Bluegrass Instrumentals
Bluegrass Instrumentals is the sixth compilation album by American bluegrass musician Bill Monroe and his band, the Blue Grass Boys. Released by Decca Records on June 14, 1965, it features 12 instrumentals recorded between 1951 and 1963, many of which were previously unreleased.
Background
The idea for Bluegrass Instrumentals originated from a disagreement between Bill Monroe and manager Ralph Rinzler on what to release after the recording of Bluegrass Special and I'll Meet You in Church Sunday Morning during 1962. During the summer of 1963, Monroe stated that he wanted to work on an album of banjo-centric songs, whereas Rinzler favored a retrospective collection of older recordings; this latter idea was actually announced in Billboard magazine in July 1963, with the compilation slated to be a "two-volume record" titled The Bill Monroe Story released that winter. The impasse was eventually resolved, with Bluegrass Instrumentals — although not entirely a "banjo album" — issued in June 1965 and The High, Lonesome Sound of Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys following a year later.Bluegrass Instrumentals contains 12 instrumentals recorded as early as 1951 and as recently as 1963. Seven tracks were previously unreleased, with the remaining five — "Get Up John", "Panhandle Country", "Scotland", "Raw Hide" and "Wheel Hoss" — issued in previous years as singles or B-sides. Two of the new tracks were "banjo-driven tunes" recorded in 1963 with Bill Keith, while the other five were primarily fiddle-based. The album was noted as being one of the first in bluegrass music to include extended liner notes and recording details for each track, leading future Monroe biographer Neil Rosenberg to call it "the first historically-oriented collection of Monroe's recordings" in his book, Bluegrass: A History.