The truth is, Monroe listened harder than most people, and he listened everywhere–to the guitars and fiddles of his brothers and mother and uncle, to the choirs he heard in church and to the radio that brought Tin Pan Alley all the way to the Rosine, Ky., farm where he grew up. In songs like ““Blue Moon of Kentucky’’ and ““The Gold Rush,’’ the mature musician would fuse Gaelic fiddle tunes with blues, stir in the syncopation of swing and acrid gospel harmonies and then accelerate this hybrid to a breakneck tempo.
Monroe’s ““high, lonesome sound’’ was both ancient and contemporary, a true reflection of its creator’s divided sensibilities. He depended on technology–Grand Ole Opry radio broadcasts, the recording studio, buses for touring–to become a household name across the nation. And yet, he viewed the modern world with grave suspicion. All his life he kept looking back, cherishing songs he’d learned from his uncle the fiddler Pen Vandiver, adamantly refusing to hear his music played on anything but acoustic instruments. His genius lay in his ability to express his divided loyalties in his music. The exquisite tension in bluegrass–the sound of something threatening every second to fly apart–was put there by a man trying his damnedest to negotiate a truce between past and present.
Monroe influenced everyone from Elvis Presley to the Grateful Dead. And while bluegrass may sound a bit antique six decades after its invention, it has lost none of its ferocity–until now. For the unmatched performer of this music was always Monroe himself, a brilliant composer, an intrepid instrumentalist and a wonderful singer. No one who saw him in his prime could forget the sound of that near-psychotic falsetto soaring over the sound of a mandolin played so fast that one critic said Monroe was not playing his instrument so much as piloting it. Pyrotechnics, however, were only part of the point. ““It’s played from my heart to your heart,’’ Monroe declared. Even near the end, when the famously fierce voice had thinned to transparency and the fingers were no longer so fleet, Monroe never lost his ability to touch your heart, or make the hair rise on the back of your neck.
