This Month in '90s Country

The man who invented a genre dies four days short of 85

Almost nobody gets credit for inventing a style of music. Bill Monroe did. Bluegrass took its name from his band, the Blue Grass Boys, and from the grass of his native Kentucky — and when he died on September 9, 1996, at a nursing home in Springfield, Tennessee, he was four days short of his 85th birthday.

He was the youngest of eight, raised on a farm near Rosine. His brothers had already claimed the fiddle and the guitar, so he took the mandolin — by default, as he told it. His mother sang traditional ballads; his uncle Pen Vandiver was an old-time fiddler; and a Black blues guitarist named Arnold Shultz shaped his sense of rhythm and phrasing in ways that ran straight into the music he'd later build.

The sound came together in the 1940s, and it locked into place in December 1945 when Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs joined the band. That lineup recorded the songs that became the bluegrass canon, "Blue Moon of Kentucky" among them — a waltz that Elvis Presley, Paul McCartney, and Patsy Cline would all eventually cut.

Monroe was blunt about what he'd mixed together. Blues, a little jazz, Scottish bagpipe, and the singing styles he'd grown up hearing in Baptist, Methodist, and holiness churches.

He played the Grand Ole Opry for 57 years. President Clinton handed him the National Medal of Arts in 1995. He'd been in the Country Music Hall of Fame since 1970, survived cancer in the early '80s, broke a hip at 82, and kept working. A stroke that April finally took the mandolin out of his hands. His last Opry appearance was March 15, 1996 — he sang "True Life Blues."

Hal Durham, who ran the Opry, said Monroe's death closed one of the most important chapters in the show's history.

Bill Monroe — "Blue Moon of Kentucky" · September 13, 1911 – September 9, 1996

The biggest song of the decade was written on a napkin — and George Strait passed on it

Earl Bud Lee was out to eat with friends and came up short on the check. Somebody asked how he planned to pay for it. His answer was that he had friends in low places — he knew the cook.

He took the line to his writing partner Dewayne Blackwell, and the two of them wrote the song at a party, on a napkin. That was 1989. They had George Strait in mind.

To pitch it, they needed a demo singer, and they knew a guy who wasn't famous yet but who could do a convincing Strait impression. As Brooks later told Taste of Country Nights, the reason they called him was simple:

"I wanted to be George Strait for years…"Garth Brooks, on why he was asked to cut the demo

He sang it out in Hendersonville doing his best Strait. It was, in his own words from the liner notes, the last demo session he ever did as a singer. Then the chorus wouldn't leave him alone. For two weeks it kept running through his head — so he went back to Lee and Blackwell and asked if they'd hold the song for him. His own album wasn't even out yet. They said yes without hesitating.

Strait passed on it. Mark Chesnutt cut a version for Too Cold at Home. David Wayne Chamberlain had already recorded it in 1989.

None of that mattered after August 1990. "Friends in Low Places" went to number one for four weeks, won Single of the Year from both the ACM and the CMA, and became the song Brooks is most identified with — he eventually named his Nashville venue after it. No Fences, the album it led, entered the all-genre Billboard 200 on September 22, 1990, spent 41 weeks at number one on the country albums chart, and became one of the best-selling country albums ever made.

In 2016, for the album's 25th anniversary, Brooks cut a new version of the song. George Strait sang on it.

Garth Brooks — "Friends in Low Places," written by Dewayne Blackwell and Earl Bud Lee · Four weeks at No. 1, October 1990

A 19th-century poem, a tour bus, and the summer song that wouldn't quit

Jim McBride is from Alabama, and he grew up near the river. He'd also read Sidney Lanier's poem "Song of the Chattahoochee" — the kind of thing that turned up in high school literature textbooks across the South. Sitting in his Nashville office one day, having just finished a book about the river, he landed on a line: way down yonder on the Chattahoochee.

He brought it to Alan Jackson while Jackson was out on tour, and they finished it on the bus. Jackson's own description of the writing, from his 1995 liner notes, is characteristically plain — they were trying to write something up-tempo, McBride walked in with the line, and it went from there.

It was released in May 1993, hit number one on July 17, and stayed four weeks. It finished the year as Billboard's number one country song of 1993 and became the first multi-platinum single of Jackson's career.

Then on September 29, 1993, at the Grand Ole Opry House, "Chattahoochee" won CMA Single of the Year and Music Video of the Year. Song of the Year that night went to Vince Gill's "I Still Believe in You" — Chattahoochee was nominated and lost. It would take the Song of the Year trophy the following year instead.

Years later, McBride told Atlanta magazine about a conversation the two of them had at one of those award shows. Jackson leaned over and said they might still be playing this song when the two of them were seventy.

"…that song is like having a single every year."Jim McBride, at 75, to Atlanta magazine

Alan Jackson — "Chattahoochee," written by Alan Jackson and Jim McBride · CMA Single of the Year, September 29, 1993