Singer, mandolinist, and principal creator of bluegrass music. The youngest of eight
children in a poor farming family near Rosine in west-central Kentucky, Monroe was
raised in a musical household. Formative musical contacts in his youth included his uncle
Pendleton Vandiver (with whom he lived as a teenager following his parents’ deaths and
about whom he later composed one of his most popular songs, “Uncle Pen”) and the
influential local Black musician Arnold Shultz.
In the early 1930s, Monroe joined several brothers at industrial work in northern
Indiana. Soon he began performing with them as mandolinist, singer, and dancer. In 1935
he and older brother Charlie became full-time entertainers. As the Monroe Brothers, they
performed on radio in the Carolinas between 1936 and 1938 and placed sixty songs,
many of them traditional, on best-selling RCA Victor Bluebird records. By 1938, when
he formed his own band, the Blue Grass Boys (named after his home state), Monroe was
recognized within the field of country music (then called “hillbilly music”) as an
innovative mandolinist and powerful vocalist. In 1939 Monroe joined the cast of the
Grand Ole Opry, the long-running live radio jamboree at WSM in Nashville, Tennessee.
He has been there ever since.
Monroe aimed at preserving and modernizing the old-time traditional music of the
rural Upland South. He developed a repertoire that combined the old and the new in
instrumental dance and display tunes, secular songs, and religious quartets. During the
1940s through his personal appearances, broadcasts, and recordings (for Victor and
Columbia), he popularized his repertoire with a band sound based on earlier Southeastern
string-band traditions. Soon other musicians, particularly in Appalachia, were copying
him. At first Monroe resented such copying, but by the mid-1960s, following the
development of a festival movement that celebrated his musical history, he had accepted
the idea that he was “The Daddy of Bluegrass Music” and became comfortable with his
role as patriarch and teacher. Monroe’s own annual bluegrass festivals, held every June
since 1967 at his country-music park in Bean Blossom, Indiana, are widely attended
events. Among his many honors are the National Endowment for the Arts’ National
Heritage Fellowship Award, election into the Country Music Association’s Hall of Fame,
and the NARAS Lifetime Achievement Award.
Over his career, Monroe has performed and recorded hundreds of folksongs and tunes,
helping spread and maintain the traditions in which he has played a significant part. He
has also contributed his own compositions, both instrumental and vocal, to oral tradition.
And by leading the way in inventing techniques for playing fiddle tunes and blues on an
instrument previously utilized for classical and Italian popular musics, he has shaped the
development of the mandolin as an instrument used in American folk traditions.
Neil V.Rosenberg
References
Rinzler, Ralph. 1975. Bill Monroe. InStars of Country Music, ed. Bill C.Malone and Judith
McCulloh. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 202–221.
Rooney, James. [1971]1991. Bossmen: Bill Monroe and Muddy Waters. New York: Da Capo.