Country

The splendid article on country music by Tony Scherman is very accurate and insightful (meaning: I agree with it). It also brought back many memories of my early youth, with the whole family hunched around the Crosley, straining to hear Uncle Dave Macon (my favorite) above the static. In the late 1930s, when Bill Monroe and Roy Acuff were both new stars on the “Opry,” my parents would argue every Saturday night about the relative merits of the two singers. My mother preferred Roy Acuff, while my father was a lifelong Bill Monroe fan. Much later, when my widowed father was in his eighties, I had a picture taken of me standing beside Bill Monroe at the Dahlonega, Georgia, Bluegrass Festival, and had the photo enlarged and framed as a Christmas gift for my father. As he unwrapped it, I could see he was both delighted and puzzled. He said he recognized only one of the men in the photo. I said, “That’s Bill Monroe!” He said, “I know that, but who is the other person?” As I said, he was a Bill Monroe fan.