The Last Time I Saw Bill Monroe

Uncle Carl, his picking buddy Gene, and I traveled in Uncle Carl's RV to Cherokee in the mountains of North Carolina. It was August 1995 and time for the 13th Annual North Carolina Bluegrass Festival at Happy Holiday Campgrounds. The festival always has a top notch lineup, the campground is beautiful and there's always good campsite jamming.

I had just been hired on a new job that week and was supposed to start work the next Monday, two days after the festival ended. We were going to go up on Thursday morning, the first day of the festival when I got a call on Wednesday. It was my new job calling to say they wanted me to start work the next day. I told the Human Resources secretary that I already had plans to be out of town until Sunday, as they had told me I started work on Monday. "Oh, ok" she said, "we'll see you on Monday morning". A few minutes later the HR director called saying "Now Grandpa, you said you could work weekends even though you're in your band. Now, the first weekend we ask you to work, you say you can't." "Uh" I quickly said. "I am to be the best man in wedding in Pennsylvania this weekend." He told me they'd see me Monday morning then.

When Uncle Carl, Gene, and I pulled into the campground it was pouring down rain. I thought it couldn't rain much harder. I was wrong, as it continued to rain harder and harder through Sunday night causing flash floods up in NC and down here in Prater's Creek.

The weather made the weekend's jamming pretty dismal. But there was one good campsite with a good sized tarp up and a good gathering of pickers underneath. I was jamming there on the mandolin when what must have been 5 gallons of water spilled off of the tarp onto my back. Time to go back to the dry RV.

That RV was a warm dry haven that weekend, to keep dry and warm, make sandwich and have a beer. Sitting out in the concert area was miserable,  in my folding chair with an umbrella covering me but my legs getting drenched.

I saw a lot of my favorite acts such as Jim & Jesse, The Osborne Brothers, and what turned out to be the real end of The Johnson Mountain Boys. During both of The Johnson Mountain Boys sets, mandolin player David McLaughlin switched to a snare drum! A blue metal flake snare drums. McLaughlin kind of stirred around on the snare with brushes. Before the songs, which were honky tonk songs, lead singer Dudley Connell, who was obviously no into the snare drum thing, would make a snide comment about it. "We're now gonna play 'Purple Haze'" he said.

Saturday afternoon Bill played his first set and it was awful. Bill, whose voice had suffered with age, but whose skills on the mandolin were still awesome, sounded like age and bad health had gotten to his instrumental abilities too.

That night, as the emcee was about to introduce Bill and the Boys, you could hear a flurry of notes flying off of a mandolin. "Well you hear that don't you?" the female emcee asked, "That can only be one person". I sadly thought to myself that somebody else was playing his mandolin. Then Bill and the band took the stage, but Bill didn't have THE mandolin, the 1923 Gibson Lloyd Loar, he had a sunburst Gibson, probably the one he played back in 1985 when THE mandolin was being put back together.

Bill's solos were ferocious that set. Everybody felt it. Every rain soaked soul was lifted by Bill Monroe's mandolin playing. It was the last time I would see him. His health soon went downhill and he never recovered. A year and a week later he would pass away. But that rainy North Carolina night he took us to another place.