Nerd,

Excellent posts. Thanks. I especially enjoyed the history on DeFord Bailey from the PBS website.

Monroe said he considered himself a blues singer, not a blues musician. He thought of himself as a country musician and cited many of the influences you mention in your post. He often said he wrote and played for the country people first (meaning southern, white, and rural). Still, his post-1945 mandolin playing was arguably closer to that of Yank Rachell than it was to, say, Ira Louvin's.

Still, western Kentucky seem to have given us different music with different influences than we see from much of Appalachia. Not only was Monroe from western Kentucky but so were Kennedy Jones, Mose Rager, Ike Everly, and Merle Travis, all heavily influenced by African American music and musicians. The music that came from this region is so strikingly different from that of other regions one must acknowledge the heavy African American influence. Sure they played many tunes whose titles and core melodies came from the Brittish Isles but the rhythms, harmonies, and arrangements were very far from anything we could term Celtic. Miles Davis played Bye Bye Blackbird but I'm not sure Ray Henderson would have recognized it.

      - Mark