Is it any wonder that Jimmy Martin – and Bill Monroe, too, to some extent – forbade his sidemen from jamming with other bands at festivals, preferring instead that they stick with him and improve their grasp of his music?
Former Sunny Mountain Boy, Bill Emerson, quotes Martin in the documentary, King of Bluegrass: “You ought to be back in the dressing room … practicing my stuff, ‘cause if you think you’ve got it right, you don’t.”
Jimmy Martin was right.
The vocal jump from m3 to M2 is wickedly hard to hear over those major chords, but emblematic of bluegrass singing as Bill Monroe designed it. The microtonal slide that is often used to make the jump has inspired some to compare bluegrass to the classical music of India. It may sound out of tune, but it is a by-product of precise and painstaking technique.
Here are Bill Monroe and Jimmy Martin, proving that precision + soul = bluegrass. The song is “Letter From My Darling”.
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