Description
Drawing on the traditional hillbilly music of his Kentucky childhood, Bill Monroe created the high lonesome sound of bluegrass; his accomplished mandolin-playing and haunting high-range voice, backed by fiddle and five-string banjo. The youngest child of eight, Monroe lost both his parents while still a teenager, and, as an adult, was a guarded, extremely private man. He was also a compulsive womanizer, whose longtime affair with the wife of a Tennessee highway patrolman was an open secret in Nashville. As one of the early stars of the Grand Ole Opry he inspired many young stars including Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley (whose first single for Sun Records was Monroe’s Blue Moon of Kentucky).
