Ed: This is the second article in a monthly series that author Barry R. Willis has generously allowed the CBA website to publish.
This discussion is to clarify the earliest fiddlers on Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys in the early 1940s. Mr. Monroe explained to author James Rooney that he founded this band in 1938 with fiddler Art Wooten, guitarist Cleo Davis, and then a jug and rhythm player named John Miller. Soon he hired Amos Garen to play bass for him and headed for Nashville where the Grand Ole Opry show was. Tommy Millard was in the band a very short time in 1939 as their entertaining comedian and emcee. Davis often had trouble controlling his straight-man role with Millard’s hilarious skits. Monroe named him “Snowball.”
The earliest fiddlers in Monroe’s band included Tommy Magness, Floyd Ethridge, Art Wooten. According to Neil V. Rosenberg in his Bluegrass history book (p. 56-57), “During this period (1942-1944) Monroe was occasionally carrying two fiddlers with the band so that he could break in the less experienced man on the job with a veteran.”
1942 was a significant year for Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys. It was this year that Bill Monroe bought his famous Gibson F-5 mandolin in a Florida barbershop for $150. The instrument was number 73987 and was signed and dated by Lloyd Loar, July 9, 1923.
Later on that year, members of the Blue Grass Boys were Monroe (mandolin), Jay Hugh Hall (guitar), Clyde Moody (guitar), Cousin Wilbur (bass, comedy) and Howdy Forrester (fiddle) who replaced Art Wooten. Forrester had already pioneered twin-fiddling on WSM with Georgia Slim Rutland. Dave “Stringbean” Akeman was hired as comedian, and as a pitcher on Bill’s baseball team. Monroe now had two comedians. Stringbean was Monroe’s first banjoist, too.
A comment by Stringbean’s brother elaborated on String’s two periods when he was with Monroe, “As far as I know, Bill didn’t even know he played banjo when he hired him. After he found out he could play, he went to playin’ a little with Bill’s band. Then he left Bill to go with Charlie [Monroe] and then went into the service and then he came back and went with Bill again.”
In October 1942, Carl Story joined Monroe’s band, replacing Forrester on fiddle when Forrester joined the Navy. Story remained with Monroe until October 1943 when Chubby Wise replaced him in the fall of 1943.
Jim Shumate later replaced Wise and played fiddle with the band until Forrester came back from the Navy after the war (October 1945) and claimed his job with Monroe as was his right as a returning veteran. Forrester didn’t stay long, and Wise came back.
But the above scenario is not the way Chubby remembered it when I asked him about it in a 1993 phone conversation while he was lounging around his home with his wife Rossie. Here’s a portion of that interview:
Barry: “When you joined Monroe, did you take Carl Story’s place? Or was that Howdy Forrester?”
Wise: “I took Big Howdy Forrester’s place. He went into the Navy–into the service–and I got his job in 1943. I happened to hear Bill say on the Grand Ole Opry one Saturday night that Howdy had to go into the service and he had to have a fiddle player. And I just went to Nashville and told Bill I wanted the job, and I did my thing with him, and he just hired me right on the spot. So that’s how I got the job.
“When I quit, Benny Martin went to work for Bill. Howdy never did work for Bill again. I quit in ’48. Clyde Moody and I went to the Washington area and went to work for Connie B. Gay, the promoter up there. He had a show called Gay Time at Constitution Hall. At that time he had different artists: He had Pete Castle, you know, the blind singer; Hank Penny, Grandpa Jones, Jimmy Dean, Billy Grammer, Roy Clark, and a number of them on Gay Time in Arlington, Virginia, on WARL. That was back in 1948. Connie B. Gay did all that. As a matter of fact, he kind of got country music started in that area. Let’s give him credit on that. As you know, he’s been dead for some time, but I don’t guess they’d ever heard of country music in that area before Connie started it.”
Carl Story remembered it a bit differently, and probably more succinctly (from what I could tell during those 1993 telephone conversations. Dear reader, as a writer I will normally keep my own opinions out of what I write, completely void of my views. But in this instance, I had to make a choice of how things went back in those days. I chose to go with Carl Story’s version).
Here’s what happened: In the summer of 1942, Carl Story had a radio show at WWNC. Blue Grass Boy Clyde Moody did a guest spot on the show. Because of the War, it was difficult to keep a band together. When Bill Monroe called Story to play fiddle with the Blue Grass Boys later that year, Story knew that it might take a while to get up to the speed at which Monroe played. Monroe and Story were both confident that he could do it, so he left his Rambling Mountaineers in the hotel where they were staying and headed for Nashville. He took Howdy Forrester’s place who had to leave to join the Navy (Forrester would later return to the Blue Grass Boys after the War, replacing Chubby Wise). Other band members were Clyde Moody (guitar), Stringbean (banjo), Sally Anne Forrester (accordion) and Cousin Wilbur Wesbrooks (bass). Story stayed a year until he himself was drafted into the U.S. Navy in October 1943.
Monroe paid Story a salary and ten percent of the sales of pictures, candy, and souvenirs. Monroe also paid all the motel bills. When Story gave notice to Monroe, Monroe hired Chubby Wise. So, for the next three weeks Story and Wise played twin fiddles until Story left.
So here’s “the conflict.” So many people, including Chubby Wise, thought that Wise replaced Forrester in Monroe’s band. But it wasn’t; it was Carl Story. Mr. Wise recalled replacing a fiddler who was going into the navy, but wasn’t sure who it was. Mr. Story clarified this to this writer.
When Story returned from the Navy in 1945, he reorganized his Rambling Mountaineers on WWNC again, this time with banjoist Hoke Jenkins (nephew of Snuffy Jenkins who would soon play join Jim and Jesse McReynolds in Hoke’s Smoky Mountaineers band, and whose banjo style served as the guide for Jesse’s invention of mandolin cross-picking.)
This story and hundreds more can be found in America’s Music: Bluegrass. A History of Bluegrass Music in the Words of Its Pioneers. See www.barryrwillis.com for revised digital download of this out-of-print four-pound book and the actual audios of the original interviews as they were conducted. Next month we’ll cover a different subject such as the single-string banjo playing of Eddie Adcock and Don Reno. Yet another blog will feature the true story of Bill Keith, Earl Scruggs, and Scruggs’ banjo instruction book.
Friends, this is the second monthly presentation of important aspects of bluegrass music which need definitive clarification. Last month, in Blog #1, we discussed who invented bluegrass music.
The source of these discussions is the huge number of conversations and first-person analyses by the people who were actually there to experience each of these topics: the pioneers of bluegrass. These conversations are aspects of bluegrass music which bear serious thought. The source of these thoughts and quotes are in America’s Music: Bluegrass. A History of Bluegrass Music in the Words of Its Pioneers, researched and published in 1997 by Barry R. Willis. Feel free to join the fray at barry@barryrwillis.com/blog.
And if you’d like to actually listen to these actual live or phone conversations I had with these pioneers so many years ago, you can actually download them by going to www.barryrwillis.com and going to Audio Interviews on that front page. With that download you’ll get hundreds of additions material for this history book. Simply go to Download “America’s Music: Bluegrass”.