Father of Bluegrass Bill Monroe profiled in new biography

Los Angeles Times

So this musician died and went to heaven, Richard Smith tells us, recounting a joke that went around Nashville in the 1980s.

"During a tour of paradise, he and St. Peter were passed by an imperious silver-haired figure, dressed impeccably in a white suit and Stetson and carrying a mandolin. 'Who was that?' exclaimed the new arrival. 'Oh, that's God,' replied St. Peter impatiently.

'He thinks he's Bill Monroe.'

This story gets at the heart of Smith's biography of Monroe, "Can't You Hear Me Callin'." Its subtitle - "The Life of Bill Monroe, Father of Bluegrass" - correctly nails down, for anyone who still had doubts, the man's place in music history. But it also underscores the relationship Smith has to his subject, and indeed the opinion of most of the people who knew or heard him: Monroe was a god.

That's the Old Testament variety, superhumanly strong and wrathful as well as life-giving and capable of miracles. If you had any other god before him, you didn't have a prayer. He took liberties, social and sexual as well as professional and instrumental. As for a spiritual son, plenty of them - including both of Monroe's actual children - passed through his legendary band of Blue Grass Boys, and it was a trying gig indeed.

These are the themes and variations of this portrait of that rare being, a single inventor of a revolutionary musical genre. Monroe, and the perfectly named "high lonesome" sound he created, was fundamental to what came after, as everyone from Elvis - who chose Monroe's "Blue Moon of Kentucky" for his first single - to Jerry Garcia, who traveled cross country to audition for him but was too scared of his idol - has attested. Bob Dylan once said, "I'd still rather listen to Bill and Charlie Monroe than any current record. That's what America's all about to me."

So, too, for Smith, a mandolin and guitar player who knew Monroe toward the end of his life, and for whom this book is clearly a labor of love. This accounts for both the tremendous strengths of his biography and its weaknesses. One of Smith's missions is to clear up the myths about Monroe's career, some of which were spun by Monroe himself. He dismisses once and for all the speculations that the bluegrass sound was not Monroe's own; and he carefully maps the feud between Monroe and sidemen Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, who splintered off and, for a time, eclipsed their mentor entirely.

Clarifications aside, Monroe's life still has all the ingredients of a fairy tale. A shy boy whose left eye turned inward, he spent his childhood hiding from his older siblings and taunting neighbors on the bustling family farm in Rosine, Ky. But nearly everyone around him played an instrument - including his gifted mother, Malissa Ann; the Uncle Pen whom Monroe's songs later made famous; and a local black laborer named Arnold Shultz who was said to be "one of the greatest blues guitarists who ever lived" - and young Monroe, playing by ear because of his poor vision, quickly became an adept.

Monroe and his brothers Charlie and Birch formed the Monroe Brothers, and began touring the South on the kind of grueling rural road trips we can hardly imagine today. Birch fell away, leaving Bill and Charlie as the Dorsey Brothers of country music, so competitive they could hardly be in the same tour bus. Then Bill went solo: He formed his own band, played on the radio and got a coveted spot on the Grand Ole Opry, started making records and left the safe ground of country music behind.

There he stayed, several feet above mortal musicians, until rock 'n' roll changed everything and he became an old-timer, relegated to the hillbilly circuit. If it hadn't been for the folklorist Ralph Rinzler, who brought Monroe into the second stardom of the late-'50s and '60s folk revival, one of the 20th century's most exciting instrumentalists and bandleaders might have been forgotten entirely.

The book is an incredible tour of American musical history. It's just about all here, from songs sung on railroad tracks, porches and fields to the Opry and laxative-sponsored radio shows, to electric guitars, big money and music videos. Smith's musical expertise adds technical depth and valuable context to his story of Monroe's life; he explains, for instance, the history and architecture of the mandolin and the innovations of Flatt and Scruggs' finger-picking in simple, helpful terms. And one is constantly reminded, through portraits of Monroe's influences and acquaintances, how many brilliant musicians have never been recorded and are lost to history.

It's distressing, for that reason, that the women and children in Monroe's life remain - despite Smith's intention to dignify them - so oddly two-dimensional. Smith spends more time going over tax records than he does on the characters and motivations of Monroe's wife, Carolyn; his true love and muse, Bessie; or his two children, James and Melissa. The careful reader will find one clue in Smith's acknowledgements, in which he discloses that James (Monroe's only living child) declined to be interviewed and is writing his own memoir, but for a book so interested in the emotional landscape of its subject, this seems an unjustifiable omission.

As for the writing, it's no "Last Train to Memphis," but it suffices. Smith takes a colloquial approach to much of his narrative, which blends nicely with Monroe's Kentucky cadences. This sometimes allows for unfortunate tangents, like the astrological sign of Monroe's main romantic rival, or Smith's strenuous psychologizing of events and relationships that speak dramatically, and tragically, for themselves. "Can't You Hear Me Callin' " is a biographical cherry pie, a filling of sweet anecdotes and sour enmities in a light and flaky crust. But for fans of American music, it's a treat you won't want to pass up.