Search - Various Artists :: The Legend Lives On: A Tribute to Bill Monroe

In April 1997 some of bluegrass music's greatest names (including Ralph Stanley, Ricky Skaggs, the Del McCoury Band) gathered at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville to remember Bill Monroe, the music he made, and the genre he all but single-handedly spawned. This double-CD set captures 28 songs performed live that evening, including such standouts as Skaggs's renditions of "Uncle Pen" and "Get Up John"; Tim O'Brien's impassioned "Workin' on a Building"; the Del McCoury Band's "John Henry," where McCoury's tenor is as tense and charged as a high-voltage wire; and Stanley's "Can't You Hear Me Callin'," featuring vocal harmony so high and piercing it'll make you shiver. The producers might have fared better paring the program down to one 14-song disc, since too many average moments dilute the impact. But the album retains a certain poignancy in two songs from the late John Hartford, one of which, "Cross-Eyed Child," traces the pain of the disfigurement that led to Monroe's mournful music, and in Marty Stuart's version of the traditional "Rabbit in the Log," a woeful reminder of the hardscrabble Southern upbringing that so many of Monroe's contemporaries endured. This is not the ultimate tribute to the Father of Bluegrass, but it's a gift anyway. --Alanna Nash