Bear Family Records recently announced an upcoming CD box set from the Father of Bluegrass, Bill Monroe. The set consists of 4 CDs containing material recorded by Monroe between the years of 1981 and 1994. The tracks come from

• Master of Bluegrass – 1981
• Bill Monroe & Friends – 1984
• Monroe with Stars of Hall of Fame – 1985

Also included are a number of previously unreleased takes.

This is the fourth Monroe box set to be released by Bear Family and a January 2007 release is planned.

The set contains a total of 94 90 tracks and will retail for $132.49 at Amazon.com where it is currently available for pre-order. It can also be purchased directly from Bear Family for 92.03 EUR.

UPDATE 5:31 PM: Regular contributor Richard Thompson writes in to tell us that the Bear Family website incorrectly lists 94 tracks when there are actually only 90, they had some haphazard line breaks in their code and I didn’t catch them. Richard also insists the tracks on this set come from these LPs:

• Master Of Bluegrass 1981
• Bill Monroe & Friends 1983
• Bill Monroe and Stars of the Bluegrass Hall Of Fame 1985
• Bluegrass ‘87 1987
• Southern Flavor 1988

My list of original recordings was based on info from Mandolin Cafe. Richard may well be correct, but I would note that at least some of the tracks are previously “unreleased takes,” which may indicate that they are alternate takes of tunes that were released on the LPs Richard noted.