Backstage at the Opry: An Encounter with Bill Monroe
Fixing me with that hawklike stare, Monroe thumped me on the chest and said, "You just listen to that 'What Would You Give in Exchange for Your Soul?'"
In the early-to-mid-90s, I spent a lot of time in Nashville, working on a never-to-be-finished history of country music (among my back pages are more such aborted missions than I care to admit). One evening in 1993, backstage at the Grand Ole Opry, I was startled to notice, immediately to my right, an unmistakable, hawklike profile under a Stetson hat. Summoning my courage, I approached Mr. Monroe, for it was he, not to ask for an interview but simply to pay obeisance.1
So closely is Bill Monroe identified with his musical creation, bluegrass, that it's almost as if man and music called each other into being. The notion of a pre-Monroe bluegrass obviously makes no sense, yet it is almost as hard to imagine a pre- bluegrass Monroe. But this is precisely the aspect of Bill Monroe that I was just then discovering, to my fascination.
In my research, I’d begun working my way through a mini-genre: early country music’s great “brother duos”: the Delmore Brothers, the Blue Sky Boys, the Carlisle Brothers, the somewhat later Osborne Brothers, Louvin Brothers, and Stanley Brothers. Of the few I’d listened to, the best by far were the Monroe Brothers, Bill and Charlie, a red-hot pair who scorched the Carolinas in the mid-’30s.
The 30s ushered in a new kind of hillbilly recording artist (until about 1950, country music was saddled in the trade magazines and by record labels with the disparaging moniker ''hillbilly''). Unlike their forebears, casual pickers for whom record-making had been largely a lark, the new breed were full-time entertainers, young, polished and ambitious. Members of the first generation to grow up on radio and records, Charlie and Bill were eager to incorporate into their music the feel of modernity, of jazz bands and smooth pop crooners. Charlie and Bill Monroe's sound matched their beautifully tailored suits; a streamlined whoosh, it brought intimations of big-city speed and excitement to their rural audiences. To an extent, the Monroes' relationship to country music parallels that of Bill's exact contemporary Robert Johnson (they were both born in 1911) to the Mississippi Delta blues, the genre whose peak Johnson represented. They shared a self-aware professionalism, supercharged technique and nervous intensity. Like Johnson, the Monroes prodded a rural idiom out of a sleepy past into a hardboiled, hopped-up present.
I’ll add here, apropos of both Bill Monroe and southern Black music, that what was known throughout the first half of the 20th century as “race music”—Black popular music, from gospel to Black vaudeville to rural blues—met and mingled often, Blacks and whites listening to each other on radios and Victrolas, if not often in person (strict segregation prevailed, of course, and not merely in the South). Frank Hutchison, who recorded in the late 1920s, and the somewhat later Roscoe Holcomb, powerful hillbilly singers from West Virginia and Kentucky respectively, had large blues repertoires; Holcomb, for whom the term “high lonesome sound” was coined, studied Blind Lemon Jefferson’s records. Sometimes (more often in jazz than anywhere else) the physical divide was a little more porous. Perhaps the most enigmatic hybrid of all was the improbably named Arnold Shultz (1886-1931), a Black guitarist and fiddler who never recorded, yet is believed to have pioneered the thumb-style guitar picking popularized by Maybelle Carter and Merle Travis. Shultz also played lots of blues guitar, often bottleneck-style. When he wasn’t working on riverboats or in western Kentucky coal mines, Shultz entertained at 1910s and 20s house parties and other gatherings, often with white musicians. These included Bill Monroe’s uncle, Pendleton Vandiver, the subject of one of Monroe’s most famous songs, “Uncle Pen,” and Monroe himself. According to the country music historian John Rumble, “Monroe worked with Shultz as a young man, playing guitar behind Shultz’s fiddle at local house parties.” “Arnold Shultz could run from one chord to another the prettiest way you ever heard,” said Monroe. Official reports cite Shultz’s cause of death as “mitral lesion,” a type of heart failure. Shultz’s family and others claimed that Shultz was poisoned by jealous white musicians with bad whiskey, the likely cause of Robert Johnson’s death.
By the time Bill and Charlie came to record, they had kicked around plenty. Native Kentuckians, they had busted their backs in an oil refinery outside Chicago and barnstormed the Midwest with their brother Birch, who left the group in 1934. Heading south in 1935, Bill and Charlie worked the North Carolina-South Carolina line. Radio performers by day, by night they rode the bad roads to schoolhouses, churches, town halls: anyplace big enough to hold a crowd.
Big Charlie was the frontman, a gregarious crowd pleaser, but it was the sounds that Bill wrenched from his mandolin—an absurdly unlikely vehicle for heroics—that distinguished the Monroes from every other hillbilly act. Before Bill Monroe, the mandolin was an inessential instrument in country music, a prop you gave the singer so he could do something with his hands. Out of sheer stubbornness and something like genius, Monroe invented a language for the instrument. Moving his pick rapidly up and down across the strings, he was able to play double- and quadruple-time runs, and when the tempo was as fast to begin with as it was on ''Watermelon Hangin' on That Vine'' or ''New River Train,'' Bill's 16th-note runs drove people half-wild, made them jump out of their seats, throw their hats in the air, holler like fools.
Charlie used the pick-strum style that he'd no doubt learned from Carter Family records, and perhaps from Arnold Shultz. But Maybelle Carter never played with anything like Charlie’s speed. Charlie Monroe must have been a powerful man, to whip his right wrist up and down as speedily and relentlessly as he did, yet with enough finesse to pick out lickety-split little bass runs. At the start of the first Monroe Brothers song I ever heard, I grumbled to myself: somebody had sped up the turntable (yes, this was back in the LP days). But in came the voices, relaxed and resonant. Nobody had fooled with the turntable; what this was, was a case of next-to-impossible musicianship. To this day, whenever I feel like laughing out loud with the giddy pleasure of hearing something ridiculously difficult pulled off with nonchalant aplomb, I listen to the Monroe Brothers.
Bill Monroe (left) and his brother Charlie, ca. 1935-’38. As a youngster, Bill was not handsome, and had a “lazy,” or half-crossed right eye. As a result, he adopted a somewhat recessive personality. Correcting his eye problem through either force of will or with medical help, Bill shed his diffidence. He nonetheless retained a occasional stammer, audible in interviews.
But Bill and Charlie weren't merely speedsters. When the Monroe Brothers played religious songs, which they considered their stock in trade, they slowed the tempo way down, shifting the emphasis to their close vocal harmonies. Bill and Charlie were at least as proud of songs such as “This World Is Not My Home” or “What Would You Give in Exchange For Your Soul?” as they were of their uptempo numbers. Their God-fearing public loved the gospel songs, too. The Monroe’s first, 1935, release, which became one of the biggest country-music hits of the 30's, was “What Would You Give in Exchange.''
Due primarily to their mutual cussedness (Bill’s days as Big Charlie’s yes-man were past), the brothers went their separate professional ways in 1938, but during their four short years together, they must have been something to see and hear.
Right, the encounter at the Opry. “Mr. Monroe,” I semi-stammered, “of course the Blue Grass Boys are beyond compare, but I just want to say that the Monroe Brothers’ music is almost all I’ve been listening to these days. It’s just splendid, it’s a revelation.”
Bill Monroe turned, focusing his attention on me. He jabbed me in the chest.
“Now you go listen to that ‘What Would You Give in Exchange for Your Soul?’” he said. It was just as I’ve said: the Monroes’ speed-demon virtuosity notwithstanding, the music which, at least as far as Bill was concerned, had best represented them were the religious songs: slow and bone-sparse, unflashily played, sailing aloft on the brothers' voices—Bill's especially, an eerie high tenor.
His directive issued, Bill Monroe turned away and reassumed his profile. He and the Blues Grass Boys evidently weren’t playing that night; Bill was either in the building on business or had merely come around to rub elbows with his fellow Opry members, Bill Monroe’s extended family since 1939. If, perish the thought, Bill Monroe had died in 1938—before, that is, accepting his invitation to join the Opry—he would still have affected the course of country music.
Below: The legacy continues. On February 1, 2024, at Lincoln Center’s Geffen Hall, mandolinist Chris Thile and guitarist Billy Strings play “What Would You Give in Exchange For Your Soul?”
Except for my backstage encounter with the great man, this piece draws largely on my July 30, 2000 New York Times essay “Before Bluegrass, Bill Monroe Was Already a Star”