Some people say it’s better to be lucky than good. Bill Monroe was both lucky and good. He was an amazingly creative person, an endless fount of songs and tunes, and he worked for a long time to come up with a style of music that would be his own and live forever.
Some of these efforts were more successful than others. Somewhere in my basement (or maybe it’s gone by now) is a vinyl LP of early Monroe songs with an accordion in the band. And his first banjo player, Dave “Stringbean” Akeman, played in a fairly primitive style.
But Monroe hit the jackpot when young Earl Scruggs applied for the banjo player job. Scruggs became a Blue Grass Boy in December of 1945 and his fluid, rapid, amazing picking really, in my opinion, made bluegrass music happen. Scruggs and singer Lester Flatt left Monroe in 1948 to start their own band. Other banjo players were starting to play like Earl by then, so Monroe kept his sound nearly the same, but over the next years Flatt & Scruggs, again in my opinion, were the premiere bluegrass band.
But lightning struck again for Monroe in 1963 when a young fellow from the North came looking for a job. And just as Earl Scruggs had electrified the country music world with his hot three-finger picking, Bill Keith, who died this past October, did it again with his “melodic” or as some called it, “chromatic” style.
There could only be one Bill in a Bill Monroe band so Keith became “Brad.” The band went into the studio and (I’m working on memory here) recorded “Devil’s Dream,” “Sailor’s Hornpipe” and I believe a really hot version of “Rawhide,” with a Keith-style break. I was struggling to learn Scruggs-style banjo at that time, and I recall being blown away by the speed and accuracy and virtuosity of those tunes.
I found tablatures of “Devil’s Dream” and “Sailor’s Hornpipe” and worked on them for hours. Eventually I could play them, but never as fast nor as accurately.
Keith’s musical achievements did not stop with his banjo virtuosity. Earl Scruggs had written some banjo instrumentals in which he tuned his second and third strings on the fly to go from G tuning to D tuning. Earl didn’t always get right back in perfect tune, which you can hear if you have a computer program like Song Surgeon or the Amazing Slow-Downer.
Earl devised a pair of cam tuners that would release the pressure on the inside strings to change the tuning, but they required him to drill two holes right in the middle of his Gibson peghead. The resulting splintered mess of inlay looked so bad Earl made a little metal box to cover the area. You can see it in a few old photos.
Keith devised tuners containing planetary gears and screw-in stops that replace the second the third-string tuners to allow those changes to be made without messing up the banjo. His company, Beacon Banjo, still sells them.
Before Keith died he answered the phone at Beacon every day when he was in town. Once I phoned to see about getting a little set screw and its attendant tiny spring that had fallen out of my banjo replaced. (He sent them along, no charge.)
I asked if the person on the phone was Bill Keith and he replied it was.
“You were at Grass Valley last summer,” I said. “Late one night you were in a jam session with Paul Shelasky and some other people, and I just want to tell you that was my favorite moment of the entire festival.”
“I think it was my favorite time there, too,” he said.
He was a great talent, universally respected, generous with his time (his music theory lectures are legendary), and as far as I have ever heard, a totally sweet guy.
He will be missed.
