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Bluegrass music got it’s name from the band Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, first formed in 1938 in Atlanta Georgia after Monroe had tried several other band names and lineups in several different states, without success. Monroe experimented with different ways to present the old time fiddle tunes and ballads of his Kentucky youth and the emerging country songs of Jimmie Rodgers. He developed the sound of Bluegrass in the mid 1940s with Earl Scruggs distinctive three-finger banjo style, Lester Flatt playing guitar, fiddler Chubby Wise, and bassist Howard Watts, his own high pitched tenor and close harmonies sung by his band members.

Over the years many musicians who would become well known on their own got their start playing in this band. Eddie Adcock, Vassar Clements, Richard Greene, Jimmy Martin, Del McCoury, Don Reno, Roland White, Mac Wiseman . . . These are the names that jumped out at me out of a long list of BlueGrass Boys.

This video is from an Austin City Limits show aired in 1981. Bill would have been 70 years old at this time. His high falsetto voice is still just as sharp and loud and right on pitch as it ever was. It is as hard to keep track of the lineup in the Bluegrass Boys ans it is a major league baseball team, however, with the help of the Doo Dah Network webiste, I think I can name the members of this band. Kenny Baker is on fiddle, Butch Robbins on banjo, Mark Hembree on bass and Wayne Lewis on guitar.

Clarence White moved from Madawaska, Maine to Burbank California in 1954, at the age of 10. His French Canadian family was highly musical, his father Eric Whie (born leBlanc) played fiddle, guitar, banjo and harmonica. With his brothers Roland and Eric Jr. Clarence formed a band, calling themselves The Three Little Country Boys, and they were soon appearing regularly on local radio. The Country Boys made several appearances on The Andy Griffin Show. No longer little, the band was renamed The Kentucky Colonels in 1962.

Because it became difficult to make a living playing Bluegrass in the mid sixties, The Kentucky Colonels broke up and white began to perform in clubs around southern California with Graham Parsons and worked as a session musician on some of the first records by The Monkees. When Parsons was asked to join The Byrds in 1968 he and fellow bluegrass player, bassist Chris Hillman brought White along to help record the album “Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” which was a departure into country music for the folk rock/psychedelic band. White would eventually take Parson’s place in The Byrds when Parsons refused to go to tour South Africa in protest of apartheid.

In this video Clarence and his brother Roland are on Bob Baxter’s “Guitar Workshop” in 1973. Somewhere I have a yellowed copy of a fingerstyle ragtime guitar book by Bob Baxter and someday I will learn to play one or two of the pieces in it.

Clarence is playing his legendary Martin D28 guitar in this clip. After his death, hit by a drunken driver while loading gear into his car after a Kentucky Colonels reunion concert not long after this video was recorded, this guitar was given to bluegrass guitarist Tony Rice. I will post a video of Tony Rice playing Clarence’s guitar on another day.

Tony Rice made much of the tonal qualities of Clarence’s guitar, attributing them to the crudely enlarged sound hole. He toured with it for many years, basing his blistering fast flatpicking solo style on the the style Clarence developed with The Kentucky Colonels. Tony now plays a Tony Rice model guitar from Santa Cruz guitars, which was designed with that same enlarged sound hole.