Quotes from Richard D. Smith

Gaylord immediately rehabilitated the log house, which had been allowed to become seriously dilapidated.103 The company had no plans for the property; it just wanted to make Bill comfortable. It was a Nashville-style gesture that would be unknown in New York or Hollywood.

Virginia Stauffer

Rinzler was struck by the fact that for all its onstage spontaneity, Monroe's music wasn't intuitive. He had consciously created it and could relate exactly where he had gotten each sound, like a painter who knows exactly what colors he has used from his palette.35 Rinzler began to see that this enigmatic man did little that he had not very deliberately decided upon.

Flatt and Scruggs formed a band called the Foggy Mountain Boys, taking its name from "Foggy Mountain Top," a Carter Family favorite they decided to use as their theme song.

Rock & roll music is a derivative of rockabilly music; rockabilly music is Bill Monroe and the blues tied together. That's it.

Having a wife and a girlfriend was not enough for Bill. The enjoyment and ego gratification of having other women, likely fueled by a persistent narcissism and a consuming need for contact and reassurance, gave rise to multiple affairs.

The bitter irony, of course, was that the same young musicians who stood in awe of Bill Monroe were about to push him, and others like him, off the stage. Rock 'n' roll began to take the youth audience away from country music. And that was a disaster.

In a multifaceted, trend-setting career, he had truly become the most broadly talented and broadly influential figure in American popular music history. He had been much more than the Father of Bluegrass: He had been an uncle to country music, a first cousin to the folk revival, and a grandfather to rock 'n' roll.166

Bill, it was said, was a direct descendant of President James Monroe; he grew up in the mountains; he rose from hardscrabble poverty in a backward, backwoods culture; bluegrass music sprang from ancient Scots-Irish culture transplanted to the Appalachians, where it blossomed as a traditional folk art.

Bill's father would have remembered the Civil War, and his great-great-grandfather actually fought in the American Revolution.

Of course, the most common response is that Bill Monroe was "the Father of Bluegrass" and its true creator. It was his melding of a band sound around fiddle playing, his high singing, his revolutionary mandolin stylings, and his distinctive surging rhythm that set bluegrass apart from the rest of country or folk music.

The most striking hallmarks of so-called traditional bluegrass were fully defined during the Jimmy Martin years, long after Flatt and Scruggs had left the Blue Grass Boys. If Bill Monroe started bluegrass, Earl Scruggs certainly made it as popular as it is today. But it is crucial to recognize that Monroe was the prime creative organizer and artistic guiding force behind bluegrass.

Arguments about the origins of bluegrass are particularly intense because—as "traditional" as bluegrass is in comparison to the rest of American popular music—it has a starting point within living memory (unlike opera or symphonic music), and its origins can arguably be credited to one man

For those unhappy with modern society, folk music suggested the colors, scents, and textures of a more authentic time. The folk scene offered a purer cultural identity, or at least the fantasy of one.

Unlike the stereotyped carousing, hotel room-smashing, self-destructive pop star, Monroe did not smoke, drink, or use drugs. But he did love women. Many of them.

Bill Monroe's earliest paid music work was thanks to Shultz, who asked Bill to "second him" on guitar when he fiddled for square dances.

Contrary to popular belief, the performers who emerged from the southern hills to become the pioneers of country music and bluegrass were not from an exclusively aural folk tradition. Formal musical education, albeit rudimentary, was available each summer in towns like Rosine in the form of "singing schools!

Meanwhile, the Flatt and Scruggs juggernaut rolled on. Under Louise Scruggs's shrewd management, Monroe's former sidemen had become the bluegrass darlings of the northern folk music revival.

Driving on 1-65 near Nashville, Bill proposed to her.102 Hazel started laughing. She knew he couldn't be a husband. It wasn't just that he was promiscuous: She knew that now, with his resurgent fame, he was married to the world.

Ralph and Mike would soon be caught up in a remarkable phenomenon that transcended prevailing regional, class, and gender boundaries. It was an intertwining cultural grapevine that united northerners and southerners who shared a common passion for rural string band music. This network proved crucial to the survival of Bill Monroe's career and even bluegrass itself.

But topping it all was the voice of Bill Monroe: as high as a woman's but totally masculine, as sharp as a razor but as friendly as a handshake, as crystalline as an icicle but as warm as beaming sunshine.

Meanwhile, David Grisman, a Ralph Rinzler protege and Monroe devotee from New Jersey, was living in California and developing his own newgrassy sound, a blend of bluegrass, swing, and Jewish klezmer that he called "dawg music" (after the canine nickname bestowed on him by friend Jerry Garcia).

Now, what did you say your name was?" Bill asked.9 "I'm Frank Sinatra." "And what is it that you do?" "I'm a singer." "I believe I've heard of you," said Bill, deadpan. "Well, I hope so," Sinatra replied with considerable grace.

Performing at the Sea of Galilee, a huge full moon shining behind him, he launched into "Blue Moon of Kentucky" and the crowd came to its feet. He encored seven times that night. Bill had been pleasantly surprised that Jewish Americans like Gene Lowinger, Steve Arkin, and David Grisman had become his devotees; now he was happy, indeed profoundly moved, that Israelis loved and understood his music.