Bill Monroe and The Bluegrass Boys 5CD Box Set Release

Richard Weize Archives have recently released this classic collection of gems from Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys. This is a significant 5-CD Boxset and is available for download or hard copy through Rock Star Records.

For devotees of Bill Monroe’s music, the CD box sets issued by Bear Family were the answer to a listener’s dream. Imagine having the originator of bluegrass music’s complete recordings and all with an informative 68 page book including a revised discography by Neil Rosenberg, and notes by Dick Spottswood (edited by Rosenberg) with recollections by Monroe fiddler Charlie Smith.

This 5 CD Boxset contains all the familiar Monroe recordings for Decca in 1950-51, featuring lead singers Jimmy Martin, Carter Stanley, and Edd Mayfield, presented next to unbelievably all the outtakes (none previously issued) of all the tracks. Among other things, this means multiple takes of Raw Hide. For musicians and careful listeners who have studied that spectacular recording for years, it’s as though a new set of Stone Tablets has been found. It also means the “tape blip” we’ve always tolerated in The First Whippoorwill is now corrected, as the previously issued take was from a faulty tape dub whereas the “new” 1951 version is from the original master.

An Excerpt from the Book by Dick Spottswood, Charlie Smith and Neil Rosenberg:

…Bear Family has assembled Monroe’s complete pre-1950 studio recordings into a 5-CD set (BCD 16399), that combines the 1936-38 Monroe Brothers and 1940-41 Blue Grass Boys RCA dates with Columbia’s 1945- 49 sessions, including outtakes, mistakes, false starts and studio chatter that survive on the original master discs. In the 1940s and early 1950s, master records of live performances were cut at 33-1/3 rpm on sixteen-inch discs called lacquers. The process, invented in the early 1930s for the early talkies, had migrated to radio and records during the decade. By 1939 Columbia Records had followed suit over the next few years. As the veteran Nashville producer Buddy Killen remembered, “You’d get started and if somebody screwed up, you’d have to stop and they’d have to move the needle over and put it back down and start all over again.” These rejected takes and false starts were preserved on the master discs at Decca just as they were at Columbia.

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