Bill Monroe - Molly And Tenbrooks (June 28, 1958)

The period of a few years beginning in the late 1950s marked a low point in the history of the Grand Ole Opry and in the career of Bill Monroe, both professionally and due to the tragic untimely death of his close friend and singing partner Edd Mayfield at the age of 32 on July 7, 1958.
Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys during the lean months of May and June 1958 had been Mayfield on guitar, 19-year-old Virginian Eddie Adcock on banjo, and Red Taylor on fiddle. Although Opry crowds were sparse, and the band "wasn't drawing flies", as Adcock remembered, on the road, die-hard Opry and Monroe fans like 17-year old John Hotze in St. Louis, Missouri were listening weekly with their tape recorders rolling.
Such was the case on Saturday night, June 28, 1958. Bill Monroe appeared on two segments hosted by Marty Robbins that night. On the first, at 9:30 sponsored by Stephens Work Clothes, Monroe sang both sides of his latest Decca single: "Sally Jo" and "Brand New Shoes", with twin fiddles. Curiously, when Monroe returned for his final spot of the night, on the De Con sponsored segment at 10:45, both fiddles are absent. After Robbins' introduction, Monroe plugs his showdates for the next day at the Brown County Jamboree in Bean Blossom, Indiana and the next week's trip to West Virginia before introducing the Blue Grass classic "Molly and Tenbrooks", which had been re-recorded the year before. Without fiddles present, Monroe takes a rare mandolin break, and Adcock makes "Molly and Tenbrooks" a banjo tour de force in much the same way the song was treated in live performance by the "classic" Blue Grass band in 1947.
This would be Adcock's literal swan song as a Blue Grass Boy, as he would leave the band immediately after this performance, remembering he "barely had scraped [together] enough money to take the bus home." The now banjo-less Blue Grass Boys headed to Bean Blossom, then to West Virginia where Ray and Melvin, the Goins Brothers were the augment the Blue Grass Boys on banjo and bass. Mayfield was hospitalized in Bluefield, West Virginia on Thursday, July 3rd, where he was found to be suffering from advanced leukemia, from which he died four days later.
This rare recording made by the late John Hotze documents the final performance of Eddie Adcock as a Blue Grass Boy and the last known recording of Edd Mayfield. As Blue Grass Boy and historian Butch Robins writes of Mayfield's death: "His death shook Monroe to his core. I think Blue Grass music, the primal form of it anyhow, died in 1958." By that logic, I am proud to be able to present here the final performance of primal Blue Grass music.

Видео Bill Monroe - Molly And Tenbrooks (June 28, 1958) канала Robert Montgomery