The Lonely Kid from Rosine
William Smith Monroe was born on September 13, 1911, near Rosine, Kentucky, the youngest of eight children. He had a crossed eye that drew constant teasing and poor vision in both eyes. His mother died when he was ten; his father when he was sixteen. Left behind by older siblings, Monroe went to live with his uncle, Pendleton “Pen” Vandiver, a fiddle player who took the boy to square dances across Ohio County. Monroe later said Vandiver had “the most perfect time of any fiddler” he ever heard. He left school in the fifth grade and started working as a laborer at eleven.
His other teacher was Arnold Shultz, a Black guitarist and fiddler from western Kentucky, the son of a formerly enslaved man. Shultz played transitional runs between chords that added syncopation and a blues feel to dance music. Monroe’s Uncle Pen hired Shultz for dances, and twelve-year-old Monroe followed him around until the older musician started giving the boy paying gigs. The blues phrasing Monroe absorbed became inseparable from everything he later built.
Building the Sound
Monroe and his brother Charlie performed as the Monroe Brothers through the mid-1930s, then split. In 1938, Bill formed the Blue Grass Boys, named for his home state. On October 28, 1939, he auditioned for the Grand Ole Opry with a high-speed “Mule Skinner Blues.” He got the spot. But the sound most people now call bluegrass did not fully arrive until December 1945, when a twenty-one-year-old banjo player from Flint Hill, North Carolina, joined the band.
Earl Scruggs had been playing three-finger banjo since he was ten. The discovery, as Scruggs told it, happened after a quarrel with his brother. Alone in his room, idly picking through a tune called “Reuben,” he realized his thumb, index, and middle fingers were all working independently. “That excited me to no end,” he recalled, saying he ran through the house yelling “I’ve got it.” Local players like Snuffy Jenkins already plucked with their fingers, but Scruggs refined it into a rolling, syncopated cascade that turned the banjo from a rhythm instrument into a lead voice.
With Scruggs on banjo, Lester Flatt on guitar, Chubby Wise on fiddle, and Howard Watts on bass, the 1945 to 1948 lineup produced what historians call the “Original Bluegrass Band.” Solos rotated between instruments. Monroe’s mandolin chopped hard on the offbeats, and his vocal tenor established what he called the “high lonesome sound,” a blend of Appalachian balladry and shape-note gospel singing delivered in full voice with dissonant, modal harmonies. The mandolin itself was a 1923 Gibson F-5, serial number 73987, signed by designer Lloyd Loar; Monroe found it in a Miami barbershop window in 1945 for $150 and played it for the remaining fifty-one years of his life.
The Feud and the First Generation
In February 1948, Scruggs played his last show with Monroe. Exhausted by touring, single, living alone at Nashville’s Tulane Hotel, he gave notice and planned to care for his mother in North Carolina. Flatt left too, then bassist Watts. Monroe believed Flatt and Scruggs had a secret arrangement; both denied it. Monroe did not speak to either man for twenty years.
Flatt and Scruggs formed the Foggy Mountain Boys. On December 11, 1949, Scruggs recorded “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” which reached number nine on the country chart. “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” hit number one in January 1963 as the theme for The Beverly Hillbillies. “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” reappeared in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, earning a Grammy in 1969.
Carter and Ralph Stanley, brothers from Dickenson County, Virginia, built a parallel tradition with the Clinch Mountain Boys beginning in 1946. Carter sang lead; Ralph played banjo and sang a piercing high tenor. Their harmonies were tighter and more haunted than Monroe’s, rooted in unaccompanied Sacred Harp singing. Carter, worn down by road travel and meager pay, drank heavily, began hemorrhaging during a performance in Hazel Green, Kentucky, on October 21, 1966, and died of cirrhosis six weeks later at forty-one. Ralph continued with the Clinch Mountain Boys for another fifty years.
The Guitar’s Rise and Newgrass
Doc Watson, born in Deep Gap, North Carolina, went blind before his first birthday. He developed a flat-picking technique that translated fiddle tunes into rapid single-note runs on acoustic guitar, something no one had done at that speed. Tony Rice, who had met Watson’s precursor Clarence White at age nine, turned flat-picking into an entirely new dialect in the 1970s. As a member of J.D. Crowe and the New South, Rice appeared on their 1975 Rounder Records debut (catalogue number 0044) alongside Ricky Skaggs on mandolin and Jerry Douglas on dobro, an album the Library of Congress added to the National Recording Registry in 2024.
In 1971, mandolinist Sam Bush co-founded New Grass Revival, a band that never played traditional bluegrass. They used bluegrass instruments on songs by Bob Marley, the Beatles, and Jerry Lee Lewis. In 1981, banjoist Bela Fleck joined; by 1986, they had signed to EMI and broken into the country chart. Bush dissolved the group in 1989, but the principle held: bluegrass instrumentation could carry any genre’s weight. Skaggs took a different path, scoring twelve number-one country hits through the 1980s before returning to bluegrass full-time in 1997 with Kentucky Thunder.
The Circle Widens
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s 1972 triple album Will the Circle Be Unbroken, recorded in a single week at Woodland Sound Studios, paired the long-haired California band with Roy Acuff, Mother Maybelle Carter, Doc Watson, and Earl Scruggs. Every track was captured on the first or second take straight to two-track tape. It went platinum.
In 2000, the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, produced by T Bone Burnett, hit number one on the Billboard 200, sold over four million copies, and won the 2002 Grammy for Album of the Year. Ralph Stanley’s a cappella “O Death” introduced his voice to millions. Alison Krauss, who would accumulate twenty-seven Grammys, found a crossover audience. Festival ticket sales surged. Del McCoury, who had sung lead for Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys in 1963, built a band with his sons that won IBMA Entertainer of the Year nine times. Billy Strings, born William Apostol in Michigan in 1992, learned bluegrass from his adoptive father then filtered it through Black Sabbath and the Grateful Dead; his 2024 album Highway Prayers became the first bluegrass record to top sales charts since the O Brother era.
Essential Listening
- Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys – The Original Bluegrass Band (1998)
- Flatt and Scruggs – Foggy Mountain Jamboree (1957)
- The Stanley Brothers – The Complete Columbia Recordings (1996)
- Doc Watson – Doc Watson (1964)
- J.D. Crowe and the New South – J.D. Crowe and the New South (1975)
- Tony Rice – Manzanita (1979)
- New Grass Revival – New Grass Revival (1986)
- Nitty Gritty Dirt Band – Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1972)
- Alison Krauss and Union Station – New Favorite (2001)
- Del McCoury Band – Del and the Boys (2001)
- Various Artists – O Brother, Where Art Thou? Soundtrack (2000)
- Billy Strings – Home (2019)