Tag Archives: Bluegrass

Montgomery Ward M-8861 – Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys – 1940

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In this website dedicated to honoring the legends and the lost of American music, it would seem terribly remiss to not pay tribute to such a tremendous figure as mandolinist, singer, and founder of the bluegrass genre, Bill Monroe—falling, needless to say, into the former category.  In fact, it would be nearly impossible to overstate the man’s legacy.

Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys at the time of their Bluebird recordings. From Bluebird catalog.

William Smith Monroe was born into a musically inclined family on September 13, 1911, in Rosine, Kentucky, the eighth and youngest child of Buck and Malissa Monroe.  Among his early musical influences were his uncle, fiddle player Pendleton Vandiver—with whom he lived after his parents’ deaths, and to whom he dedicated his popular song “Uncle Pen”—and black guitarist and fiddler Arnold Shultz.  As his older brothers Charlie and Birch already played guitar and fiddle, young Bill was relegated to playing the mandolin.  Together with them, Bill began playing music in a professional manner in 1929.  After Birch departed and the group became a duo consisting of just Bill and Charlie, the Monroe Brothers made their recording debut for RCA Victor subsidiary Bluebird in 1936, producing some popular records such as the sacred song “What Would You Give Me in Exchange?”.  The act was not particularly long-lived however, as the brothers tended to butt heads, and they went their separate ways in 1938.  Subsequently, Bill formed a new band—dubbed the Blue Grass Boys, for his home state of Kentucky—and in 1939 auditioned for WSM’s Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee.  His rendition of Jimmie Rodgers’s “Mule Skinner Blues” impressed the Solemn Old Judge, and the Blue Grass Boys became a mainstay of that program for decades to come.  A year after their Opry debut, Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys made their first recordings for Bluebird, foreshadowing the genre of music that would be named in the group’s honor.  Over the years, Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys employed such future bluegrass luminaries as Clyde Moody, David (“Stringbean”) Akeman, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, and Jimmy Martin, all of whom would go on to be stars in their own rights.  In 1945, the group went to Columbia Records, and in 1949 on to Decca, producing hits for each, including “Blue Moon of Kentucky” and “New Mule Skinner Blues”.  Although his success dipped in the 1950s with the birth of rock ‘n’ roll and more modern styles of country music, Monroe and his bluegrass enjoyed renewed popularity during the folk music revival of he 1960s, and the musical form over which he reigned found a dedicated community of musicians and fans that has persisted to the present day.  Bill Monroe continued to perform and lead the Blue Grass Boys until months before his death on September 9, 1996, four days before he would have been eighty-five.

Montgomery Ward M-8861 was recorded on October 7, 1940 in the Kimball House Hotel at 30 South Pryor Street in Atlanta, Georgia.  The Blue Grass Boys are Bill Monroe on mandolin and guitar, Clyde Moody on guitar and mandolin, Tommy Magness on fiddle, and Willie “Cousin Wilbur” Wesbrooks on string bass.  It was originally released as Bluebird B-8568 on November 22, 1940.  Side A was reissued on RCA Victor 20-3163 in 1948.

Bill Monroe sings and plays the guitar, while Clyde Moody takes the mandolin, on the Blue Grass Boys’ legendary rendition of the Jimmie Rodgers classic, “Mule Skinner Blues”., the number that won Monroe a place on the prestigious Grand Ole Opry.

Mule Skinner Blues, recorded October 7, 1940 by Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys.

On the “B” side, Clyde Moody sings the baritone vocal on the twelve-bar blues of his own composition, “Six White Horses” (not to be confused with the Tommy Cash song of later years).

Six White Horses, recorded October 7, 1940 by Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys.

Montgomery Ward M-7085 – Mrs. Jimmie Rodgers/Bolick Bros. – 1936

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In the city of New York, on the twenty-sixth of May, 1933, the famous Singing Brakeman, Jimmie Rodgers, met his untimely end at the age of only thirty-five.  Suffering a fatal pulmonary hemorrhage in his room in the Taft Hotel, he had finally succumbed to the T.B. that had dogged him since 1924.  He had completed his final recording session only two days earlier.

Mrs. Jimmie Rodgers, pictured in the 1937 Bluebird catalog.

In the wake of Jimmie Rodgers’ demise, the spirit of great Blue Yodeler was eulogized in a considerable volume of tribute songs.  Among them, cowboy star and former Rodgers cover artist Gene Autry made a two part record honoring his late inspiration, future Texas governor and senator W. Lee O’Daniel penned another one that was recorded by his Light Crust Doughboys, but surely the most heartfelt of all the tributes was by Rodgers’ own widow, Mrs. Carrie Williamson Rodgers.

It was three years after her husband’s death when she first entered a recording studio, one operated by the same company for whom her husband had made so many records—RCA Victor—set up temporarily in a hotel in San Antonio, the city Rodgers had called home in the last years of his life.  She brought with her a burgeoning young radio singer, one of the legion of devotees of her late husband, whom she had befriended after he contacted her for an autographed picture of the famed singer; his name was Ernest Tubb.  He made six sides at those sessions, his first; she made only one.  Her lone recording was a touching original composition dedicated to Jimmie, with Tubb backing on Rodgers’ famous custom Martin 000-45 guitar, emblazoned with “Jimmie Rodgers” in pearl lettering inlaid across the fretboard, and “Blue Yodel” on the headstock.  The following year, Mrs. Rodgers returned to the microphone with Tubb—and his buddy Merwyn Buffington—accompanying to make one more side: “My Rainbow Trail Keeps Winding On”, only tangentially related to Jimmie.  She bookended her scant recording career many years later, all the way in 1956, when she met with the reunited original Carter Family at the site of the famous Bristol Sessions, where Jimmie and the Carters made their first records, to record “Mrs. Jimmy [sic] Rodgers Visits the Carter Family”, a sequel to 1931’s “Jimmie Rodgers Visits the Carter Family”.  Carrie remained in San Antonio for the rest of her years, and never remarried.  She died there from complications of colon cancer on November 28, 1961, at the age of fifty-nine.

Montgomery Ward M-7085, a split release, was recorded in two separate sessions: the first side on October 26, 1936, in San Antonio, Texas, and the second on the thirteenth of the same month and year in Charlotte, North Carolina.  Side “A” was also issued on Bluebird B-6698, backed with Jimmie Rodgers and Sara Carter duetting on “Why There’s a Tear in My Eye”, and a year or so later on another Montgomery Ward, M-7279, backed with Mrs. Jimmie Rodgers’ only other song.  Side “B” was also released on Bluebird B-6808 with another side by the same artists.

Mrs. Jimmie Rodgers, by her own admission, was no singer, but she succeeded nonetheless in delivering a heartrending performance on her tribute to her late husband: “We Miss Him When the Evening Shadows Fall”.  Whatever she may have lacked in ability, she made up for with sincerity.  Carrie is accompanied, as the label states, “on Jimmie Rodgers’ own guitar,” played by the Blue Yodeler’s posthumous protégé Ernest Tubb.

We Miss Him When the Evening Shadows Fall, recorded October 26, 1936 by Mrs. Jimmie Rodgers.

On the reverse, the Bolick Brothers—Earl, on guitar, and Bill, on mandolin—better known as the proto-bluegrass duo the Blue Sky Boys, deliver an inspirational message in the gospel song “I Believe It”.

I Believe It, recorded October 13, 1936 by the Bolick Bros.