Bill Monroe

The generations really work together, don't they? Well, in the middle section of the show, I often take the opportunity to play some music from some of the LPs that I've got.

And I recently got a load of LPs from a friend of mine who was digitizing his collection and no longer needed to keep all the albums stored on a shelf like i do and um and there was some great music in there and one of them is an album bill monroe lester flannell scruggs the original bluegrass band put out on rounder records in the special series This was number six in the special series.

And basically, it's got all the music that was recorded by what most people regard as the original Bluegrass band.

And it's all classic songs.

You don't get paid.

It's the honor of being on that stage, which is the church basically of music, of rock and roll and bluegrass and country music and The old guys, you know, the Bill Monroe kind of guys who Elvis had copied, you know.

Elvis took everything that was going on there, all the blues and R&B and bluegrass, and put it together, put a drummer in there, and, you know, they called it rock and roll, and out came Chuck Berry and everybody else.

But it was quite a traditional thrill for me to play there.

I wrote songs with Melba Montgomery.

I mean, what's the chances of that? I played with Bill Monroe for three or four years every Wednesday night.

What's the chances of that? Hello here, buddy.

I like your cap.

a lot of gospel music in Bluegrass.

But back when it started, like, Bill Monroe was credited as being the father of Bluegrass music.

But when he had his band, and they were playing on the Grand Isle Opry with, you know, in amongst, you know, Ernest Pub and, you know, George Jones and all that stuff, they were just country music.

It wasn't sort of called bluegrass then.

Bill Monroe called his band the Bluegrass Boys because Kentucky sort of had a lot of Kentucky roots there, and bluegrass being, you know, alfalfa or lucerne paddocks, and they called it the bluegrass of Kentucky.

And he called his band the Bluegrass Boys, and then people just started referring to it as bluegrass.

So, you know, generally bluegrass is...

And look at what he put on the other side.

Blue Moon of Kentucky, a bluegrass waltz written by Bill Monroe.

The trio dragged it out of waltz time into a driving 4-4 with the blues all through it, and on the session tape you can hear Phillips say, that's fine, that's a pop song now.

So think about that single as an object.

It's quite awesome.

the day today in country music history a whole lot went on on this day in history going back to 1939 when it kind of all started because bill monroe auditioned for the grand old opry and of course surprise surprise five days later he made his debut and country music was never the same.

And then we fast forward to 1956 in Pikeville, Kentucky, and that is where Dwight Yoakam was born on this day.

Happy birthday, Dwight.