Great Voices of Bluegrass, I: Bill Monroe, "Put My Little Shoes Away."

Any series on Bluegrass singers has to begin with Bill Monroe, the father of Bluegrass. His accomplishments were simply enormous. It's not that he wrote these songs (he did write some) it is rather that his main work was that of a musical historian and a great creative arranger. Basically, what he did was establish Celtic music in America. His family, like other Southern families, had brought most of these songs with them to America. Monroe heard many of them as a child, sung by his mother, around the house, and more specifically, played by his uncle Pendleton Vandiver (Uncle Pen) whom they would visit fairly often, and who would play his fiddle for hours. Little Bill absorbed these many tunes, and held them in memory into his adult years. He set about to re-create this music, with particular new qualities in mind, primarily rhythmic drive. He said, in his later years, that the up-tempo drive that he insisted upon was the major factor in the creation of the new musical genre which quickly became known as Bluegrass. Bluegrass fiddlers especially, like Paul Warren of the Foggy Mountain Boys, would play at almost virtuoso levels of speed. It was not at all easy to keep up with them, and it often took equally virtuosic string players, such as the legendary Earl Scruggs, to keep up. Anybody that couldn't handle the tempo was out. Add to this the high, wailing tenor falsetto on the vocals, and a rich, traditional harmony, and the essential elements of Bluegrass are in place. Here is the great Bill Monroe himself, with an extremely sentimental song that could be heart-rending to the point of mawkish if not driven by these constituent factors of Bluegrass, Monroe style.