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This is sort of a complaint.
More than a month ago I wrote out the substance of the issue and sent it to the editor of BLUEGRASS UNLIMITED, who said he'd forward it to... someone... ? Though my note was really too long, I thought of it as a "Letter to the Editor," but BU no longer includes such letters. So I'm posting it here, and hope it may fall on sympathetic — or at least interested — ears... And I'll note, too, that this letter was vetted and approved by my old friend (former Blue Grass Boy) Tom Ewing...
HERE:
David McCarty’s article in the January, 2024 BU — “Bean Blossom: Ground Zero for Traditional Bluegrass”—provided a welcome update to the history of this most important music park. Great photographs, too, by Ron Petronko and Steve Cale!
Much of the essay was probably based on McCarty’s interviews with Rex Voils and family, who own the park today, and who are carrying forward the stewardship of this key bluegrass music venue, originally owned and developed by Francis Rund, Bill Monroe, Dwight Dillman and their families.
But facts presented in the paragraph following the subheading “Bill Monroe Buys The Farm,” demand correction. The filling-station and lunch counter, at the southeast corner of the intersection of highways 45 and 135, was actually owned by Dan Williams and his son; it was located where Short’s fruit market stood for years—now the site of Plum Creek Antiques. The Dollar General store cited in the article is on the northwestcorner of the intersection, on the site of the IGA grocery store owned by Jack McDonald; that was where Birch Monroe typically purchased tiny quantities of hot dogs to offer to huge festival crowds from his concession stand in the Brown County Jamboree barn. Such small errors might have been avoided from a careful review of earlier published histories of the park, e.g., Jim Peva’s 2006 Bean Blossom: Its People and Its Music, or my 2011 history, Bean Blossom: The Brown County Jamboree and Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Festivals.
Much more problematic: the same paragraph implies that Bill Monroe knew of and participated in early Brown County Jamboree shows because of his travels from Kentucky to Whiting and Gary, Indiana. No documentation supports that contention. In fact, the Monroes’ involvement at those northern Indiana cities happened in the late 1920s, more than ten years before the inception of the Bean Blossom Jamboree. This error could have been avoided by a careful consultation of Tom Ewing’s 2018 Bill Monroe: The Life and Music of the Blue Grass Man.
Many fans have wondered why Bill Monroe—(an ardent Kentuckian whose career was solidly based in Nashville, Tennessee by the time of his late-1951 purchase of the park from Francis Rund)—would buy a rural country music park in central Indiana. Details and theories about Monroe’s acquisition of the park were the subject of a research paper I presented at the 2011 International Country Music Conference. That paper resulted in a short YouTube video entitled “Bill Monroe’s Decision to Buy the Brown County Jamboree” (https://youtu.be/IQay-yd9QD4). I hope that fans interested in this critical moment for Bill Monroe and for the historic music park and festival site at Bean Blossom will take a few minutes to explore the ideas offered there.
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