Bluegrass Music, The High, Lonesome Sound

In the winter of nineteen forty-five, a thirty-four-year-old mandolin player from Rosine, Kentucky, assembled the band that would define a new genre. Bill Monroe, who had been performing with his brother Charlie in the nineteen thirties and had led his own band since nineteen thirty-nine, added a banjo player named Earl Scruggs and a guitarist named Lester Flatt to a lineup at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville that already included a fiddler and bassist. Within a few months, they were recording for Columbia Records, and what they recorded was unlike anything that had existed before.

Monroe had been building toward it for years. His style drew on the old-time string band music of the Appalachian counties where he grew up, fiddle breakdowns, gospel four-part harmony, the mountain ballad tradition, and fused it with the blues he had absorbed from an African American guitarist and fiddler named Arnold Schultz in Ohio County. The result was played faster than old-time music, with the banjo running three-finger rolls in a style Scruggs had developed into something virtuosic and driving.

Monroe called his ensemble the Blue Grass Boys, after his home state. The genre took its name from him. The high, lonesome sound, the phrase belongs to Monroe himself, and it describes the hard-pressed vocal quality, the intervals that seem to reach for something just out of range, the quality of yearning embedded in the style.

The subject matter matched: separation, homesickness, the railroad, the hard-coal mine, the old home place left behind. In this it reflected the experience of the Appalachian diaspora, the hundreds of thousands of eastern Kentucky families who had moved to Cincinnati, Detroit, and Columbus looking for industrial work, carrying their music with them. By the time Monroe died in nineteen ninety-six, the music had crossed every boundary, influencing rock and roll, country, folk revival, and eventually a global audience that held its own international bluegrass festivals.

It had begun with one man's particular loneliness for a particular landscape, and turned into something that other people recognized as their own.