Don’t think we have forgotten about the Bill Monroe Stamp Campaign, just because we haven’t mentioned in a few months!

A great many folks are collecting signatures on a petition to have Bill Monroe honored with a commemorative stamp from the US Postal Service.

Peter Thompson, long time host of Bluegrass Signal on KALW in San Francisco, sent along these photos he took at the California Bluegrass Association’s Grass Valley Festival in June. Bluegrass Signal airs Saturdays from 6:00-8:00 p.m. on KALW, and is also broadcast several times each week on WAMU’s Bluegrass Country.

Here’s the report Peter sent along with the photos:

“Here’s Randy Pitts (late of Keith Case, previously of the Freight & Salvage and other venerable organizations) signing the Monroe stamp petition as Laurie Lewis looks on.

Laurie had already signed.

Then Randy watches Kathy Kallick sign the petition in front of the Vern’s Stage, where Kathy & Laurie had just finished a tribute to Vern & Ray.”

We can all get involved in this effort. Anyone can download a copy of the petition, collect signatures, and send them on to the Postal Service. There is a web site with information about this campaign at www.billmonroestamp.org, and here are links to the various resources you need to take part.

• Download the petition
• Contact your Senator
• Contact your Representative
• Get a Monroe Stamp shirt from Grassware

Completed petitions should be mailed to:

Get on board!

UPDATE 10:00 a.m. -  Cindy Baucom sent along this photo of hubby Terry Baucom signing the Bill Monroe Stamp petition at the High Country Bluegrass Festival in Boone, NC in July.

She told us that 10 pages of signatures were collected at the festival.

If you have news and/or photos of any efforts on behalf of the Bill Monroe Stamp campaign, please contact us.

A bit of research has revealed a book about bluegrass music that we missed from our recent bulletin.

I Hear a Voice Calling – A Bluegrass Memoir is Gene Lowinger’s photo journal that captures Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys during Lowinger’s tenure in the early 1960s with the Father of Bluegrass, and some pictures from the later years of Monroe’s life.

Lowinger’s pictures accompany his own story of a New Jersey boy obsessed with folk and bluegrass music and he recounts college trips to country music parks in Pennsylvania and his stints as a fiddler for the New York Ramblers and Blue Grass Boys.

The 144 page book contains 75 black & white photographs. It will be published in both cloth and paper backed editions this October by the University of Illinois Press.

Mandolin Cafe has a story about an auction being conducted by Christie’s in New York on December 3 that should be of interest to mandolinists and collectors of Bill Monroe memorabilia.

The Country Music Sale on 12/3 includes the framed, original peghead overlay from Monroe’s 1923 Loar-signed F-5 mandolin. In a fit of pique, he had gouged out the word Gibson from the mandolin’s headstock after he was dissatisfied by some repair work they did on his instrument.

From the piece by Bill Graham at Mandolin Cafe:

The gouge became part of both Monroe’s and the instrument’s legends.

He sent the mandolin to the Gibson factory at Kalamazoo in the early 1950s, most accounts have 1951 or 1952. According to Smith, Monroe wanted the neck reset, new frets and fingerboard, new tuning pegs, a new bridge and refinishing. Gibson kept the instrument about four months, a short time to wait on a luthier for a hobby musician, but a long wait for a touring pro like Monroe who probably didn’t fritter money on extra mandolins in those days.

Gibson expert Roger Siminoff remembers that the neck may have been cracked.

Either way, when Monroe once again had the mandolin, both Smith and Siminoff say only the neck work had been done. So out came the pocket knife, onto the floor in little shavings went “Gibson,” with “The” remaining intact above it.

Monroe felt he’d prompted a lot of bluegrass musicians to buy Gibson mandolins, so he deserved better, Smith said.

But bluegrass music wasn’t yet big and a price boom in American-made acoustic instruments was decades away.

“Bear in mind that in the 1950’s, no one at Gibson really knew who Bill Monroe was,” Siminoff said. “He was just some guy with an early Gibson mandolin.”

The headstock was fully restored in 1980 after Gibson and Monroe buried the hatchet, and though they offered the original overlay to Bill afterwards, he said that Gibson could keep it. Graham quotes the folks at Christie’s estimating the auction sale at $5,000-7,000.

Read all the details and the tale of this storied mandolin at Mandolin Cafe.

Well, it will be a special brick if you take the The Bean Blossom Jamboree Foundationup on their offer and adopt a brick in their Memorial Brick Wall Project.

The Foundation is trying to raise sufficient funds to purchase the Bill Monroe Memorial Music Park & Campground in Bean Blossom, IN, once owned and operated by Big Mon himself. The fate of the park has been uncertain in recent years as current owner (and former Blue Grass Boy) Dwight Dillman has announced plans to sell the property.

The wall is being erected near the music stage. A brick can be personalized with 3 lines of text for $100 prior to construction, going up to $125 after the wall is up. The fee is fully tax deductible and proceeds go to the Foundation’s goal of taking over the park and Bill Monroe Museum on site.

To purchase a brick and support the The Bean Blossom Jamboree Foundationup, you may contact them by phone (877-989-BBJF),or email them from their web site. You may also download the PDF order form for a mail-in donation.