Bill Monroe was born and raised in Rosine, Kentucky. In the early 1930s, when Bill and his brother Charlie began playing together professionally, they had been working in an oil refinery in Indiana. Upon ending his musical partnership with Charlie, Bill formed his own band and called it the Blue Grass Boys. They played the same basic old-time style of music that dozens of other bands at the time played. But Monroe was picking up a wide range of influences. Many of the old-time string bands of the period were playing a speeded-up, urbanized style of the old-time music they had grown up on. The Blue Grass Boys were among the fastest, sped along by Monroe's prodding mandolin. Monroe, who as a child was influenced by a blues guitarist named Arnold Schulz, was soaking up jazz, pop, and even schoddische, and incorporating these various elements into his music. In 1946, when the three-finger banjo picker Earl Scruggs joined Monroe's band, the synthesis was basically complete. Often picking at extremely fast tempos, but including slow yet muscular ballads, singing high and hard, and passing solos around between banjo, mandolin and fiddle, the Blue Grass boys created a brand new style of music that would soon (within 15 years) come to bear their name--bluegrass music.
Bluegrass, from the beginning, was a music that was made in cities but looked back to rural roots. Lyrically, the earliest bluegrass songs reflect a yearning for a way of life that is passing out of the world; the songs tell of a lost home and dead parents. While bluegrass is hardly new in singing about lost love, often the departed lover is just one more part of the general milieu around the old home place that has been unfortunately left behind. Bluegrass music is about memory and loss.
In one of his most enduring songs, Monroe sings:
Back in the days of my childhood
In the evening when everything was still
I used to sit and listen to the foxhounds
With my dad in the old Kentucky hills
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
This is the quintessential bluegrass song.
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2 comments:
I have watched many a friend fall into this strange nostalgia of old-timey-ness. There is a difference between longing for what one has lost and longing for what one imagines one could have lost. I am not saying one is more true, valid or more pure than the other. I am however concerned with the difference and how that affects a person's expression of nostalgia. Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, I think so. I think one reason this sort of music resonates so much is that there is perhaps a collective nostalgia for a past that never was, at least not for any of us. Even in the case of the 1st-generation BG musicians, there's an idealization of home and mother that may be a little bit distorting or even reactionary, like a refusal to adapt or something. So the two sorts of nostalgia you mention may not be entirely distinct. It's an interesting phenomenon.
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