During the World War two era and up into the rise of Rock N Roll, Bluegrass’s reign as a top commercial genre was established. Bill Monroe & The Bluegrass Boys became a smash hit on the Grand Ole Opry and were beginning to sell a large amount of records. Popular success then led to others copying the style which turned it into its own genre. The Stanley Brother’s version of “Molly and Tenbrooks” is a prime example. The only thing different between this recording and Monroe’s is the personnel: the arrangement is the same. It is even sung by the mandolinist Darrell “Pee Wee” Lambert who was a self-professed Monroe fan and replicator. Instead of being appreciative and welcoming like would be the standard in folk-genres where songs and styles are public domain; Monroe was beyond furious and threatened to leave RCA Victor when they proposed to sign the Stanley Brothers to a record contract.
A similar sentiment could be found in Monroe when his longtime, and possibly most talented, band members Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs left to find their own group the Foggy Mountain Boys in 1948. Monroe, predictably, saw this as an affront to his status in the newly created genre and attempted to black list the band. This resulted in the Foggy Mountain Boys not receiving an invitation to the Grand Ol’ Opry until 1955, once their star had risen to a point never before seen in bluegrass thanks to their sponsorship with Martha White. They would later transcend into film stardom with their musical roles in The Beverly Hillbillies as well as Bonnie and Clyde.
When the folk movement came to bluegrass in the 1960s, Earl Scruggs’s immense popularity in popular culture as well as his connection with the banjo led to him being the first face of bluegrass while Monroe was nowhere to be found. After the folk revivalists realized their faulty logic and crowned Bill Monroe as the Father of Bluegrass, Monroe began making a point of not simply playing and redistributing the music for profit, but creating a story about his own role in creating this unique form of popular music derived from a variety of old time origins. It is at this point that Monroe begins to tell a similar story to the ones told by the English in regard to Scottish folk music in the eighteenth century. The music stops being advertised as a hybrid pop genre, and instead as a timeless entity waiting to be discovered by a great man who had the right tools to put it all together. Monroe depicts how he took his childhood influences such as Arnold Schultz and Pendleton Vandiver and merged it with tunes such as Jimmie Rodger’s “Mule Skinner Blues” in order to make a sped up, driving, and syncopated version of hillbilly music that truly derived, and should be represented as, a folk music more than anything else.
Folk music, along with being about its musical constructs, also consists of societal and musical rules that must not be broken as they are meant to symbolize and epitomize the groups of people that made it. Monroe, instead of presenting the music as a pool for innovation and synthesis, instead made it a music steeped in tradition, commitment, and restraint: the same type of values that represent Appalachia and the southern farmers to this day. With concocting a romanticized musical and societal background, Monroe placed barriers on what the music could be in the future that are now just beginning to weaken over twenty years after his death in 1996.
While there has been almost constant innovation and distinction in bluegrass as well as conscious attempts to move into a larger popular market, these attempts have always been situated towards and under the guise of Bill Monroe. Use of electronic instruments, a decision considered so taboo during the rise of Rock N Roll, soon became justified in order to implement “Monroe Drive” and other vague musical characteristics that only have merit due to their attempted connection with the self-proclaimed creator of the music. Yet, this is how Monroe wanted it. His personality and desire for monetary gain pushed him to always desire to be the center of the conversation. That urge pushed him into synthesizing the musical styles he grew up with as a kid, but it also inspired him to keep that synthesis for himself despite its blatant origins in both folk and pop music of the past.
