Come See the Fireworks

The very first bluegrass festival was a one-day event staged by Bill Clifton in Luray, Virginia on July 4, 1961. This is Bill Monroe’s set from that day.

Suitable for the occasion, there were fireworks that were still being heard when historians started to write this stuff down in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Carter Stanley, half in the bag, was a guest vocalist during this set, as was Mac Wiseman, but it was left to Brother Carter to smooth things over when Monroe got a teeny bit offended over the glaring absence of his former sidemen, Flatt and Scruggs.

Monroe's meltdown made it into more than one of the history books. So, maybe it was for all the wrong reasons, but Bill Monroe was on fire that day. The songs he sings with Stanley are crazy-intense, but the whole set is an absolute must-listen.

Years later, Bill Monroe changed his mind about a couple of things. He decided that Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, and all those who came after had not stolen bluegrass music from him, but had, instead, paid a kind of tribute to his genius. Monroe eventually reconciled with Flatt and Scruggs, and reinvented himself as the father of bluegrass instead of the abused baby brother.

In truth, he had been both.

The “Father of Bluegrass” title was not Monroe’s idea, however. It was bestowed by folklorist and one-time Greenbriar Boy, Ralph Rinzler, in an article for the influential folk magazine, Sing Out! Rinzler aimed to correct some long-standing, revisionist history concocted as liner notes for a Flatt and Scruggs LP by none other than Earl Scruggs’s wife, Louise.

Maybe Lester and Earl weren’t the ones Monroe was mad at.

In any case, here’s a juicy and essential chunk of the soap opera, in the form of an incendiary show. Enjoy.