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A Shadow That Keeps Lengthening
Bill Monroe was not just the undisputed ‘Father of Bluegrass’ and a totally self-invented original—he was one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century.
Aug. 17, 2007 - Bill Monroe continued performing until a few months before he died, at the age of 84, in 1996. The father of Bluegrass kept up his Grand Ole Opry appearances (he’d been a member since 1939), played the same one-night stands in the same community centers, union halls, dance pavilions, school houses and roadhouses—every conceivable venue really (I once saw him perform in a disco in North Carolina)—that he’d been playing for decades, not to mention the summer bluegrass festivals and fiddlers’ conventions, including his own, at Bean Blossom, in Indiana.
It was a curious thing, though, watching him from the audience in those last years. In a way, he seemed indestructible, as though he would go on doing this for years, replacing members of his band with new Bluegrass Boys as the necessity arose. Countering this was the evidence coming through the speakers: his singing became more ghostly and transparent with each passing year. The savagery with which he had once attacked lyrics was all but gone, as was the trademark falsetto, which had for years so reliably raised the hair on necks from Tennessee to Tokyo. It came as a genuine shock to realize that Monroe was mortal.
Since almost nothing about Monroe was ever simple or straightforward, there was evidence to counter the “merely mortal” theory: he was composing as much, if not more, than ever and his mandolin playing seemed to get better all the time. It was perhaps a little less fireworky than in previous decades (Monroe was already an astonishing instrumentalist when he first recorded in the 1930s). But what it lost in flash, it gained in profundity, if not downright spirituality. This can, in part, be explained by his change of playing style in his later years. His touch on the strings became gentler, and his picking hand was less aggressive. The results aren’t weak or diluted, however. It’s more like he traded in the fierceness that characterized so much of his music for genuine serenity. (Or maybe it was all mechanical: according to one theory, the neck of Monroe’s mandolin needed straightening and he was afraid to fix it for fear the wonderful sound that he coaxed out of his old Gibson would disappear. The curve in the mandolin’s neck put the strings perilously high off the fretboard, making them harder and harder to play and resulting in the aforementioned “serene” sound.)
The songs that Monroe wrote and recorded in his later period—such titles as “Old Daingerfield,” “Southern Flavor,” “Come Hither to Go Yonder,” Old Ebenezer Scrooge” and “My Last Days on Earth”—all have that uncanny quality of sounding simultaneously familiar and like nothing you’ve ever heard. Listening to late- Monroe instrumentals, you can’t help but think of his statement that composing, for him anyway, was just a matter of reaching up and grabbing the songs out of the air, where they’d been all along. His playing could make you believe that comment, because if any music ever sounded like the music of the spheres, it was Bill Monroe’s.
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