Can't You Hear Me Callin' by Richard D. Smith

During succeeding generations, hundred of men and a few women moved through his band and out on their own, Monroe had his downs and ups while trying to continue making the music he had created through the rock and roll revolution and the folk music crazes. His most famous band, the 1946 – 1948 group including Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs as members of The Blue Grass Boys established his music as a separate form of country music and was eventually dubbed bluegrass music, becoming a distinct sub-genre. By the late thirties, Bill Monroe was an established professional, a member of the Grand Old Opry and was able to make a living from music for the rest of his life. They gradually moved from manufacturing to making music and found themselves on radio and performing. He followed his older brothers to the industrial cities of the Midwest as part of the southern diaspora during the depression where they worked in industrial plants by day and played music at night. As a youth he grew accustomed to hard work and developed into a physically imposing man. He was early introduced to music by his mother and his uncle, fiddler Pen Vandiver. He became a reclusive and lonely child who learned more by listening than by seeing. Born to a Kentucky farm family of modest means in rural circumstances in 1911, William Smith Monroe grew up with extremely bad eyesight, mostly ignored by his busy father, and teased by his older brothers. The outline of the Monroe story is clear and well agreed to. Smith, in his well-researched biography of Bill Monroe called Can't You Hear Me Callin': The Life of Bill Monroe, Father of Bluegrass tries to capture the many dimensions of this enigmatic and difficult but brilliant and endlessly creative man who created a musical genre. Bill Monroe, until the very end remained different things to different people depending on when and how they encountered him. A wise man explained to them that they were all right, because everyone understands the part they have experienced. The blind man who felt a leg said that the elephant is like a pillar the one who felt the tail said the elephant is like a rope the one who felt the trunk said the elephant is like a tree branch the one who felt the ear said the elephant is like a hand fan the one who felt the belly said the elephant is like a wall and the one who felt the tusk said the elephant is like a solid pipe. Anyone approaching Bill Monroe's life story, or his music for that matter, finds himself confronted with a dilemma much like the six blind men in the parable, which goes something like this: Six blind men were asked to describe an elephant by examining different parts of it.

Can't You Hear Me Callin' by Richard D. Smith