Bill Monroe Obituary
Obit New York Times Sept 10, 1996
Bill Monroe, who helped lay the foundation of country music as the universally recognized father of bluegrass, died yesterday in a nursing home in Springfield, Tenn. He was 84. He had suffered a stroke earlier this year, said his booking agent, Tony Conway.
Mr. Monroe, who played mandolin and sang in a high, lonesome tenor, created one of the most durable idioms in American music. Bluegrass, named after his band, the Blue Grass Boys, was a fusion of American music: gospel harmonies and Celtic fiddling, blues and folk songs, Tin Pan Alley pop and jazz-tinged improvisations. The Blue Grass Boys sang, in keening high harmony, about backwoods memories and stoic faith; they played brilliantly filigreed tunes as if they were jamming on a back porch, trading melodies among fiddle, banjo and Mr. Monroe's steely mandolin. By bringing together rural nostalgia and modern virtuosity, Mr. Monroe evoked an American Eden, pristine yet cosmopolitan.
He perfected his music in the late 1940's and stubbornly maintained it, and he lived to see his revolutionary fusion become the bedrock of a tradition that survives among enthusiasts around the world. He was also an indefatigable traveling musician, and a taskmaster who challenged his sidemen with difficult keys and tempos. Every musician now playing bluegrass has drawn on Mr. Monroe's repertory, his vocal style and his ideas of how a string band should work together. And his influence echoes down not just through country music but from Elvis Presley (who recorded Mr. Monroe's ''Blue Moon of Kentucky'' on his first single disk) to bluegrass-rooted rock bands like the Grateful Dead and the Eagles.
''I never wrote a tune in my life,'' Mr. Monroe once said. ''All that music's in the air around you all the time. I was just the first one to reach up and pull it out.''
