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Historical notes from The Music of Bill Monroe; Neil Rosenberg, Charles Wolfe

Kenny Baker's composition Big Sandy River (one of his first to be recorded by Monroe) was included on the two album set titled Bluegrass Special recorded by Decca November 23 and December 6 and 10,1962, with Lonnie Hoppers playing banjo full of drive and unexpected turns. (Hoppers later performed with the young Dan Crary and helped form his music into an influential modern style.) The song became a long-running successful single. 

Bill Keith, banjo, brought the traditional tune Salt River to the March 20, 1963 recording session. the studio renamed it Salt Creek because they feared customers would confuse it with Monroe's current single, Big Sandy River.

On March 29, 30, 1976, Kenny Baker recorded Big Sandy River for his seventh solo album, Kenny Baker Plays Bill Monroe.

Monroe allowed producer Harry Silverstein to suggest several standards, including Dusty Miller, to be recorded December 6 and 16, 1966, and January 23, 1967, on the Bluegrass Time album. The tune featured fiddler, Richard Greene's innovative style and became one of the most widely copied performances on the album.

By 1990, Monroe was drawing on a repertoire of almost 60 years, on songs beloved by three generations of fans. He had recorded over 500 pieces by then.) His core repertoire of 12-15 tunes for Bean Blossom performances of the time included the old favorite, Dusty Miller.

Evening Prayer Blues was recorded in February, 1981, for the album, Bill Monroe: Master of Bluegrass—what Monroe referred to as “the mandolin album.” The tune was his tribute to DeFord Bailey, the legendary black harmonica player from the early days of the Opry. Bailey wrote and began playing the piece in the 1920s as a tribute to famed Nashville preacher, Zema W. Hill. Monroe observed that, DeFord was the best harmonica player, when it came to playing the blues of any man, I thought that ever lived.” On June 23, 1983, a little over two years after he recorded his mandolin version of Evening Prayer Blues, Monroe played it as a solo over Bailey's grave at a service dedicating a monument to him.

Honky Tonk Swing was Monroe's mandolin showcase for the 1941 recording sessions for Bluebird. His original piece reflects the fact that this blues in C is, in the words of Rich Kienzle, “a remarkable twelve-bar tour-de-force with a boogie beat and licks that anticipate blues or even rockabilly guitar.” During Opry shows of this time the piece was often referred to as Honkey Tonkey Sween

Monroe worked at Monroe's Hornpipe and played it onstage long before recording it during Decca sessions in early December,1958 (for which he borrowed a Gibson F-4 mandolin while his F-5 was being refurbished). By the time of the sessions many young pickers had learned the tune and were playing it at jam sessions, especially at Monroe's Bean Blossom, Indiana, park, the Brown County Jamboree. Many old-time southern fiddlers were somewhat casual about what they called a hornpipe, but this piece has the features of a New England hornpipe, perhaps Monroe's tribute to his many Canadian fans and Canadian tours. Benny Martin maintained it was derived from a tune he used to play, Big-Eyed Rabbit, which Martin used when he was with Roy Acuff.

The tune was later featured on the album, Kenny Baker Plays Bill Monroe.

During the recording sessions in February, 1981, for the album, Bill Monroe: Master of Bluegrass, Monroe spoke of how instrumentals could be as evocative as lyrics in calling up an image or a sense of the past. Named after the town of Daingerfield, Texas, “Old Danger Field,”  said Monroe, “goes back a long time. how the people would have danced and listened to the music.”

During the recording sessions in February, 1981, for the album, Bill Monroe: Master of Bluegrass, Monroe singled out his favorite two originals, Old Ebenezer Scrooge and Come Hither to Go Yonder.

Pike County Breakdown was recorded at the July 26, 1952 at Decca as a cover. Monroe composed the tune several years before he recorded it. “I wanted,” he said, “to write something and title it after something up in the eastern part of Kentucky. You remember Sweet Betsy from Pike? I listened to that and wrote the Pike County Breakdown. On another occasion he recalled how many good bookings the Blue Gras Boys had in eastern Kentucky and implied that the piece was partially inspired by a local woman, Betty Parker, who always came to the shows. He had started playing it backstage when Flatt and Scruggs were in the band, and in May 1952, a version was released they recorded for the rival Mercury company in 1950. Thus Monroe was forced into covering one of his own songs. Sonny Osborne played banjo and Charlie Cline the fiddle, and, Martin recalled, “Sonny was just getting started then and he thought that when he cut that Pike County Breakdown that he had his part pretty close to what Earl Scruggs was doing.  I had to tell him, ‘Sonny, you're not anywhere close.’” Osborne, however, remembers things differently. He recalls Monroe had made suggestions that led him to try not to sound too much like Scruggs on the piece.

At the March 27, 1963, Decca recording session Pike County Breakdown dramatized more than any how different Bill Keith's style was from that of Scruggs. Along with the other sides from this session, it marked the beginning of a major shift in bluegrass banjo playing from the classic three-finger style Scruggs had established a generation before. Pike County Breakdown had first been recorded by Monroe in 1952, but now he wanted to do a new version of it. In the first part Keith duplicates Scrugg's version of the tune and then goes on to do it in his own style. This was the way Monroe had asked him to play it. Possibly because it seemed to be a deliberate parody the version was not issued until a Japanese set included it years later.

During the May 6, 1985, recording session for the album, Bill Monroe and the Stars of the Bluegrass Hall of Fame, Ralph Stanley came in and did two tracks including Pike County Breakdown but had problems with it. “Ralph took me to the side during the session,” producer Emory Gordy remembered, “and told me he had not played the song very much and was not comfortable with his performance. I promised him it ‘would never see the light of day.’ I never mixed or edited it. I should have burned the original multitracks. I respect Ralph that much.”

Although Monroe's Columbia sessions, especially those with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, have been widely hailed as the cornerstone for the bluegrass sound, it was his Decca records of the early 1950s that Monroe crystalized that sound and established most of his core repertoire including classic recordings of songs such as Raw Hide.

On January 20, 1951, Monroe recorded three striking originals including Raw Hide, which became one of his great signature pieces. He would routinely play it as fast as he possibly could and use it to challenge veteran musicians and test new musicians trying out for the band. Onstage, he would talk about other mandolin players trying to do the piece right and then rip into it to show the audience how it should be done. Raw Hide would, in short, become the vehicle for an old-fashioned cutting contest, to borrow the jazz term. Monroe's identity as a mandolin player became tied to the piece, and he never let anyone cut him on it. No one was surprised when Ricky Skaggs and Marty Stuart played the piece at full speed at his funeral in 1996. Monroe admitted on several occasions that he named the tune—certainly not to be confused with the cowboy theme song popularized a decade later—after a 1951 Hollywood film, Rawhide, which starred Tyrone Power. Monroe like the movie because it featured his old friend Max Terhune, whom he met while working at WLS in Chicago in the 1930s.

Pete Kuykendall, the distinguished editor of Bluegrass Unlimited, has called this recording of Raw Hide the “definitive mandolin tune.” Monroe built the two parts of the piece, which is in the key of C, using earlier forms. The first part follows the same chord pattern as Lonesome Road Blues, which Monroe also did in C and recorded in 1960. The second part follows the circle of fifths chord pattern often associated with ragtime-type pieces in country music. The arrangement highlights the end of this section by having all instruments stop except the one taking the break. Monroe's ending, with the four stop chords followed by the familiar “shave and a haircut” phrase, was new at the time and has been frequently copied. Because of its extreme tempo Raw Hide was considered a tour-de-force for the mandolin. It remained in Monroe's performance repertoire for the rest of his career, and in later years he developed the arrangement to highlight its speed.

In 1969 Bill turned the job of guitarist over to his son James, who'd played bass with the group for nearly five years. As he observed, “I never had done much with the guitar. Oh, I had done one number as part of the show, but that was all. I knew the job was going to be hard. Especially with tunes like Raw Hide...”

In the early 1940s Tennessee Blues, a fast blues in A, was a showcase for Bill's mandolin. The tune has the distinction of being the first song with formal published composer credits to Monroe.

Virginia Darlin', originally issued on the flip side of the Gold Rush 45-rpm single and much later on a Rebel LP, is an up-tempo piece Monroe derived from an older Kentucky fiddle tune and has echoes of Durham's Bull. Named in honor of Virginia Stauffer, it spotlights more of Brian Berline's work as well as a rare bass solo by James Monroe.

Bradley Film and Recording Studios was where Monroe recorded great fiddle instrumentals like Wheel Hoss... The New Year's Eve session of 1954 opened a new chapter in Monroe's music, one characterized by the use of multiple fiddles playing new instrumental compositions in tightly arranged harmony. Cline was joined by Bobby Hicks on fiddle at the session and the first instrumental recorded was Wheel Hoss. Monroe explained to Ralph Rinzler that the “wheel hoss” of a team of horses is the one nearest the wagon wheel (as opposed to the lead) and thus the horse that pulls ore of the load. The term, which Monroe appreciated and understood, is common in the upland South to refer to anyone who works hard and steadily at a job.

Monroe was not the only one fascinated by the twin-fiddle sound. Kenny Baker, who became Monroe's main fiddler, was stunned when he first heard Roanoke and its companion piece Wheel Hoss. He said, “I played swing fiddle until I heard Roanoke and Wheel Hoss. The two fiddles play together on choruses but alternate solos on the verses.

Kenny Baker, a fiddler and coal miner from Jenkins in eastern Kentucky, joined Monroe first in 1956 after a stint with Don Gibson's band and left in 1958. In the early 1960s he rejoined a second time and then a third, torn between the uncertainties of life on the road adn the steady wages Bethlehem Steel offered for working in the mines. After Baker replaced Sumner in Gibson's band he found himself playing western swing and had little real interest in bluegrass until he heard Monroe's recording of Roanoke and Wheel Hoss.

In 1983 on Glen Duncan's first Opry appearance with the Blue Grass Boys, Monroe asked what he wanted to fiddle. “Wheel Hoss,” he answered, and kicked into it at a ferocious tempo that surprised even Monroe. As he struggled to keep us with his new fiddler, Monroe lost his pick and had to resort to doing a buck dance on the last chorus.

Early in 1984 Ricky Skaggs began work on the album Country Boy and asked Monroe to perform as a special guest on his country version of Wheel Hoss. Monroe readily agreed. The Skaggs studio band, which included drums, electric steel, and Bobby Hicks fiddle, laid down the basic tracks, and then Monroe came in at a later date and did his mandolin part as an overdub—another first for him. The track would win Skaggs, by then a newly inducted Grand Ole Opry regular, a Grammy in 1984 for Best Instrumental Performance.

On Sunday evening, October 26, 1947, the Blue Grass Boys rolled into Chicago for Monroe's second session with the classic band. The next afternoon they made their way to the Wrigley Building and the WBBM Studio for what would be a massive session over the next two days. They recorded sixteen sides, most of them destined to become classics. After a long supper break the second day the band returned to the studio at 8:00 to record four more songs. They only needed one take for When You Are Lonely, another duet in which Flatt sang lead on the verses and was joined by Monroe's tenor on the chorus... it has a smooth feeling because of Watt's four-beat walking bass. Chubby Wise's fiddle work is especially prominent in his backup role, and Monroe's mandolin solo combines the fluid sound of his Monroe Brothers work with the more rough-edged sound of his later recordings.

In April 1949, Billboard carried a lengthy note on Monroe detailing his ambitious plans... His Columbia records were selling briskly... Monroe ranking seventeenth in sales, with seven titles listed as best sellers for the first six months of the year, including When You Are Lonely.