Tom’s Ewing’s sober, encyclopedic, and exhaustive Bill Monroe: The Life and Music of the Blue Grass Man, by his own account more chronicle than biography, will prove absorbing to the book’s primary class of readers who have followed or have been personally associated with the “Father of Blue Grass Music.” For them no detail of Monroe’s life will seem extraneous. Ewing knows his audience, and is content to let the facts speak for themselves. The stories that for years have been circulating among bluegrass musicians and fans—the embarrassment, in childhood, of Bill’s crossed eyes and farsightedness; his love of baseball; his spartan life with fiddler Uncle Pen; the breakup of the Monroe Brothers; his hiring onto the Grand Ole Opry, where George Hay said that for Bill to quit he’d have to “fire himself”; his catastrophic auto accident; the effacement of the Gibson logo on his precious F-5 mandolin; the intervention of folk music impresario Ralph Rinzler; the ever-changing personnel of the Bluegrass Boys; his many women admirers, friends, and lovers—are here all firmly grounded in the record.
Bill’s fans have always known that he and Charlie moved to Iowa in 1934 to perform under the sponsorship of a patent medicine called “Crazy Water Crystals”; but who knew that the water was so named because, as the legend goes, its lithium content had relieved a woman of what was likely bipolar disorder? They knew that Dave Akeman, “Stringbean,” was Monroe’s first banjo player; but did they know that Akeman could neither read nor write? Those of us who have contemplated photographs of Monroe on his record-album covers have wondered at the dime-store price tag oddly stuck to the peghead of his mandolin—now we know that banjo player Bill Keith, having peeled it from a new pair of socks, had placed it there as a joke. National newspapers covered the story when Bill’s F-5 mandolin was destroyed with a fireplace poker in 1985 by an intruder never identified, though Ewing implies Bill had identified the vandal and implicates several likely candidates, adding ominously that death threats compelled Monroe to mount the Opry stage wearing a bullet-proof vest. We don’t normally judge a book solely on the basis of the labor invested in it; even the best scholarship does not always bear fruit. But Ewing’s book in this respect is downright awesome. The hundreds of interviews, the ledgerbooks and genealogical records, the newspapers and magazines, the advertising ephemera, liner notes, newsletters, diaries and datebooks, the memoirs, letters, telegrams, and emails, a bookshelf of secondary sources including histories, biographies, and studies that provide historically orienting milestones such as the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in 1883—that’s just the beginning—never mind the many years required to accomplish this work. Bill Monroe: The Life and Music of the Blue Grass Man is the proverbial labor of love. As such it is the ultimate fans’ book, generously addressing the limitless curiosity such readers bring to the life of a musician whose unrivaled technical skill, immense vocal power, and intense emotionality, whose deep-rooted and inexhaustible musical imagination have made him into a kind of obsession. “I think you can watch people,” Bill once said to Ralph Rinzler, “any kind of work they do in the way of music, and tell pretty well in their life what they’ve gone through, if you watch it close enough.” If music, or any art, means anything, then this must be in some sense true; not only our capacity to be moved by art, but also our fascination with artists and their lives, testify to the mystery of the relation between art and experience. Ewing’s book embodies the pursuit of this mystery, undertaken in the faith that what Monroe “went through,” thoroughly explored, will provide readers “insights into the life and music of this extraordinary individual.” The crux of the story, I think, is Bill’s violent removal from a life in Kentucky, essentially unchanged from the rural life of the nineteenth century, into the world of modern industrial America. The centrality of hard work “that nearly defies modern comprehension,” the grueling road life, the unflagging dedication to the music and mentorship, the many women—on this point Ewing is completely candid—are consistent motifs. Many readers, Ewing writes on this last, might regard Monroe’s “involvement with women younger than he” as his “worst fault.” But such relationships, he remarks, “helped Bill continue to feel young and vital…and inspired some great love songs.” Here the author, who sang lead and played guitar in Bill’s band for ten years, goes to the heart. As the many compositions he called “true songs,” or the instrumentals written to capture the sense of a particular place, all reveal, Bill Monroe first and foremost acted upon his feelings, in all of his personal relations, with men as well as women, but most importantly in his music, where he both searched for and imparted to every note, played or sung, the overflow of feeling so many have noted and celebrated. “Worst fault?” Perhaps. Bill lost his mother, who played fiddle and sang, even while he was in the womb, at age ten; music was for him indelibly associated with her. And he spent his entire adult life on the road. Properly speaking, Bill was a serial monogamist, and to most of his sweethearts, such as Bessie Lee Mauldin, he remained stubbornly faithful, in spite of sometimes frightening outbursts of jealousy and rage on both sides. With its sweeping narrative of Monroe’s ancestry, his family, his band members and associates, the nine decades of his life in country music, Bill Monroe: The Life and Music of the Blue Grass Man is a case study in the history of a people. Not by any means the first to attempt such a history; but in its understated sympathy, its tacit understanding, and especially in its unalloyed devotion to is subject, it is one of a kind.
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[Review length: 986 words • Review posted on October 3, 2019]