Bill Monroe

Rosine to the Opry

William Smith Monroe was born on September 13, 1911 on the family farm near Rosine, Ohio County, Kentucky, the youngest of eight children of James Buchanan Monroe and Malissa Vandiver Monroe. He played mandolin and guitar. In 1929 he moved to Indiana to work at an oil refinery with his brothers Birch and Charlie, and the brothers formed the Monroe Brothers. They signed to RCA Victor's Bluebird label in 1936 and recorded 60 tracks through 1938, when the duo ended.

He formed the Kentuckians in Little Rock and then the first Blue Grass Boys in Atlanta in 1938-39. In October 1939 he became a regular on the Grand Ole Opry, after auditioning with Jimmie Rodgers's "Mule Skinner Blues". His trademark instrument was a 1923 Gibson F5 Lloyd Loar mandolin.

Bluegrass

In December 1945 Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs joined, the band that is called the Original Bluegrass Band, and the Columbia recordings of 1946 and 1947 followed; Flatt and Scruggs left in early 1948. Monroe signed with Decca in 1949, which Wikipedia calls the start of his golden age, with members including Jimmy Martin, Rudy Lyle and the fiddlers Red Taylor, Charlie Cline, Bobby Hicks and Vassar Clements. He bought the park at Bean Blossom, Indiana in 1951 and founded an annual festival there in 1967. On January 16, 1953 he was critically injured in a two-car wreck and took almost four months to recover, with Cline and Martin keeping the band together.

Elvis Presley recorded "Blue Moon of Kentucky" at Sun on July 7, 1954 and released it on July 19 as the B-side of "That's All Right". Over nearly 60 years more than 150 musicians played in the Blue Grass Boys, among them Del McCoury and Peter Rowan. The first bluegrass festival, organized by Carlton Haney, was held in Roanoke, Virginia in 1965, and Ralph Rinzler became his manager in 1963. He played Farm Aid IV in Indianapolis on April 7, 1990 and gave his last performance on March 15, 1996. He died on September 9, 1996, aged 84.

Honors

He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1970 and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1971, received an NEA National Heritage Fellowship in 1982, was the inaugural inductee into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Honor in 1991, and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993, the National Medal of Arts in 1995 and a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1997 as an early influence. A Bill Monroe Museum opened in Rosine in 2018. Richard D. Smith wrote his biography Can't You Hear Me Callin' (2000) and Tom Ewing another in 2018.