1971

“Speaking about Bill Monroe, the most sudden stop I've ever witnessed took place at the front of the old barn at Monroe's Bean Blossom festival in 1971.

Best I remember, I was in the thick of a huge jam with six or seven of us wailing away at ninety miles an hour on "Little Girl in Tennessee." I was singing lead and playing guitar with a crowd of thirty or forty people gathered around our little circle, five deep.

Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Birch Monroe, who was the no-nonsense brother of Bill Monroe, and the manager of the park. I detected a fierce determination in his eyes as he marched headlong into crowd while the song was going full blast. Since I was playing guitar and singing lead, Birch marched directly up to me. Without saying a word, he suddenly wrapped both his hands firmly around the fingerboard and neck of my guitar. The song stopped so suddenly that we practically got whiplash! In all my days of jamming, I've never seen anything stop so quickly.

Not known for the secrecy of his signals, Birch then ordered us to move our jam to the stage, which was empty at that time. Since we didn't want to tangle with Birch any more than we already had, we obediently followed his orders, and we continued the jam from the stage of the old barn.”

-- Wayne Erbsen

The anecdote reproduced above is from Wayne Erbsen's website, "Native Ground Books and Music": (www.nativeground.com).

This text appeared in his 2012 article there about musical cues, entitled "The Secret Signals of Musicians." --> The Secret Signals of Musicians