September 17, 2000
Kentucky Troubadour
A biography of Bill Monroe and the bluegrass music he invented.

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  • First Chapter: 'Can't You Hear Me Callin''

    The Life of Bill Monroe, Father of Bluegrass.
    By Richard D. Smith.
    Illustrated. 365 pp. Boston:
    Little, Brown & Company. $25.95.

    I once met Bill Monroe, the creator of bluegrass music, backstage at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. He stood six feet tall and looked at least seven, and his expressionless face might have been carved from a stump of petrified wood. He wore a white Stetson hat and a sky-blue suit with a pin in each lapel -- one was an enamel American flag, the other an evangelical Christian emblem -- and everyone in earshot called him ''Mister Monroe.'' Never were italics more audible.

    Such stiff-necked dignity went out of fashion long ago, but it was common enough in country people of Monroe's poverty-scarred generation (he turned 18 two weeks before Black Tuesday in 1929), along with an iron reserve still more rarely encountered in our flabby, confessional age. Nobody ever complains in Monroe's songs, though there is usually plenty to complain about, while bluegrass itself is no less contradictory in its blending of seemingly incompatible styles and themes. It is at once lively and bluesy, hopeful and tragic, fabulously virtuosic and as plain as a cast-iron skillet. And while it often sounds like folk music, it is in point of fact the highly sophisticated invention of one prodigiously gifted man.

    Jelly Roll Morton did not invent jazz, nor did Jerome Kern invent musical comedy, but there would be no bluegrass without Bill Monroe. You can hear it starting to take shape in the very first recordings he made with his brother Charlie in 1936; his lickety-split mandolin solos and hard-bitten, high-flying tenor harmonies were already recognizable. Ten years later, he walked into a Chicago recording studio with a new band featuring Lester Flatt on guitar and Earl Scruggs on banjo, and all at once the thing was done. What the Blue Grass Boys were playing in 1946 is the same music Alison Krauss and Rhonda Vincent play today, a music whose shadow extends over much more of American popular culture than is generally realized. One of the songs Monroe cut that day was his own ''Blue Moon of Kentucky,'' which would be re-recorded eight years later in a revved-up rockabilly version by a then-unknown Monroe fan named Elvis Presley.

    This tale has been told many times, most notably in Neil V. Rosenberg's magisterial ''Bluegrass: A History,'' but the story of Monroe's stormy life had yet to be recounted in detail before the publication of ''Can't You Hear Me Callin'.'' Richard D. Smith, the author of ''Bluegrass: An Informal Guide,'' who plays mandolin and guitar, has produced a carefully researched biography based on interviews with many of the surviving key figures of the early days of bluegrass. It is factually reliable, musically knowledgeable, adequately written and appropriately frank (especially as regards Monroe's chronic extramarital philandering), and I cannot imagine its being bettered for a long time to come.

    William Smith Monroe was the eighth and last child of a timber farming family from Jerusalem Ridge, Ky., whose hard-working members had little time left over for love. ''For many years,'' he later told a friend, ''I had nobody to play with or nobody to work under. You just had to kindly grow up. Just like a little dog outside, tryin' to make his own way, trying to make out the best way he can.'' By the time he was 16, he had lost both parents and went to live with his Uncle Pen, an amateur fiddler who introduced him to the square-dance tunes whose stamping rhythms would eventually be absorbed into the language of bluegrass. In 1929, he moved to Chicago to work at an oil refinery, part of the great migration of ambitious young men from the South; it was there that he and Charlie Monroe began performing professionally, becoming a full-time duet act in 1933.

    The Monroe Brothers' music was a homemade amalgam of ''old-timey'' ballads and white gospel songs, lightly brushed with jazz and the blues and enlivened by a daredevil energy all their own. When the brothers went their separate ways, Monroe put together a four-piece band called the Blue Grass Boys and auditioned for the Grand Ole Opry, winning a place on the weekly radio show in 1939. Though the group's galloping style was an instant hit with Southern audiences, Monroe continued to tinker with it for another seven years; Scruggs's syncopated three-finger banjo picking turned out to be the missing ingredient, and once he joined the band in 1946, no more tinkering was necessary.

    Younger musicians began copying the Blue Grass Boys almost immediately, and when Flatt and Scruggs left in 1948 to start their own band, the Foggy Mountain Boys, they played, logically enough, in exactly the same style. Instead of finding such imitation flattering, the famously hot-tempered Monroe was enraged by it, and grew angrier still as the more shrewdly managed Foggy Mountain Boys found wider popular success. It was not until the folk revival of the early 1960's that he won recognition as the ''father'' of what had come to be known generically as bluegrass. By that time, he was working with younger, better-educated musicians, many of them urban Northerners, and though they treated him as a living legend, he found it hard to view his new colleagues as anything other than objects of suspicion.

    Success made Monroe more approachable, but he remained essentially solitary to the end of his long life (he died in 1996), never fully capable of trusting anyone else's good intentions, and his loneliness was writ large in his music. He sang of love gone wrong in a harsh, stoic wail, the cry of a strong man in agony who cannot quite manage to keep his pain to himself. This intensely inward quality -- what fans of bluegrass call its ''high lonesome sound'' -- coexists uneasily with the joyous sound of fleet-fingered pickers sprinting wildly to the finish line. It is this delicate balance that gives bluegrass its double-edged character, and it was Bill Monroe who first struck it.

    Does that make him ''the most broadly talented and broadly influential figure in American popular music history,'' as Smith asserts? That covers a lot of ground, as does the incautious claim that he can be ''ranked with Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Charles Ives and Hank Williams as a true giant of American music.'' For all its emotional intensity, bluegrass is far narrower in expressive scope than the jazz that influenced it, and I suspect most unbiased observers would thus be reluctant to rank Monroe with Armstrong and Ellington as a musical innovator. Even so, the invention of bluegrass was without doubt an important cultural event, very probably significant enough to justify calling its inventor a musical giant. If so, that would explain Bill Monroe's lifelong melancholy as well as anything that happened to him in childhood: giants are always lonesome.

    Terry Teachout is the music critic of Commentary and a contributor to Time magazine. He is writing ''H. L. Mencken: A Life.''

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