CITATION — REFERENCE ENTRY
On Meter and the Social Dynamics of Cueing in Bill Monroe's “Muleskinner Blues” — Music Theory Online
- Key
- mitchell2024-muleskinner-cueing
- Authors
- Mitchell, Nathaniel
- Issued
- 2024-9
- Type
- article-journal
- Container
- Music Theory Online
- Volume
- 30
- Issue
- 3
Raw CSL JSON
{
"DOI": "10.30535/mto.30.3.4",
"URL": "https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.24.30.3/mto.24.30.3.mitchell.html",
"type": "article-journal",
"issue": "3",
"title": "On Meter and the Social Dynamics of Cueing in Bill Monroe's “Muleskinner Blues”",
"author": [
{
"given": "Nathaniel",
"family": "Mitchell"
}
],
"issued": {
"date-parts": [
[
2024,
9
]
]
},
"volume": "30",
"container-title": "Music Theory Online"
}
Claims
-
Mitchell models Monroe's band as treating a passage as a scripted sequence of chord events, each filled with chord-appropriate vamps or licks drawn from a mental 'action pool' constrained by instrument role, harmony and meter.
"In essence, I posit that the Blue Grass Boys viewed the passage as a scripted sequence of chord-events, each of which is to be filled in with chord-appropriate duple-meter vamps or licks"
-
In Monroe's 'Muleskinner Blues', the fiddle took the opening solo and the lead role passed between Monroe's voice and the fiddle (Kenny Baker on a 1971 recording); fiddlers also filled gaps with improvised figures, as when Benny Williams 'leaps in early to fill up the silence with high G wails'.
"Fiddler Benny Williams leaps in early to fill up the silence with high G wails"
-
Monroe described ensemble performance as competition, and band members report that he sometimes worked against his musicians in live performance, for example by unexpectedly altering the opening mandolin cadenza of 'Muleskinner Blues'.
"All the way through, bluegrass is competition with each man trying to do the best he can, be on his toes. . . They’ll still be friends, but they’ll work hard to be better than the other"
-
Bill Monroe very rarely rehearsed his Blue Grass Boys, and at least 149 musicians passed through the band over his 57-year career; Del McCoury recalled his first performance with Monroe involved no run-through.
"A second condition is the equally infamous (and more astonishing) fact that Monroe very rarely rehearsed his musicians. Concerning his first performance with Bill Monroe, Blue Grass Boy Del McCoury recounts, “We got backstage, and all we did was tune up and walk out. Didn’t run through nothing!”"
-
Monroe expected band members to learn songs on their own; guitarist Peter Rowan recalled that parts were not written down, so different Blue Grass Boys developed different, sometimes incompatible, versions of the same song.
"It wasn’t written down. It’s what you brought to Bill, you know what I mean? If he said “Muleskinner Blues,” you had to know how to play that. You weren’t gonna learn it (laughs) from him!"
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