of the singer's love life. He wound up with his first wife, Carolyn, thanks to a shotgun marriage in 1936. Though they remained married for 24 years, during which Carolyn often managed his career, Monroe also conducted a long-running affair with a woman named Bessie Lee Maudlin, who played in his band and with whom he may have had a child. There were many other women, and Can't You Hear Me Callin' is full of tales that might not have raised an eyebrow in the world of rock 'n' roll, but scandalized Nashville. Monroe wooed and won Julia LaBella when she was 21 and he was 65. He was later charged with smacking a ladyfriend in the head with a Bible during an argument (the charge was quickly dropped). Smith even reports that when Maudlin eventually sued for divorce as Monroe's common-law wife, she raised questions about whether or not the singer molested his and Carolyn's daughter, Melissa, but the author quickly dismisses the allegation.

Some of these carryings-on might seem sleazy in another context. But Monroe's upright country-preacher demeanor wasn't a pose; Smith found that Monroe was a highly moral skirt-chaser who avoided married women and his band members' girlfriends. In fact, Smith paints Monroe not as a cold-hearted womanizer, but as a straightlaced man tormented by love who let his pain loose in his music. Some of his finest songs—"Rocky Road Blues," "Blue Moon of Kentucky," "Letter from My Darlin'," and the tune which gives the book its title—were supposedly inspired by Monroe's romantic anguish. Can't You Hear Me Callin' not only brings to notice the life and music of a great American musician, it humanizes the legend and reveals the palpable lonesomeness behind that high, lonesome sound.