Tag Archives | Bill Monroe

Flatt, Scruggs and Foggy Mountain

In the 1940s Kentucky-based mandolin player Bill Monroe pioneered a form of music that came to be known as “Bluegrass.” He and his band, “The Blue Grass Boys”–a band that eventually came to include extraordinary musicians like guitar player Lester Flatt and banjo player Earl Scruggs–used “mountain music” as their foundation but played it faster and with virtuosic vigor. Bluegrass included melodies and rhythms from gospel, country music, blues and laborers’ work songs. A bluegrass band’s banjo, fiddle or mandolin would play melody, while guitar and upright bass would keep the rhythm bounding forward. Monroe’s nasal, plaintive vocal style, known as “high lonesome” and is still a staple of the genre. Let’s listen to the classic, “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.”

The Miraculous Mandolin


Yesterday we fawned over the fiddle. Today, let’s marvel at the mandolin. Though the mandolin, Italy’s regional variant of the ancient and widespread lute, started to appear in the United States as early as the 1850s, many Italian immigrants brought their mandolins with them when they immigrated to America in the 1880s. At the turn of the 20th century the mandolin was a familiar Vaudeville instrument, and also became popular among the middle class youth on college campuses and in towns throughout the South, though inthe ’30s and ’40s bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe, who you can see tearin’ it up in this video, was the first mandolin virtuoso to take the instrument to the country music-loving masses.