jae@hou2g.UUCP (J.ELKINS) (04/19/85)
Bill Monroe created a distinctive style which someone referred to as "Music of the Bluegrass Country", and he decided that he liked the term. It stuck. A little while after he had begun to record and market his product, he added a young banjo player named Earl Scruggs to the ranks, who was a student of another finger-style player named Snuffy Jenkins. Another new addition at that time was Lester Flatt, whose laid-back vocal style contrasted that of tenor screecher Monroe, and had immediate appeal. Scruggs banjo style was a great asset to the original "Bluegrass Boys,", but he was by no means the creator of the original sound. Monroe knew what he wanted, and did it. In his time no one liked working for him,as he was an unmerciful slave-driver who underpaid his band members and convinced them that they should work for him and feel privileged to just be a part of it, since the work was great for their careers. The fact of the matter was that there was almost no other work of that sort in existence at that time, so he had it all sewn up, at least as far as playing acoustic music commercially that was not C&W, Swing, Jazz, or "mountain music." At an informal moment in one of the first of the Bean Blossom Festivals (MONROE'S FESTIVAL) I had an opportunity to speak and play music with him. He's a bastard to deal with, but he did provide work for some talented musicians in an era when there was no such work, and he did define what bluegrass music was to become for a long time after his early work. He is referred to as the "Father of Bluegrass" for that reason, not because he typifies what the music is now. By contemporary comparison to the current bands and their diversifications, Monroe's music is often seen as ugly.