Back east and north a bit, Bill Monroe, a Kentuckian of Scottish descent, formed the Blue Grass Boys in 1938. As his music evolved, it stirred some blues and some considerable acceleration into the string band music of the Kentucky hills. The new style incorporated dissonance and syncopation—and, in the case of the fiddle, slurs—imported from blues and swing.
Another innovation was the three-finger banjo roll introduced by Earl Scruggs. By playing notes in groups of three, Scruggs set his rhythm against the prevailing count of four beats to the bar (recall the discussion of this in the Early Fusion section). This roll was developed earlier by Black Kentucky guitarist Sylvester Weaver, and can be heard on a 1924 Okeh release of “Smoketown Strut.”[1] This roll not only sets up a spinning, gyrating rhythmic tension, it throws the other players into the game, giving them the opportunity to play back and forth between the two pulses, or in between. The entire spectrum of rhythmic accents is opened up, freeing the music from a repetitive thudding on a simple pulse.
[1] Kienzel, Guitar Player, 39.
Related styles include that of Murphy Gribbles with
the black string band of John Lusk,
and the white player Homer Davenport,
who recorded in 1925. (Wolfe 1989)
Monroe’s early use of fast riffs to fill in empty spaces accentuated the call-and-response aspect of the music. Elaborating on this manic tendency, the Blue Grass Boys evolved a third important difference from old-time string bands: the emphasis on improvised solos. This led the music toward jazz, since the more extensive soloing expanded the musical vocabulary in all available directions, and jazz/blues is the nearest neighbor to visit. Alan Lomax wrote in 1959,
The mandolin plays bursts reminiscent of jazz trumpet choruses; a heavily bowed fiddle supplies trombone-like hoedown solos…[i]
In its improvisation and also its bluesy quality, the mandolin style diverges from its Appalachian influences. As for the fiddle, Chubby Wise had in fact been playing western swing on it before joining Monroe.
Bluegrass, in other words, “completely assimilated hillbilly music into itself, as a jazz band can assimilate popular or even classical pieces into jazz.”[ii] The question was posed, said Robert Cantwell,
How, indeed, to do with strings what jazzmen did readily with drums, horns, and a piano…The answer was to touch Afro-American music, black music, at an earlier point in its evolution…at a point when it, too, was a rural, even a frontier music…to touch it, in fact, just where old-time music, through the minstrel show, had touched it: on the plantation, where, among plantation slaves, the “old southern sound had been born.”[iii]
♬substitution: Trumpet for mandolin. Trombone for fiddle. Robert Johnson for Bill Monroe. Pick up some rap lyrics and try them with bluegrass. Read them with a high lonesome tone.
So let’s get down to brass influences, or at least stringed ones. Monroe hailed from Ohio County, in the Green River valley, near Indiana; he got his start playing backup at square dances for no less than Arnold Shultz who, recall, played with Bill’s uncle:
The first time I think I ever seen Arnold Schultz…this square dance was at Rosine, Kentucky…People loved Arnold so well all through Kentucky there…There’s things in my music, you know, that comes from Arnold Schultz—runs that I use in a lot of my music.[iv]
Bill was only twelve when he first encountered Arnold, in 1924.
Another important source for Monroe was Clayton McMichen, the jazzy country fiddler. He recorded in the twenties—that first decade of hillbilly and blues recording that perched on the cusp between the old folk styles and the new media-induced sophistication and commercialization. A lot of players did time with his Georgia Wildcats, including Merle Travis.
Monroe was also inclined toward the music of Jimmie Rodgers, a seminal White bluesy guy, and professed an affinity for Black music in general, which he picked up from a number of musicians locally. In spite of all this, his singing style really comes from church singing schools that extend the method of the old shape-note days.[v] The harmony vocals are likewise extracted from White church traditions, but with a marked bluesy inflection.
Among Monroe’s early tunes were “Mule Skinner Blues,” “Dog House Blues,” and “Tennessee Blues.” Between Wills and Monroe, the blues was hammered deep into the soil of modern Country.
Blue Grass Boys guitarist Lester Flatt played in a style that emphasized the offbeat—a style that Cantwell traces to “a nineteenth century black guitar riff developed at about the time that the guitar took over from the banjo in Black folk culture.”[vi] It reproduces the same rhythm as clawhammer banjo style, which dates from the late minstrel era.
Minstrels as well as railroad workers brought the banjo into the Appalachians; they also brought the ragtime rhythms that evolved during the minstrel period. There are many string band and bluegrass tunes called “rags,” and the offbeat has come to the fore in bluegrass much more than in the older hillbilly sound.
Granted, there remains a steady bass thump on the one and three beats, driving the music relentlessly forward and underpinning it with a decidedly unsyncopated foundation. Without that, it wouldn’t be bluegrass. But it’s fair to say that bluegrass is to old-time music as jazz is to ragtime: smoother, less square, more swinging.[vii] Recall that all this innovation took place in the wake of the Swing era and its White Texas counterpart, Western Swing. We must also note, however, the addition of string bass in bluegrass, which facilitates a smoother, swingier feel than the old-time bass-less string groups; this change can be compared to the shift from Dixieland to swing, usually described as including a shift from 2/4 time to 4/4. More events per measure, smoother sound.[viii]
Speaking of minstrels, in the early forties Monroe organized a series of tent shows around his band. They included blackface comedians from the Opry and a clawhammer banjo player. He also hired, early on, a player of spoons, jug and bones who performed in blackface. He soon thought better of it and replaced him with a string bass.[ix]
The bluegrass tradition built on its Monroe-Scruggs beginnings to become an attractive alternative for its mostly White audience: ostensibly White folk music with more swing and virtuosity than its old-time predecessors. Although Monroe contemporaries Ralph and Carter Stanley hewed more to the old mountain style, Monroe alums Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs added a dobro player with a blues touch, Uncle Josh Graves. Cantwell called it the joining of the form of jazz to the content of hillbilly music.[x] Manner and matter. And from the 1970s on, the New Grass music of Tony Rice, Sam Bush, and others, and various progressive offshoots of bluegrass and Country from players like David Grisman, Mark O’Connor, and Bela Fleck, have leapt even further into the ring of jazz improvisation, unnerving the purists as they energize the adventurous.
[i] Lomax, Esquire, 108.
[ii] Cantwell, 72.
[iii] Ibid., 89.
[iv] Wolfe, 32.
[v] Malone 1968, 311.
[vi] Cantwell, 106.
[vii] Cantwell, 105.
[viii] Sandberg, 69.
[ix] Cantwell, 78, 86-87.
[x] Ibid., 70.