Bill Monroe Transcript
- [Announcer] And now, ladies and gentleman, will you make welcome a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, the father of bluegrass, Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys!
- His influence has literally touched, I think, every form of American music.
- The influence that he's had on so many musicians, country musicians, bluegrass musicians, rock and roll musicians, I mean, the obvious influence, Elvis Presley.
- Every year, there's always a young crop of mandolin players, or fiddle players, or banjo players, that are trying to learn to play his music.
- You know, there was a saying that blues had a baby and they called it rock and roll, but I say you should put, you know, that bluegrass had its part in there, too.
- Bill is, he's, you know, one of the important guys in 20th century American music. All right.
- What's the first earliest, earliest recollection you have of Uncle Pen?
- [Bill] Well, I was real young, and he would come and visit us on the weekends, you know, and bring his fiddle with him. And my mother, she would fix supper for everybody.
- [John] Now, did your mother play the fiddle too?
- Yeah, she could play the fiddle too.
- [John] Wow, she learned from Uncle Pen--
- And she could play the accordion.
- Wow.
- Yeah. They just growed up together, and I guess they both learned about the same time.
- [John] What kind of tunes did they play?
- Old time numbers, you know, like "Sally Goodin" and "Fire on the Mountains" and numbers like that, "Billy in the Low Ground." "Soldier's Joy." All right, I'm gonna play a number. Way back when I was first starting to play the mandolin and my uncle Pen Vandiver and people like that played the fiddle and they'd play this old-timer called "Soldier's Joy." So I'm gonna play a little bit of it. The reason I picked the mandolin, my brother, Birch Monroe, he wanted to play the fiddle, and Charlie, he wanted to play the guitar, so there was nothing left but just the mandolin for me and so I started on the mandolin and now I'm glad that that's the instrument that I've taken back when I was real young. I like them old time fiddle numbers, you know, I learned 'em back years and years ago and the way they played 'em and I think they played 'em the right way. And so I tried to play them note for note how they played.
- [John] Well, you keep the feeling, you keep the--
- Yes.
- [John] The tones. 'Cause, you know, there's a lot of stuff that you can sit in there that don't fit.
- And they got to be played to where you can dance to 'em.
- [John] Were there any other fiddlers around there besides Uncle Pen that they listened to?
- There wasn't no music in the country much and there were a few fellas that could play guitar and that's about all they had to follow the fiddle with. The mandolin hit it and got started good and there wasn't... Nobody played the banjo hardly. And the bass fiddle, it wasn't even heard of right there, nobody played the bass.
- How long did you live in Rosine before you moved up to live with him?
- It was a long time. After a lot of my brothers and my father and mother both passed away, a lot of my brothers, they moved north, you know. I just didn't have any place much to stay.
- But you were the last one to go up to Indiana.
- Yes, sir, yes, sir. So, I moved in with Uncle Pen up there. I was around 15, 16, I was working hard back in the days.
- Would he play music up during the day or just at night?
- Well, most through the night because I would be out working through the daytime, I don't know whether he played or not, but I don't think he did much through the daytime, but he would fiddle some, sit outside, you know and you could hear him all the way down in Rosine playing that fiddle. He was a wonderful fiddle player.
- Mm.
- "Jenny Lynn," man, he could really play that. That was a powerful number.
- Yeah. I'm not sure I know how "Jenny Lynn" goes exactly the way he did it. Did you cut that once?
- Yes, sir, I did. That's and Uncle Pen over there. All that?
- Okay.
♪ Oh, the people will come from far away ♪
♪ To dance all night to the break of day ♪
♪ When the caller would holler do si do ♪
♪ They knew Uncle Pen was ready to go ♪
♪ Late in the evening about sundown ♪
♪ High on the hill and above the town ♪
♪ Uncle Pen played the fiddle ♪
♪ Lord, how it rang ♪
♪ You could hear it talk ♪
♪ You could hear it sing ♪
♪ He played an old piece he called "Soldier's Joy" ♪
♪ And one he called "Boston Boy" ♪
♪ Greatest of all was "Jenny Lynn" ♪
♪ To me that's where the fiddlin' begins ♪
♪ Late in the evening about sundown ♪
♪ High on the hill and above the town ♪
♪ Uncle Pen played the fiddle ♪
♪ Lord, how it rang ♪
♪ You could hear it talk ♪
♪ You'd hear it sing ♪
♪ Oh, I'll never forget that morning day ♪
♪ When Uncle Pen was called away ♪
♪ He hung up his fiddle and he hung up his bow ♪
♪ And he knew it was time for him to go ♪
♪ Late in the evening about sundown ♪
♪ High on the hill and above the town ♪
♪ Uncle Pen played the fiddle ♪
♪ Lord, how it rang ♪
♪ You'd hear it talk ♪
♪ You'd hear it sing ♪
- John, I'll never forget the old days. They were wonderful. Had some wonderful times up there in Rosine and went to school, you know, worked hard. Back in the early days when all of my brothers had lived there, you know, and I would drive four horses and haul telephone poles or haul crossties or coal, you see, and when I was 16 I was making into a stout man already, but I knew how to load and everything. Working on the farm and taking care of things, you know, the way of your animals and everything and your dogs and chickens and cats and everything. You've got to see that they're fed right and taken care of. So that plays a big part with you. You know that you've done something good. So I like to do all that. I was raised that way and it's just in me to take care of things.
- Is this the Jerusalem Ridge?
- Our home was there in some old fields and the orchard was grounded, you know, but there was maple trees all around it and walnut trees and cedar trees round the yard. But way back about half a mile or a mile was where Jerusalem Ridge come through. It was about three or four miles long, and that's where we used to go and we'd fox hunt back there. I'm still a great fox hunter and I like to turn my dogs usually, you know, once a week. And so, when I'm back here in the hills, why, it's a good place to hunt. Boy, the fire still ain't wanting to burn here. It's the place where you can think about things and, you know, not be tied up all the time with something to do. On my way back to the old home, I was up in Kentucky. We were gonna play up there one night and... Or I might just had a night off, but I went by the old home place up there and my brothers, you know, my father and my mother passed away, some of them lived there. But I went up there and there was no light in the window and no light around no place and I went on up there. There wasn't nobody living there. So, I just wrote that song.
♪ Come on back to the old home ♪
♪ And the road-- ♪
- On my way back to the old home and the road winds on up the hill, but there is no light in the window where long years ago I once lived.
♪ Soon my childhood days were over ♪
♪ I had to leave my old home ♪
♪ For dad and mother was called to heaven ♪
♪ I was left in this world all alone ♪
♪ I'm on my way back to the old home ♪
♪ The road winds on up the hill ♪
♪ But there's no light in the window ♪
♪ That shined long ago where I live ♪
♪ High in the hills of old Kentucky ♪
♪ Stands the fondest spot in my memory ♪
♪ I'm on my way back to the old home ♪
♪ The light in the window I long to see ♪
♪ I'm on my way back to the old home ♪
♪ The road winds on up the hill ♪
♪ But there's no light in the window ♪
♪ That shined long ago where I lived ♪
How about Arnold Schultz? Did he play the fiddle any?
- He could play the fiddle some, but he was a powerful guitar man. He could play the blues, you know the old southern blues, and he was a fine feller too. Well, I like the way that Arnold Schultz played the guitar and played the blues, but the way that he played the blues, you know, our music was much faster so his kind of music wouldn't work in bluegrass, so we had to put blues in a little bit different style and a little bit faster. And then we moved on up north, you know, and I went to work at Sinclair refinery company. Worked there about four or five years. But music, I was working hard on music, you know, when I had some time off and practicing, and that's when The Monroe Brothers was together.
- [John] You started, after you got to Indiana, you started dancing pretty soon. Didn't you have an act?
- Had a what?
- [John] Didn't you have an act on WLS?
- Oh, yes, sir. Well, we had a good set of square dancers and they had a road show going, you know, and they was playing theaters all over the country and so they give us a job dancing on the show.
- He danced before he played music professionally there.
- [Man] Right, right.
- And that was on WLS.
- Well, basically, I think, what they discovered was that they had some old boys in the dance group that could also pick. And then the next thing you know there they was a-singing.
- Now, that was you and Charlie?
- And Birch and another gentleman.
- What was his name?
- I can't remember what his name was now, it's been so long.
- Now, you were working in the refinery and dancing too?
- Well, after we got this job dancing I got them to give me some time off at Sinclair refinery company, and we danced, I believe, about three or four months, something like that, with them.
- [John] You reckon they're still holding your job for you?
- They might be.
- When Emmylou was making her last special, she danced with Bill Monroe and that's gotta be a unique thing. That was the first time you'd ever really danced with him.
- [Emmylou] First I ever danced in public.
- Right. But, I mean, he was just such a powerful dancer and that's his word. Did you find that to be the case?
- Yes, and he warned me about this. He literally came out there and lifted me right up off the ground and I was glad for the warning so that I was sort of prepared for it.
- [Jacky] But they were both buck dancing.
- [Emmylou] We were doing really different things.
- [Jacky] Different things. And then he took her like they were square dancing.
- Well, now, when did you and Charlie start playing together?
- Well, we started on the radio. Or I did. I was the first Monroe to go on radio in Hammond, Indiana, in 1930, and the next day The Monroe Brothers was together. We was all on it. And then we went, we was on in Gary, you know, that's WJKS was our call letters, and you know what that stands for? Where Joy Kills Sorrow. WJKS.
- Wow.
- And then, we moved out to Shenandoah, Iowa, me and Charlie did, and from there to Omaha, Nebraska, and from there to Columbus, South Carolina. We was working for a company called Texas Crystal, and so we went to Columbus, South Carolina, and from there to WBT in Charlotte, North Carolina, WFBC in Greenville, South Carolina, and then Raleigh, North Carolina, WPTF, and we had a song, "What Would You Give In Exchange For Your Soul," really was high all day. They loved that song all over the country and it was a record that was really selling. That was The Monroe Brothers.
- Bill and Charlie how they used to come, just the two of them, how erect they stood and how wherever they went through town they cut a trail that was, Lester said it was like a knife in hot butter the way they walked down the street, and everything about Bill and Charlie were classics.
- Bill's music has touched even groups like The Beatles. I'd say John and Paul and their style of singing, the brother sounding duets, 'cause Bill and Charlie Monroe influenced The Delmore Brothers. The Delmore Brothers influenced the Blue Sky Boys and people like the Louvin Brothers. The Louvin Brothers influenced the Everly Brothers. The Everly Brothers, obviously, influenced The Beatles, because the kind of music the Everlys were doing, they were doing old style traditional harmony with a new style approach and new blood and new songs and they were singing the kind of songs that was touching America. I just really believe with all my heart that their music was such an influence down through the bloodline of the brother style harmony singers that obviously touched The Beatles.
- Where does the singing style come from, your singing?
- A lot of different ideas. Not a lot of different but some ideas that I'd heard with different music, you know, like gospel, southern blues, you know, and Scotch bagpipe. I had to put that sound in my music. And I put that hard drive in with my mandolin to where the fiddle player and the banjo player would be speeded up a little bit, you see. And back in the early days of bluegrass singing, before bluegrass started, they played in G, C, and D, most all of country, but I moved it on up to B natural, you know, the words, I could sing and it learned a lot of fiddle players and the banjo players a lot about how to tune it. And then, I believe in 1937, we broke up. We had a lot of days booked and Charlie he just wanted to walk out on them and not play the dates. I wanted to play them, you know, 'cause we had them booked. So we broke up there and he formed a group called Kentucky Partners and I formed a group called Bluegrass Boys. So I went out through Little Rock, Arkansas, and worked there a while and then I come on down through... Alabama Atlanta, Georgia, and then I went to get me some more entertainers, you know, that would really fit in with my music. When me and my brother broke up I decided I wanted to be on the Grand Ole Opry. Well, he had done gone up there, Charlie had, and they wouldn't take him on there and I went there in 1939 and Solemn Old Judge and Harry Stone and David Stone, they was going out to have them some coffee. They told me they'd be right back and they'd listen to me. They come back and I'm running over two or three numbers for 'em and they told me, they said I could start on the Grand Ole Opry that Saturday night, or if I wanted to go ahead and look for another job, you know, another radio station, I said, "No, I wanna be right here." And they said, "Well, if you ever leave here, "you'll have to fire yourself."
- Wow.
- [Bill] So I've been there ever since.
- Now, when you came to the Opry, was it at the Dixie Tabernacle or to rhyming already?
- [Bill] Rhyming.
- It was already to rhyming?
- Yes sir.
- When I came here and started singing, I was the only one almost that sung a song. The rest of it was all instrumental with the band such as Uncle Dave Macon and his son Doris. They played the banjo and sang together. Both of 'em sang lead. There was no harmony, they just sang lead, and The Delmore Brothers, they were crooners, and when I sang, when I came here and opened my voice or my lungs up to sing for the... I knocked 'em off of the air. They wasn't used to that type of voice that put out a whole lot of effort. They were used to that bum, bum, bum, bum. It was just fiddle music when we came here, just bands, bands playing. The Gully Jumpers, the Fruit Jar Drinkers, now, they were all just a band and George D. Hay gave them all these names. They didn't come here, they wasn't calling themselves that. When they come here, George D. Hay gave 'em all their names and everything and they started talking about 'em and put 'em on the air. When I came here in 1938, I believe Bill came here in '39, and I think Mindy came in '40 or '41. It was right along about like that and then Ernest Stub came in about that time, and then after that, Hank Snow drifted in and it just all just melded into one.
- Who was in your band when you came?
- Fiddling R. Wooten, played the fiddle, and Cleo Davis played the guitar, and Amos Gary, I believe, was my first bass player when I first started on the Grand Ole Opry.
- Tell me about your first night on the Grand Ole Opry.
- John, it was a great night. I just loved it. It was just wonderful. And the first song I sung was "Muleskinner Blues," and back in the early days when I sang "Muleskinner Blues" I played the guitar myself and I put the run in there on the fine strings and then I go from the bass across, you know? And then the fiddler, he'd pick it up and play it.
- [John] So there wasn't any mandolin in the band?
- Well, they played a mandolin, you know.
- [John] Did somebody else play the mandolin?
- They'd just hold the mandolin and play rhythm with the mandolin. Yeah.
- [John] Well, who would do that?
- Well, Cleo Davis and Clyde Moody, people like that.
♪ Hey ♪
♪ Little water boy ♪
- Water boy? Do I look like a boy to you?
♪ Won't you bring that water round ♪
♪ If you don't like your job ♪
- Oh, I like my job. I just can't sing and yodel like you.
♪ Sit your water bucket down ♪
- Okay. Okay, I'll help you.
♪ Yodelay-hee-hee ♪
♪ Hee-hee, hee, hee ♪
- Wow! Thank you.
- Is Bill Monroe the original hat act?
- Probably so. I think Bill must have been the original hat act.
- I used to like those hats he wore in the '40s, you know? In the late '30s, he and Charlie had great hats.
- Bill had this Kentucky gentleman hat, this riding hat, and he wore it with such dignity and such pride and it's never arrogant, but it always had this Kentucky gentleman look and these riding pants that he used to wear was just awesome.
- [John] When did you start with the tent show and where'd you get the idea to take out a tent? Weren't you one of the first to do a tent show?
- Well, I just thought the tent would be good. I could take it to play different cities, you know?
- I joined Bill Monroe in 1941 at the Grand Ole Opry. Back in those days, he had a tent show and we'd take this tent show into each town on each night, different place, never play two nights in one place.
- When did the baseball team start?
- I believe that was in the early '40s, round '43 or '44, right in there. And I had two ball clubs, one to travel with me on the road and one that stayed here in Nashville, and we played some games around here.
- [John] Two completely different teams.
- On Bill's team, I was his pitcher, and we played a lot of the civic clubs over the country, and I never will forget playing for Bill's baseball team. He played first base. Clyde Moody was on third base, and then they'd pick up some boys out of Nashville to sandlot, we called sandlot players, and make a team.
- Do you think bluegrass music and baseball are similar?
- It's quite a bit alike, yes.
- [John] Kind of when you step up to the microphone, it's like your turn at bat.
- Right, yes sir. You're right, yes sir.
- I was working with a group in Gainesville called Jubilee Hillbillies, and I was listening to the Opry one night and I heard Bill say that he's gonna lose his fiddler, Howdy Forester, the late Howdy Forester. So I just get a hand full of train and I go to Nashville, walked in the dressing room and I said, "Bill, my name's Chubby Wise. "I'm a fiddle player from Florida and I want that job." Bill said, "Well, can you play a hoe down?" And I'll never forget it I played "Kitty Hill" for him. He looked at me and you know how expression builds up, he said, "You know any of my stuff?" I said, "Yeah, Bill." I said, "One of my favorites is 'Footprints in the Snow,'" and I played the turn around for Bill to do "Footprints." He sang it and I done my part. He looked at me and said, "You got your clothes with you?" I said, "No, Bill, they up in the hotel." He said, "We'll go get 'em. "We're gonna be leaving in two hours." When I went to work with Bill in '43, and at that time he had Clyde Moody playing flat top guitar and singing with him and String Bean was playing the five with us, and he had a gentleman by the name of Cousin Wilbur playing bass, and Howdy Forester's wife, Billie, was playing accordion and singing with us at the time.
- Bill's music, the style that he played and the rockabilly sounds that he was using with the bass fiddle, walking and doing all the dog house slapping style and stuff with Clyde Moody and Howdy Forester's wife playing the accordion and the hot fiddle of Chubby Wise, the swing stuff, it was really the early, early birthings of what rock n' roll ended up sounding like and getting started with.
- The first date was Rockingham, North Carolina, I'll never forget that, gentlemen. The tent had some holes in it and it rained, I mean, the bottom fell out and then people sat there with the shoes in their lap just playing their feet in that mud. I bluffed my way into that job. I wasn't a bluegrass fiddler when I went to work with Bill, and many hours Bill and I just him with his mandolin and me with the fiddle, had spent in the hotels and motels to show me just what he wanted. He'd say, "Chubby, on that 'Footprints,'" he'd say, "Do a long bow like..." And he said, "Make it go."
♪ Now she's up in heaven ♪
♪ She's with the angel band ♪
♪ I know I'm going to meet her ♪
♪ In that promised land ♪
♪ But every time the snow falls, it brings back memories ♪
♪ For I found her when the snow was on the ground ♪
♪ I traced her little footprints in the snow ♪
♪ I found her little footprints in the snow, Lord ♪
♪ I bless that happy day that Nellie lost her way ♪
♪ For I found her when the snow was on the ground ♪
- And that's what Bill wanted and that's how I progressed the style that I have right now. Bill Monroe told me. Like something crazy, I quit Bill for a couple of months and went to work with the Georgia Peach Pickers in California. When I came back, he had Lester and Earl with him, and I have never seen an audience take to a bluegrass group like they did. Earl and Lester and Bill just tore 'em up. Every time they'd hit the stage it was an encore after encore and a standing ovation.
- And Lester found out real fast after I went to work with him how much I loved the history of bluegrass music and the history of his career and Bill and Earl, and he started going into all these stories about when he was a band member with Bill. You know, about how much they just... I think they were on fire for the music back then. It was a real passion about what they were doing. They were packing tent shows in the Carolinas, you know? I'd give anything if I could've seen one of those shows, but thank God we have their records. The band that they had in those early Columbia recordings, that was the blueprint for bluegrass music. I'm talking about Bill Monroe, Earl Scruggs, Lester Flatt, and Chubby Wise. It's never been beat and I don't know that it ever will 'cause it was an original.
♪ I hope you are happy tonight as you are ♪
♪ But in my heart's a longing for you still ♪
♪ I just keep it there so I won't be alone ♪
♪ In our little cabin home on the hill ♪
♪ For someone has taken you from me ♪
♪ And left me here all alone ♪
♪ Just listen to the rain beat on my window pane ♪
♪ In our little cabin home on the hill ♪
- Something that just happened in Lester's life I think that made a big impression on him, he and Monroe hadn't spoken I think in over 20-something years due to the fact that Flatt and Scruggs had left the band and gone off for their reasons, whatever their reasons were, and Bill came up to them the previous year at Bean Blossom and said, "Welcome to Bean Blossom," and they got back together and sang "Will You Be Loving Another Man" and I think some other things. And I know Lester loved Bill Monroe a whole lot the same way he loved Earl Scruggs. Lester had an awful lot of pride. When somebody crossed him, his way of dealing was just not speaking sometimes, just leaving it alone, but I'm glad they got back together.
♪ For someone has taken you from me ♪
♪ And left me here all alone ♪
♪ Just listen to the rain beat on my window pane ♪
♪ In our little cabin home on the hill ♪
- You told me one time you have a philosophy of hard work to keep you healthy, and I've always liked to hear that. Tell me that again.
- Well, I've always liked to work and I've never been a lazy man, and I like to work. And back in the early days on up in my '20s and early '30s I was a stout man.
- Lester used to talk about how strong Monroe was, and he said Monroe would put the whole band on his shoulders, the whole band, and walk down the street with them.
- When I had five working for me, I carried them all at one time. They weighed 960 pounds.
- He was a very strong man in those days. He weighed about 256 pounds and he could out lift any mule. He could drag a tree like a mule.
- Where Bill first heard me was on the Bristol station when he'd come through, Lester and Earl were still with him and then when Lester and Earl left, why, I joined the Foggy Mountain Boys and Bill on his way through one time offered me a job. So when I left the Foggy Mountain Boys I called Bill to see if that offer was still open, and in Easter time of 1949 when I was about 24 years old I joined the Blue Grass Boys and worked about a year with Bill. Unfortunately, I was with Bill and was on the last Columbia session with him before he went to DECCA, which is now MCA, and while I was with him he had written "Can't You Hear Me Calling" and "Traveling This Lonesome Road."
♪ The days are dark and the nights are lonely ♪
♪ Since you left me all alone ♪
♪ I worried so, my little darlin' ♪
♪ I worried so since you've been gone ♪
♪ Sweetheart of mine, can't you hear me callin' ♪
♪ A million times I've loved you bad ♪
♪ I mistreated you, darlin', I'm sorry ♪
♪ Come back to me ♪ ♪ That's my request ♪
- April of 1952, Jimmy Martin and I came over here to this place, the Bean Blossom, Brown County Park, and at the time Bill had one guy working with him named Charlie Klein, and Charlie was just kind of playing everything, and so Jimmy said, Bobby, my brother, was in service at the time and Jimmy said, "Bill, you don't have anybody working with you right now, "so why don't I go back to work playing the guitar with you "and this kid here can play the banjo a little bit." Of course, I couldn't play that well, but Bill says, "Well, I guess that'll do."
♪ Now, don't be crying on my shoulder ♪
♪ And telling me that love is grand ♪
♪ And you know I can't be with you ♪
♪ Or will you be loving another man ♪
♪ Will you be loving another man ♪
♪ Will you be loving another man ♪
♪ When I return, will you be waiting ♪
♪ Or will you be loving another man ♪
- Bill came through Dayton, asked my dad if I could go to work with him, and I was 15 at that time and he said, "Yeah, take care of him." He was like another father to me and he helped me a great deal in growing, you know, as a human being he helped me a lot. In that sense, Bill was very good at that because he knows what people are supposed to do, he knows how they're supposed to be. He knows how a kid is supposed to be raised. We went to Nashville, Jimmy and I, that next week after that and I still hadn't said a word to Bill. Nobody had introduced me to him. I didn't know- He was God to me, you know, and I was gonna go to work for God and I didn't know him yet and so we got to Nashville and the first thing we did on the Grand Ole Opry, the hardest thing you could probably ever do for a banjo player would be, a young banjo player, would probably be to do "Raw Hide," Bill's old mandolin tune. So I go down there, 14 years old, standing on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry and literally knees shaking, I mean, really knees trembling and all this stuff and Bill came out there, and he still hadn't spoken a word to me yet, not one word, he didn't shake hands. I was 14 years old and scared to death, and he said, "Here's a song that I wrote called 'Raw Hide'," and he went into it and I thought, "Oh, my God! "I'll never get through this." The first recording I ever did was with Bill too, and there was one thing we did, "Pike County Breakdown," and Flatt and Scruggs had recorded "Pike County Breakdown" at that particular time, and it was on every juke box in the world, and I made the mistake of saying, I said, in the studio that day, I never had been in a studio in my life, and so, he said, "We're gonna do "Pike County Breakdown," and I'm thinking, "God, how does he want me to play it?" So I ask him, I said, "You want me to play it, "how do you want me to play it? "Like the other record or what?" And he said, "What other record?" I said, "Oh, well, there's another record out. "Somebody has done it and, you know, "I don't know whether you..." And he said, "Just play it the way I play it." I said, "All right, I will." And I did. It was in a little theater somewhere, maybe Grundy, Virginia, or something like that, in a little bitty theater, and we were kind of... Had eaten between shows and we hear this scraping sound, this whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop sound like that and we go back there and Bill is working on his mandolin, on the finish of his mandolin, with a little penknife kind, you know, and I'm thinking, "You know, I'm a kid, I don't know nothing." I'm thinking, "What's he doing?" This couldn't be doing for the sound. And he said, "It won't be so pretty now. "Maybe nobody will wanna pick it up."
- Bill Monroe's mandolin has gone through several rather notably important changes in its lifetime. When Bill first bought it in a barber shop in Florida in about 1946, he paid $150 for it. It was in pretty nearly pristine original condition at the time. After a few years of use, it had a fair amount of wear and Bill sent it back to Gibson to be re-fretted. At that time, Gibson not only re-fretted it but to do him a favor, they decided to touch up the finish and really spiff it up as best as they could. Unfortunately for them, Bill was much less than pleased. As a result, he gouged the name Gibson out of the peg head, leaving a big gaping hole. He took a piece of glass and scraped the finish off the instrument and he broke off this little scroll curly cue on the peg head. That's the way it was throughout most of the '50s and '60s and well into the period of the early and mid '70s, and it's the classic Monroe look for that mandolin.
- Well, I was working in Knoxville with Don Gibson, along about '53, '4, something like that, and Monroe heard me playing with Gibson, and everyday when we'd go out to work, go out to play in other words, you'd look down the front row and you'd see Bill sitting there. One day he came back stage and he told me, he said, "Kenny, if you ever get dissatisfied "where you're working, just call me." Then he looked at me, he said, "Don't call me, just come on." That's what he said to me. This went on for four years maybe. I think '57 was the first year I worked with Bill.
- When I first joined The Blue Grass Boys, the man that's responsible for all the blue grass festivals to begin with, Carlton Hainey, lives about 30 miles from my home in North Carolina, and Bill Monroe was in our area for about two weeks doing road shows and he needed a bass player, so Carlton came to my house and wanted me to do the bass for Bill Monroe for two weeks on the road there, doing little shows around my part of the country. So I went out and worked for two weeks with him playing bass and he knew I was a fiddle player, so he would let me play one fiddle tune on his show every night. I recorded some of the things that everybody calls the vintage instrumentals that Bill Monroe did back in the '50s and early '60s, you know, and stuff like "Roanoke" and "Cheyenne."
- I heard Monroe doing this raw note, "Cheyenne," and it was totally different fiddle stuff to me. It was kind of a challenge, maybe I just wanted to see if I could do it. And after he'd already spoken to me about it. He'd never heard me play, I was playing mostly swank stuff back those days when he heard me play, but he liked what I was doing, evidently. And uh... So anyway, when I heard those two numbers I wasn't making a beaucoup of money, but I know they had one little corner tavern over there. I'd go over there and some days I'd put two bucks in that juke box just to watch this, or listen to "Roanoke" and "Cheyenne." People just about run me out of there playing the same numbers over and over, but I wanted to learn them.
- We picked out an old time fiddle number we'd like to do for all of our friends entitled "Roanoke."
- The first time I'd ever met Bill I was six years old and Bill came to Martha, Kentucky, the high school and he did a concert. People started requesting and hollering out in between Bill's songs to let little Ricky Scaggs get up, Herbert and Dorothy's little boy, Ricky, and let him get up and sing. And so Bill put up with about 20 minutes of that and then finally he just said, "Well, where is this little Ricky Scaggs?," you know. And so, most of the people there were like family or real, real close friends, so they started applauding and pushing me and getting me up there and everything. So I come walking up the front of the stage, it's only like this tall, and so Bill looks down at me like that, you know, and reaches down and grabs me by the arm and sets me up on the stage and said, "What do you play, boy?" And I said, "Well, I play the mandolin." He said, "Oh, you do?" And I said, "Well, yeah." And so he takes his mandolin off, runs it around the curl of the mandolin, the strap, runs it around a couple of times and puts it on me, and so I'm standing here playing his mandolin and I said, "I sing too." And he said, "Oh, you do?" And I said, "Yeah," and I said, I wanna sing "Ruby," which was an Osbourne Brothers hit at that time, and of course the crowd went nuts because, you know, it was my family and my friends and everything like that. So Bill just kind of stood around and looked in the air like when's he gonna get done and everything like that. So as soon as I got finished, why he comes and grabs the mandolin, takes it back off, unloosens the strap, puts it back on himself and hits it about three times and says, "Now we're gonna do the "Muleskinner Blues."
- [John] I always heard that when Elvis was starting out that he was trying to do "Delta Blues" and your music together.
- Yeah, yeah. He come by at the Grand Ole Opry one time and he told me that, he made himself acquainted with me, and he told me that he was sorry that he changed "Blue Moon of Kentucky" around, you know? I said, "Well, if it helped you get your start, "that's all right with me. "I'm for you 100%." So he told me that it was, might have been one of his first numbers that he recorded, you know, "Blue Moon of Kentucky", and our friendship was good.
- As far as bluegrass's effect on rock n' roll it's always been a silent partner of that type of music. The first person to actually bring that forward was Elvis Presley when he did "Blue Moon of Kentucky."
♪ I said blue moon of Kentucky keep on shining ♪
♪ Shine on the one that's gone and left me blue ♪
♪ Blue moon of Kentucky keep on shining ♪
♪ Shine on the one that's gone and left me blue ♪
♪ Yes, shine on the one who's gone and left me blue ♪
- When I first got interested in bluegrass music, and the first thing I heard was probably Flatt and Scruggs and then I find out about Bill Monroe, and the first time I started to study what was going on in the music was right around '60, '61, and I found out about it from friends in the folk scare at that time, the early '60s folk boom. I heard bluegrass music and I just felt like there's something about that music that's very familiar to me and I think that was speaking to my memories of hearing, listening to the Grand Ole Opry every Saturday night when I was a small kid, kind of something about the sound of it, the harmony and the way the music works, and I just then I decided I had to learn how to play five-string banjo and one thing led to another and, of course, right in there, if you get into the music at all you find out right away that Bill Monroe is the guy, he's the creator of the music, the guy after which all other bluegrass bands are patterned and the guy who set the formula so to speak.
- I made my first trip to Nashville in 1963, early in the year, at the request of Earl Scruggs to work on his banjo instruction book. And while I was there he took me over to the Grand Ole Opry at the Ryman auditorium and everybody's jamming in the back room, tuning up and tuning down and putting their instruments away and so forth, and so I had a chance to pick up a banjo and play some and while that was all going on Kenny Baker came in.
- I heard this banjo belting out this "Sailor's Hornpipe," "Devil's Dream," several numbers, you know. But I maybe was in Acuff's dressing room at that time. Boy, I heard that and I could not believe my ears. So I went to Monroe and I told him, I said, "You must come over here and listen to this boy." Well, Bill, he never went in the room, but he heard this banjo. He said, "That's not my kind of music." So I said to him, I said, "Bill, your kind of music, "I believe that banjo would help you or help us." I think that's the way I put it. He said, "Well, go talk to the boy."
- Later that evening as I was leaving the building, Kenny came up and asked me if I'd like to have a job with Bill Monroe. Of course I accepted. It was an honor to be asked and Kenny and Bill both said that I had something new on the banjo that they'd like to have in the band.
- Del McCoury was a boy I met up in Baltimore, Maryland. I was still working with Gibson then, and we uh... I'd heard Del playing some banjo. I didn't know he was a guitar player.
- Del McCoury and I started playing at the same time, about the same day we arrived in Nashville.
- He wanted to hire Bill on banjo and me on guitar and singing lead, and he never heard me play guitar I know before this. So, but he wanted to try us out and see how we could do. So he took us up into the National Life and Accident building in Nashville, and we rehearsed a little bit and he kind of hired me on a trial basis to see if I could handle a job.
♪ When I left old Kentucky ♪
♪ Linda kissed me and she cried ♪
♪ I told her that I would not linger ♪
♪ I'd be back by and by ♪
♪ I'm going back to old Kentucky ♪
♪ There to see my Linda Lou ♪
♪ I'm going back to old Kentucky ♪
♪ Where the skies are always blue ♪
- Within the first week or 10 days we'd been in the studio and made the cuts of five or six instrumentals and a gospel tune, and these records came right out. There was "Devil's Dream" and "Sailor's Hornpipe," "Salt Creek" and few others that Bill had out on record, and those were the only recording sessions we did. We left Nashville the day John Kennedy was assassinated, and I remember it was Earl Scruggs that told me, he was the first person to tell me that on the telephone. From Nashville we drove to Miami, Florida. We played two shows there and then drove to New York City and played one show there and then drove to Wheeling, West Virginia, for one show and our next show was in Los Angeles. So we kind of covered all three corners of the country and at the beginning in less than a week we were in all those places.
- Back in my younger days, a lot of folks in music's younger days, Bill and all of 'em, most of the time you drive the bass fiddle on the top of the car, have five people going and when it comes to rain they'll start putting the bass fiddle inside the car and everybody was crumpled down and underneath it like this trying to see out or sleep or something.
- Well, back when I first started a lot of the roads wasn't paved. It was just dirt roads and gravel. You had to be careful. You had to take your time on a lot of them, you know. ♪ It's mighty hard for me to travel ♪ ♪ For my sweetheart she is gone ♪ ♪ The road is rough and filled with gravel ♪ ♪ But I must journey on and on ♪
- Bill Monroe was the first concert I ever saw. I went to Jackson, Alabama, my daddy took me to a national guard army to see Bill Monroe and the Sullivan family. I saw his bus parked on the outskirts of town and I said, "Daddy, stop. "Maybe we can see him come out." He was in a restaurant. He walked out, he was like a statue walking.
- About that time, '63, Bill was starting to play to different audiences, I think, and he got a new agent/ manager, Ralph Rinzler, and he was booking him in colleges and his audience was kind of changing, and I don't think he had to depend on the country package shows as much from that time on. He had a lot of new people, you know, listening to his music.
- I'm sure he doesn't know me from Adam, but I may have spoken to him briefly when they were out here on tour with the Bill Keith Del McCoury band, Kenny Baker band.
- People really liked him, you know, the younger people, and a lot of musicians today I think came to see his shows on the college campuses back in '63 and '64.
- It was followed by people like Peter Rowan whom I introduced to Bill Monroe, and Richard Green from Los Angeles, and a lot of other city musicians.
- Bill Keith called me up one day and asked if I wanted to play some guitar with Monroe when he came up and he was just putting a band together on the road and we became The Blue Grass Boys for three days and that was my start with Bill Monroe, and he said, "You ought to come to Nashville. "I can help you." So, as soon as I could I headed on down to Nashville. Those were the psychedelic years and I think the bluegrass took on a psychedelic edge. The real psychedelic experience was in bluegrass music in that it had so many counter rhythms. It was myself and Richard Green and then later on when we got together with Jerry Garcia and formed Old and In the Way. We really were leaning on a kind of inner rhythm in bluegrass and letting the... The melody lines and the harmonies have a certain lilt, a bounce to them, and a certain openness and freedom, but really we were just trying to play bluegrass and that seemed to have the intensity that we were looking for in the 1960s.
- I still wanna be a bluegrass, yeah, God, yes, I did, and in the worst way. Yeah, I did. Yeah.
- What did you think when the city kids, like from New York and places like that first started playing bluegrass music?
- Well, I just hoped they would like the music, you know, and go ahead and practice on it and work on it good. And, now there's people all over the whole country, you know, playing bluegrass music. A lot of young kids are playing bluegrass music. And bluegrass music is like going to school you know, you can learn. When you learn bluegrass, you can play a lot of music.
- And when you stand next to the burning fire of a man who has created bluegrass music, you get warm and you learn to build your own fire, so a bluegrass boy has to move away from the father, but while I was there I had the great fortune to write a song with Bill. Early one morning, we were watching the sun come up over the mountains of Kentucky, stopped beside the road and he sang a melody to me and I wrote some words to it and it's a tune that has become very popular in the walls of time.
♪ I hear a voice out in the darkness ♪
♪ When it moans and whispers through the pines ♪
♪ I know it's my sweetheart a calling ♪
♪ I hear her through the walls of time ♪
♪ Lord, send the angels for my darling ♪
♪ And take her to that home on high ♪
♪ I'll wait my time out here on Earth, love ♪
♪ And come to you when I die ♪
- So when I left Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys, I joined up with David Grisman and we formed a band we called Earth Opera and we recorded for Elektra Records, but after the Earth Opera band broke up, I came out to California and joined up with Richard Green and formed a band called Seatrain. So Seatrain toured around the country and we played a lot with Janis Joplin and the band, but the call of bluegrass was there as it always is. It calls you back. Once you've been in bluegrass, you can't really ever get away from it.
- I guess it was in my early teens that I first heard of Bill Monroe. Also, around that time in the mid '60s there was a big folk music movement on, which included a lot of bluegrass that was played on the radio stations around the Washington, D.C. area which is where I was growing up. So I heard Bill Monroe on the radio on those shows and also on my brother's turn table.
♪ We were waltzing that night in Kentucky ♪
♪ Beneath the beautiful harvest moon ♪
♪ And I was the boy that was lucky ♪
♪ But it all had ended too soon ♪
♪ As I sit here alone in the moonlight ♪
♪ I see your smiling face ♪
♪ And I long once more for your embrace ♪
♪ In that beautiful Kentucky waltz ♪
- He was playing a show in Bean Blossom, and Bean Blossom, Indiana, is only what? Four, five, six hours away from Ann Arbor, so I drove down there with a car load of people and Bill showed up without a guitar player. Well, he knew me just as the kid who'd been in charge of booking him at the University of Michigan three months ago, but I said, "Well, I know all your songs," and so I auditioned that very day and on that spot. He was looking for somebody permanent and I was much too raw and green to be permanent, but I did fill in on a big west coast tour and stayed with him from April 30th until about, I guess it was toward the end of the summer, and that was my junior year of college. I went back home to finish my senior year of college and Roland White became the full time guitar player at that point.
- Well, I believe I started in '63, playing for my father, and I started out on the bass fiddle and I played that for five years.
- I guess it was '69, Roland and Vic Jordan left Bill Monroe to join Lester Flatt when he split up with Earl Scruggs and that left a vacancy at the guitar spot again which James Monroe immediately jumped into and so that left a vacancy open at the bass spot for which I volunteered and was hired and did that from about the middle of March to maybe September, something like that. Those are my two stints.
- I switched from there to guitar when Roland and Vic left to go with Lester Flatts' show, and then I started recording some with my father, and I think I cut some 90 sides with him, two "Father and Son" albums and some of the "Uncle Pen" stuff and the Hall of Fame albums. I can't remember all of 'em, but did a lot of recording with him. We toured all through the country back in those days and in the '60s we worked Carnegie Hall and Newport Jazz Festival, Philadelphia Folk Festival, and did an England tour where we played the Albert Hall there, and that was great times. The money wasn't great back in those days and I think union scale was $25 a day for the side men.
- We landed in the airport there in Tokyo. They had a banner. It was about maybe a couple of hundred feet long: "Welcome Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys." And they was about maybe from 500 to 750, 800 people out there to welcome us in. That's, you know, that'll strike your mind once in a while.
- Around 1980, you know, I was bad sick, had cancer. And this man from West Virginia called me and he said, "Mr. Monroe, I know you're in the hospital "and you're not a well man, but I've got it set up "and I just wanted to tell you this, "that there's 24 churches in the state of West Virginia, "all of 'em starts to pray for you at the same time." 24 churches, everybody in the church was praying at the same time. You couldn't beat that.
- This is about 1982 and in the mid-summer we had left Portland, Maine, going to Nova Scotia. And we were crossing on the ferry and Mr. Monroe was talking about he was not feeling real well, so when we pulled off in the bus on the Nova Scotia side, he said, "I'm really having some severe pain "and I need to go see a doctor." So we rushed him to the hospital. And he was very ill and they, they performed a major surgery on him that morning. Three hours later, he was on the stage with us sitting in a wheelchair playing his mandolin and singing tenor with us, and they immediately took him back to the hospital after the performance and kept him 'til the afternoon- 'til the evening performance.
- Monroe had gotten out of his hospital bed, talked the nurses into getting an ambulance. He was in a wheelchair. They took him to the festival that he was gonna perform at, picked him up out of the ambulance, put him on the stage and he did a full 60-minute show in a tremendous amount of pain and the audience had no idea except that they just thought he was in a wheelchair due to his age and gave him a standing ovation. As soon as the show was over he collapsed again and we rushed him back to the airport.
- 10 days later we had a festival in Waynesboro, Tennessee, and Mr. Monroe played all three days. We left there on a Sunday night and went to Missouri to do the state fair for six days and he did not miss a performance, and his ability to snap back from the illnesses, it's something inside that says "I've got to go."
- That's the real Bill Monroe. When it comes to the show I think he's always told me, I've been very concerned about his age and he's always told me that his last day he wants to be on stage.
♪ If I was a preacher ♪
♪ I tell ya what I would do ♪
♪ I'd keep on preaching and I'd work on the building too ♪
♪ I'm a working on a-building ♪
♪ Dear lord, I'm a working on a-building ♪
♪ Hallelujah ♪
♪ I'm a working on a-building for my Lord ♪
♪ For my Lord ♪
- A lot of my music has a Methodist and Baptist and a holiness thing in it, and the people, my audience can hear that. They can hear that there's different sounds, that the feeling of the music will go right from where I'm playing it in the mandolin, from me right to them.
- Bill's mandolin and others at his home were vandalized and someone actually took a fireplace poker and literally smashed it to pieces. Gibson put it back together in what may well be one of the most remarkable restorations of any fretted instrument ever undertaken.
- The biggest job, initial job of the repair when I received the mandolin was to actually take the one garbage sack and with a microscope and tweezers and a piece of white poster board, catalog out the different pieces for the two mandolins. At that point, it was given to me to take the splinters, some of them smaller than the size of this toothpick, and brush a special epoxy glue, a special epoxy glue and regular sewing thread to hold the pieces together, and as those pieces grew, you could then take those pieces and clamp them in. On his famous mandolin, the July mandolin, it was in about 200 to 300 pieces total. They did such a good job cleaning the carpet and picking up the pieces that I only had to replace two actual pieces of wood in that mandolin, both of them no bigger than the diamond on a playing card.
- They spent countless hours of time putting it back together so well that not only does it look virtually the same as the did before but it actually has retained its original sound so that Bill still uses this instrument today. In fact, I can think of no one musician who is more closely identified with one specific instrument than Bill is with his July of 1923 F-5 mandolin.
- How does that chorus part go? Okay.
- Two junctions.
- Bill's always been very adamant about the fact that you can't write it down, that you have to learn it from somebody or, in his case, him, you have to learn it from him and see him and hear him do it. You can't learn it from off of a piece of paper.
- I play it and let them learn the melody and play it and then if you're playing the guitar or banjo, why, you can play it along with me and know you'll soon learn where the cords are at, where you should go to with it, you see, and sometimes, if they go the wrong way, I'll tell 'em that they're going the wrong way, that they should put the right chord in it and show 'em where the right chord's at. So that helps 'em out a lot. I like for him to know the time of the music and make a good sound come out of his guitar or the banjo, whatever he's playing, and that helps out a lot, and don't try to put in some chords or some notes that don't belong in the music. Play it like it was wrote.
- Bill's mandolin plays the two and the four which the drum, the snare drum plays that in a rock band or a country band. You know, he'll teach you how to use the guitar and to play the licks and stuff around his singing and to fill the holes in places. And so, anybody that wants to learn how to play bluegrass music, Bill's records are, it's the training wheels. I mean, that's what you listen to that to learn how to play. I mean, no other group can teach you any better how to play it than Bill does because he lives and breathes it. If you cut his arm, that's what he's gonna bleed, he's gonna bleed bluegrass music.
- I remember one time Bill was auditioning a fiddler and he told him that in playing bluegrass you have to have these hands working together, the left hand with the right hand, and you have to be thinking right in between 'em.
- He gets a chord on the mandolin and he'll turn toward you and he'll slap it a couple times and you know exactly where you better be capo'd to or where you better have your instruments tuned to in that key, and you can usually tell by the story that he's telling on the stage or the line that he uses.
- You stand up there and take your instrumental break or sing your piece and you are in competition with the guy that's gonna come after you and the guy that came before you. Your job is to try to do better than the guy that just played.
- Bluegrass musicians crowd the best stuff in the solo at the very end when they're getting away from the microphone. It's like something very neat, you know, and there's a quality- a certain quality of refinement to it where it gets, the better the players get, the more complex and wonderful that moment is, the moment at the very end of a solo, it's like the additional bar left over or the additional two bars left over.
- I've heard the old bluegrass musicians and the old members of The Bluegrass Boys talk of doing battle with Bill. Said, "Boy, you get up there and really give him a run "for his money and that's the way you get a good performance "out of it."
- Are you ready?
- [Audience] Yeah!
- Yeah.
- You ready?
- [Audience] Yeah!
- Are you ready?
- [Band Member] All right.
- The thing I loved about Bill's music is the fact that it had energy. It had sass, you know, it had a lot of life about it. And one minute he could just drive you into a frenzy, you know, playing "Raw Hide" or "Roanoke" on the mandolin or something like that, but on the other hand, he could take you to the other end of the world of a song like "I Hear a Sweet Voice Calling." It was a real lonesome thing about his music as well as the speed, you know? I heard him say one time, "It takes a man to play my music." That gave me something to look up to when I was just a young kid. The one thing that bluegrass music does is it gives you a place to start, 'cause if you can play bluegrass, you can play anything.
- You can trace it all the way back into Ireland and Scotland and England, trace back the roots of traditional mountain music and see how bluegrass started, but it was a mixture of Irish folk music, English ballads, Scottish bagpipe type fiddle tunes mixed with Mississippi Delta blues.
- As far as coming out of the '60s, that was the greatest high of all, was to be able to sing with Bill Monroe and to lean my voice against his with that hard driving rhythm or that slow and ancient rhythm. Bill always talks about the ancient tones. And these ancient tones really reached me and kind of lit a fire in my soul. Well, the only way I can say is it's like standing next to the master chef in the kitchen. After a while, you're doing his recipes all the time, and after a while you wanna try it yourself.
- Bluegrass is full of wonderful kind of sound bites, you know, kind of little quotable things or things that you can extract if you sort of get the idea of how the music works. It's not so much a direct thing, but it's got what all good music should have. It has a lot of power. It can be very moving. It can be very beautiful. It can be tremendously exciting. I mean, bluegrass music has great range and it has lots of devices that are unique to it.
- All musicians have hearts, hands, and eyes and ears and we're all, whether we allow ourselves to believe it or not, we're all affected by all of each other's music in some way or another. We can't be totally blind to anything. There's something good in everything that gets recorded or it would never be released.
- Bill always taught us to show respect for the music and for ourselves and for the audience.
- Bill is one of the boss men. You know, he's the boss man. I mean, he's trained like two or three generations of musicians firsthand, and the fallout from where those musicians went, what their- the people they influenced and they taught and so on, he's a vital resource in American music. I mean, he's one of the guys like... It's hard to make a comparison, like Miles Davis. He's an important guy. He invented a kind of music that is peculiarly American, and really you have to say that he's the guy responsible for the way the music works and what it sounds like, and so he's also responsible for all the subsequent developments indirectly, and that means, that's quite a vital... Because the bluegrass musicians have gone on to influence other players and other styles of music.
- Bill's influence on the future of music will be really what it's been in the past. Bill's music that he laid down in the late '30s all the way through, I'd say, the late '60s, early '70s is training ground music. I mean, it's music for people to listen to and to learn the ingredients. I mean, anytime you learn to cook, if you bake a pie or if you bake a cake, you have to practice, you have to learn what ingredients goes in to make a cake just right.
- Any time I ever see Bill Monroe coming to a function or anything around Nashville, he always looks like Bill Monroe. He's like a moving statue. I think there should be a place for him in the rotunda, the Capitol in Washington, alongside of some of the other great statesmen.
- The term "Father of Bluegrass" really does apply to Bill. I mean, I feel that he really did take a lot of forms of American music and put it together into a different kind of music that is truly new, an American form of music called bluegrass.
- All right, now I'm gonna play one on the mandolin for you tonight. Marty Stewart's gonna come up and join in with us here.
- [Marty] He called me at the Bean Blossom to his birthday party and he said, "What do you wanna play with me?" And I said, "Southern Flavor."
- Come around on this side right there.
- [Marty] All right.
- Did you--
- Howdy, howdy, howdy, howdy, howdy.
- Thank you, thank you, thank you.
- Howdy, howdy, howdy.
- Play, play that guitar, boy.
- I'll do it right now.
- That's enough, you can go on home.
- [Marty] And I thought, perfect.
- "Southern Flavor."
- [Marty] It was a perfect birthday present. Okay. [Marty] We stood out there and I remember everybody was worried about him 'cause he'd been sick and everything. He played the song for like nine minutes that night and then danced a little bit and I thought, "There's a lot of fire left there."
- Everybody together now, come on. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
- [Marty] I went away not worried about him anymore 'cause I saw how much fire was in his eyes that night.
- Let's hear it again, ladies and gentlemen, for Mr. Bill Monroe. Happy birthday, Bill.
- A lot of people have seriously imitated Bill Monroe. Now, the role of Bill Monroe is not only the band leader but he plays mandolin and he sings high tenor. You will find very few mandolin players who sing baritone or bass or anything like it, or want to, because it's that image, it's that thing. And, that's why the joke about bluegrass heaven is so funny and they go and he sees the guy at the end of the street in the white hat playing the mandolin. And then he meets Lester Flatt and he meets Don Reno and Carter Stanley and all the greats that have gone from the past and there high in the hills stands a tall figure in a white hat and a suit playing a mandolin and singing "Blue Moon of Kentucky" and, of course, Bill Monroe isn't dead, so the guy says, "Well, who is that up there?" "Oh, that's God. "He just thinks he's Bill Monroe."
- Well, I'd like for them to remember me as the father of bluegrass music, the man that originated this music.
- [Announcer] And that's Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys at the Grand Ole Opry.
