Keeping Bluegrass Alive

This is a song written by an old man about an even older man.

This is a song about the way country music used to sound, a song originally performed in the way that country music came to sound — years before anyone dared to call it “blue grass”, after the songwriter’s band.

Long after it was forgotten by anyone but the old man’s friends and fans, this song unexpectedly came to prominence once again. New fans of the song had no idea that it told a major part the story of how bluegrass music came to be, but they loved it anyway.

So many of them bought it — and the other hits from the singer who re-popularized it — that the singer was financially able to keep a promise he made to the old man when that great songwriter lay on his deathbed: Keep this music alive, the old man said, more or less. Start playing bluegrass music again.

Ricky Skaggs kept his promise to Bill Monroe.

Here’s Skaggs, playing bluegrass once again, with the long-forgotten Bill Monroe tune that Skaggs turned into an 80s country hit – “Uncle Pen“.

Facts taken from Richard D. Smith’s superb, exhaustive Bill Monroe biography, “Can’t You Hear Me Callin’?”