Re: Could Bill Monroe Read Music??
Originally Posted by
f5loar
When Monroe was asked if he could read music he simply said "Why that ain't no part of nothin' ". Earl Scruggs could not read either and I doubt seriously any of the first generation bluegrass artist could read. Maybe Jesse McReynolds learned it later on. I'm pretty safe in saying Jimmy Martin couldn't read a lick.
Well, then - I'm in good company! Well, I can read, not sight read. I mean, plunk some sheet music in front of me, I won't be able to play it straight away, but give me enough time, I'll figure it out. But then, I do have glasses.
Originally Posted by
Tobin
So how did Bill remember new tunes that he composed? Especially if it was a work in progress over time? I mean, did he just keep playing it over and over and tweaking it until he had it memorized by repetition, or did he have some other method for putting them to paper so he could remember them later?
It sounds like his mind was trained to store and recall all these tunes, even the ones he was working on - though I get the impression he wrote them pretty quickly, in a matter of minutes or hours, not days or weeks or months. The anecdote told by Bela Fleck seems to show that he expected other musicians were the same, at least the top flight ones.
Hank Williams said if it took him more than fifteen minutes to write a song he knew the idea wasn't any good, and he would throw it away. And he wrote more than 500 songs. Those were different times, when the oral/aural tradition was stronger, largely by necessity, when people had to memorize more because there was no internet with search engines nor iPads to store the songs in your repertoire, when you had to learn how songs go and what the words are rather than learn how to look them up. You had to develop this sort of recall, and the best players did. So it seems, to me, anyway.
But that's just my opinion. I could be wrong. - Dennis Miller
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