Quotes About Bill Monroe

Bluegrass is wonderful music. I'm glad I originated it.

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

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.

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.

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.

I had some good teachers. One of the greatest teachers I've had is bluegrass music: going back and listening to Bill Monroe's music, the Stanley Brothers, Flatt & Scruggs. When I was with Ralph Stanley I learned a lot from him.

While we waited for the eggs Peterkin asked, trying to sound casual, "This your hound-dog? What's his name?" Bill Monroe looked at us and the dog as mean as a man can look. "He's ourn all right. Bein' a plain hound-dog he hain't got a name.

There's only one Hank Williams, man. Singing that high-voiced style, them bluegrassers, I don't see how they do it - Jimmy Martin, Bill Monroe - it's just a natural thing, man.

High lonesome is a sound or type of music in the bluegrass tradition. Its roots go back to Bill Monroe, Roscoe Holcomb, and the bluegrass region of Kentucky.

There wasn't really a lot of difference from a Mississippi perspective between what Elvis did on 'Mystery Train' or 'Milkcow Blues' or what Bill Monroe was playing or what Flatt and Scruggs was playing; it was rock 'n' roll to me.