As the youngest of eight children on a farm near Rosine, Kentucky, Bill Monroe was forced by his older brothers to remove four of the eight strings from his mandolin so he would play more quietly. He lost his mother at 10 and his father at 16, then found stability with his disabled uncle Pendleton Vandiver, the fiddler behind the song Uncle Pen, and absorbed the blues from Black fiddler and guitarist Arnold Shultz. This episode explains how those Anglo-Scots-Irish dance rhythms and blues syncopation collided on a mandolin, producing the aggressive velocity and percussive chop that turned a parlor instrument into a snare drum.

We trace the Monroe Brothers' 1936 RCA Victor hit, the 1938 split with Charlie, the Blue Grass Boys' 1939 Grand Ole Opry audition with Mule Skinner Blues, the experimental years that even included an accordion, and the ...