CMT Blog: Bill Monroe

If you ever find yourself driving between Cincinnati and Lexington, Ky., you should pull off I-75 and check out the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Renfro Valley. That town’s name will be familiar to an older generation of country fans, because it’s the home of the Renfro Valley Barn Dance, the famous radio show that started broadcasting there in 1939. The big, black barn is still standing. You can’t miss it from the highway. And after walking through the nearby museum, I was surprised by how many of my favorite singers are from the Bluegrass State.

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There’s a fine little venue in Ann Arbor, Mich., that’s long been a friend to acoustic music. With a staff of mainly volunteers, The Ark manages to bring in some of the finest talent anywhere to their stage; Mountain Heart recently recorded their live record here. The area’s roots of bluegrass run deep. For years, Southerners looking for work in the auto and military plants went back and forth between the Detroit area and home, bringing their music with them. The Hillbilly Highway, 23, runs from here all the way to our home in Asheville, N.C., and beyond. Our buddy Ralph Lewis, a former Bluegrass Boy with Bill Monroe, talks about playing three nights a week for big crowds while he was working in Detroit. Bluegrass music tends to pop up where you’d least expect it; in Ireland last year, the first pub we walked into had bluegrass playing on a little beat up antenna radio and nothing ever sounded better. — Graham Sharp

Last week I gushed over a book of fictional stories and “true” recollections by country songwriters called A Guitar and a Pen. I was particularly effusive about the tale of Bill Monroe’s encounter with Frank Sinatra at the White House, which the book — and I, in turn — identified as having been written by CMT.com’s Hazel Smith. Hazel just told me that while the core of the story is true, she didn’t write it. Nor did she accompany Monroe on the trip to Washington, as the story says. These substantial departures from fact call into question all the other pieces presented as real happenings.

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Even the most artfully crafted song is a mere “teaser” to a longer story. We hear a great song and wish we knew more, as we do, for instance, when we listen to “He Stopped Loving Her Today” or “Strawberry Wine.” In a new book called A Guitar and a Pen, 25 of country music’s most gifted lyricists are given ample space to tell their stories instead of being limited to three verses, a bridge and a chorus.

Most of the pieces here are works of fiction, but a few are true chronicles. Shining brightest in the latter category is CMT’s Hazel Smith’s account of accompanying Bill Monroe to Washington, D.C., where he was to receive a presidential award, and watching helplessly as he imposed his iron will on everyone he met, from airport security guards to a strangely-subdued Frank Sinatra. On the fictional side, Bobby Braddock serves up a hilarious tale of amorous deception on the Internet, while Bob McDill introduces a camp cook too sensitive for mere mortals to trifle with.

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Here’s the question I am probably asked the most: “Have you heard anything good lately?” And if you’d ask me that now, I’d have a lot of recommendations for you.

Lately I keep going back to Tift Merritt’s Another Country (due Feb. 26). Her voice is wonderfully soothing, and she makes sure that every word counts. I like her perspective too - taking risks and getting past the bumps in the road. She’s a native of North Carolina, but now living in New York City - much like Ryan Adams. Ryan and I are the same age, but when his band Whiskeytown released the album Strangers Almanac in 1997, I didn’t quite know what to make of it. What can I say, I was really innocent back then, which makes me even more enthusiastic about the double-disc reissue (due March 4), with a bunch of bonus tracks I’d never heard before. My favorite cuts are “Dancing With the Women at the Bar,” which I consider one of the best songs in his extensive catalog, and a sturdy cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.”

Two of my favorite country artists from my high school days are back with solid albums too. Carlene Carter’s Stronger (due March 4) shows her songwriting is still in peak form. I was relieved, too, because I used to play her big hit, “Every Little Thing,” all the time. This was when I was just getting into country music, and Kathy Mattea happened to be one of the first country concerts I saw. When I heard she was making an album about coal mining (Coal, due April 1), I figured I’d listen to it once and file it forever. Surprise! It’s really good. Marty Stuart lends his expert producing skill.

Also in my pile, I just received Kathleen Edwards‘ new album, Asking For Flowers (due March 4) and Ricky Skaggs‘ tribute to Bill Monroe, Honoring the Fathers of Bluegrass: Tribute to 1946 and 1947 (due March 25). Just in time for a weekend road trip. Farther down the road, I’m looking forward to Dierks Bentley’s Greatest Hits (due May 6) as well.

In case you missed it, here’s a playlist of some pretty cool songs I’ve heard lately.

http://blog.cmt.com/2008-01-29/my-favorite-songs-of-the-year-so-far/

I am not a man who plucks the subject of cleavage out of thin air, but neither do I shrink from cleavage when it is thrust upon me. So it is with serious purpose that I turn to the topographical features of Rhonda Vincent. In the liner photos for her new album, Good Thing Going, the effervescent bluegrass star once again exhibits some intriguing studies in light and shadow. One picture shows her lying on her back in the grass, pensively gazing at the sky while clasping the neck of her mandolin just to the side of her precipitously plunging neckline. Looking closely at the photo (and choking back sounds generally associated with the last stages of waterboarding), I concluded this was not a candid shot, not something that could be dismissed as the accidental slip of a strap or failure of a button. No, it was a deliberate display of the goods. And bravo for her. The peek-a-boo theme has been common to her album and publicity art since at least as far back as her One Step Ahead CD of 2003. On that cover, she strides across a street wearing a top that bares both cleavage and navel. I count this the most important advance in bluegrass music since Bill Monroe hired Flatt and Scruggs.

As one who is pure of heart, I barely took notice of Vincent’s stylistic swashbuckling until it came up at the 2003 International Country Music Conference. There, on a panel called “Country Music and Gender,” banjo player and magazine columnist Murphy Henry grouched about Vincent’s recent epidermal revelations and then flatly declared, “You don’t show cleavage in bluegrass!” That outraged me. How dare she, I thought, put such a rack on the rack? I was on the verge of withering her with a spirited defense of cleavage as an instrument of free expression, but then it occurred to me that someone might think my motivation was more carnal than Constitutional. So I cravenly kept my mouth shut. It is a shame I will carry with me the rest of my life. Forgive me, Rhonda, and keep up the good works.

I guess you can never count a good song out, no matter how ancient it is. Who would have thought that a lament as creaky as “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow” might appeal to modern ears? But it did. Thanks to the Coen Brothers’ refurbishing, it became the crown jewel of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack album, slugged its way to No. 35 on the country singles chart and, in 2001, won a Grammy for best country vocal collaboration (with Alison Krauss’ sideman, Dan Tyminski, providing the lead vocals). Even more remarkable, that same album contained Ralph Stanley’s spooky a cappella rendition of “O Death.” While that song never charted in Billboard, it did earn Stanley a Grammy for best male country vocal. Both songs have been around so long that no one knows for sure who composed them.

In 2005, CitiBank debuted a TV commercial that showed an elderly couple bantering and singing outdoors, she plucking an autoharp, he a mandolin. The ad was a snapshot of folks in their “golden years” who had handled their money well and were now making the most of their leisure. But what really attracted my attention was the song they sang. It was “Happy, Sunny Side of Life,” a tune made famous by the Blue Sky Boys some time around World War II. The commercial was so popular that it gave the two performers, Mo and Loretta Lebowitz, something of a second career. They are currently touring festivals as “Loretta & Mo — The Bluegrass Couple.”

Lately, you may have seen the L. L. Bean commercial of a guy shoveling his way through an enormous snowfall. The music that accompanies the spot is “Footprints in the Snow.” Bill Monroe had a Top 5 hit with the song in 1946, and that’s the version I remember. But the one used on the commercial, it turns out, is even older. It was recorded and released in 1939 by Cliff Carlisle, older brother of the late Grand Ole Opry star, Bill Carlisle. His was not the first recording of the song, however. That distinction, I am told, belonged to the West Virginia Ramblers, who cut it in 1931 as “Little Foot Prints.”

There are plenty more mossy treasures out there, so keep ‘em comin’. I’m waiting for somebody to dust off “The Girl in the Blue Velvet Band.”

(Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

Is bluegrass music the new Branson, the last resort for aging country artists who can’t get major record deals? It may look that way, but I think it’s just as likely that these acts, finally freed of the usual commercial expectations, rejoice in singing the kind of songs they grew up with, ones that embody the string band sound and the rural images that were once common in mainstream country. Looking over such recent arrivals as Merle Haggard’s The Bluegrass Sessions and Bill Anderson’s Whisperin’ Bluegrass, it occurs to me that country performers have long shown a fondness for this old-time style.In 1970, Dolly Parton and Lynn Anderson, both of whom would record bluegrass albums in the twilight of their careers, scored country hits with “Muleskinner Blues” and “Rocky Top,” respectively. “Muleskinner” was a Bill Monroe evergreen by way of Jimmie Rodgers. Anderson’s “Rocky Top,” of course, covered the Osborne Brothers‘ 1968 dynamo.

Bluegrass took to the country (and pop) charts again in 1973 via Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandell’s galloping instrumental, “Dueling Banjos,” the theme from Deliverance. At the height of his country prominence, Tom T. Hall recorded The Magnificent Music Machine, an entire album of bluegrass songs, most of them standards. The 1976 collection featured such guest pickers as Monroe, Jimmy Martin and J. D. Crowe. Six years later, Hall teamed with Earl Scruggs for The Storyteller & the Banjo Man. (Since his retirement from touring, Hall has devoted himself to bluegrass.) In 1978, Conway Twitty saluted bluegrass with “Boogie Grass Band,” a tune written by Ronnie Reno, son of Bluegrass Hall of Famer Don Reno.

Throughout the ‘80s and 90s, Ricky Skaggs pumped a torrent of bluegrass into his country music. Travis Tritt enriched his 1991 album, It’s All About to Change, with the Jimmy Skinner bluegrass classic, “Don’t Give Your Heart to a Rambler.” Steve Earle brought legions of new fans to bluegrass in 1999 when he recorded The Mountain with the Del McCoury Band. That same year, Parton crossed the musical border with The Grass Is Blue. Anderson and Janie Fricke both re-styled their country hits in 2004 on albums called, not surprisingly, The Bluegrass Sessions.

So the next time a country icon reaches for a banjo, try not to be too cynical. It could be that he really does like bluegrass. Couldn’t it?

His apparent suicide this week probably means we’ll never know all of the exact causes behind his recent financial and legal woes, but Bob McLean sure seemed like country music’s guardian angel. In 2004 and 2005, he made two extraordinary donations to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum that can only be described as genuinely iconic musical instruments — the 1923 Gibson F-5 mandolin that Bill Monroe used during most of his career and 1928 Gibson L-5 guitar that Maybelle Carter played throughout her life, including early recordings with the Carter Family. The mandolin and guitar had been on the market with a collective price tag of more than $1.5 million, although it’s hard to attach a dollar figure to instruments that launched bluegrass and country music as we know it today.

With private collectors acquiring and hoarding vintage American-built instruments to keep locked up in their mansions overseas, McLean made sure the Monroe mandolin and Carter guitar would be on public display in Nashville. The elite of the country music community responded accordingly by inviting him to various parties and industry gatherings. (While it may be true that money can’t necessarily buy love or friendship, there’s no denying that it gets people’s attention.)

McLean, a philanthropist and former stockbroker who lived in Murfreesboro, Tenn., had donated millions to various institutions, including Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro and the new Schermerhorn Symphony Center in Nashville, but rumors circulated earlier this year after he was hit by a series of lawsuits from investors who alleged he had fraudulently taken their money. By early September, they claimed he owed them a total of $20 million. The day before he was to attend a bankruptcy hearing, McLean’s body was found Tuesday (Sept. 25) near a church in Shelbyville, Tenn. Police say the cause of death was a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

One of the lingering questions about McLean’s legal troubles is whether the Hall of Fame is in any danger of having to relinquish the Monroe mandolin and Carter guitar to the bankruptcy court or the IRS. I spoke to a museum spokesperson who emphasized that both instruments are owned by the Hall of Fame, adding that confidentiality agreements prohibited additional explanation.

I once sat at a table with McLean during BMI’s country awards banquet and he seemed like an extremely nice guy. It was easy to tell that he was wealthy but I also sensed that he donated the Monroe mandolin and Carter guitar to the Hall of Fame simply because he felt like that’s where they belong. If he was a con artist, I certainly didn’t detect it, although it could be argued that being a great actor is an essential part of a con artist’s job description. In any event, I still prefer to think he was just another person who somehow lost his way and got in over his head financially.

It wasn’t too long ago that country performers routinely incorporated a title with their name, the idea being that such an addition gave them a little extra boost in stature and individuality. Thus, Roy Acuff was the King of Country Music, Kitty Wells the Queen and Tammy Wynette the First Lady. The practice went a long way back. Jimmie Rodgers billed himself as the Singing Brakeman (and later bore the title of Father of Country Music). Grand Ole Opry patriarch Uncle Dave Macon was known as the Dixie Dewdrop. Eddy Arnold gained fame as the Tennessee Plowboy (but gradually eased away from that designation as he sought a broader, more urbane audience). Tennessee Ernie Ford styled himself as the Old Pea Picker, and Ernest Tubb labored as the Texas Troubadour. Patti Page was the Singing Rage.

Sometimes these titles were conferred on performers by their admirers and sometimes by their paid promoters. But whatever its origin, the value of a title lay in whether or not it stuck and eventually became synonymous with the performer’s name.

Before there was a Gary LeVox, Vern Gosdin was the Voice. Roy Rogers was King of the Cowboys, Bill Monroe the Father of Bluegrass, Hank Snow the Singing Ranger, Johnny Cash the Man in Black and Tom T. Hall the Storyteller. Generously proportioned Kenny Price of Hee Haw went to his grave as the Round Mound of Sound. Ranger Doug Green of Riders in the Sky continues to call himself (albeit puckishly) the Idol of American Youth.

So here’s what I’d like to know: What do you think would be fitting honorifics for the likes of Garth Brooks, Vince Gill, Alan Jackson, Reba McEntire, Martina McBride, Kenny Chesney, Keith Urban, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill (separately or in tandem), Josh Turner, Carrie Underwood, Brad Paisley, Miranda Lambert or any other act of your choosing? Here’s your chance to influence country music history. The floor is yours.