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According to Smith, by 1947 Monroe had become so busy as a performer that he invited his brother Speed and his family from Kentucky to live on and help maintain his own farm near Nashville.  They became a close-knit bunch.  Rosetta remembered Bill one day that year was sitting on his porch waving to his daughter Melissa as she walked towards him after a day at school.  In that moment of happiness, Bill was struck with fear of losing her in death. The result was “I Hear a Sweet Voice Calling,” a heart-breaking dialog between a father and a little girl on her deathbed after coming home from school.  (Lyrics)

According to Rosetta, it was a similar experience that inspired Bill to write “The Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake.”  One of her sister Erroldean’s playmates was bitten by a harmless serpent.  Bill took the ‘what if’ of that situation in the direction of his deeper fears and vulnerabilities to produce a powerful song.  Poisonous snakes were certainly a concern throughout the South, but Bill’s warning here is not really about such things, and it wasn’t just expressed in these two songs.  Our sense of vulnerability when it comes to our children runs exceedingly deep, and yet it’s more than this as well.  Smith writes –

Surprisingly, there has been no critical notice to date of the deeper meaning of songs like “I Hear a Sweet Voice Calling” and “The Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake.” Monroe recorded a significant body of material thematically united by the concepts of dying, suffering, or abandoned children, including “I Was Left on the Street,” “Little Joe,” “Jimmy Brown the Newsboy,” “Put My Little Shoes Away” (and the nearly identical “Put My Rubber Doll Away”), and “There Was Nothing We Could Do.”

Abandonment and childhood suffering were huge psychological issues for Bill Monroe. His attempts to relieve his own lingering childhood pain were reflected in his kindnesses to youngsters, his habit of adopting animals, and in his beautiful although disquieting songs about dying or neglected children.

Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys boarding a plane to travel to Washington , D.C. July, 1946. Donated by Jarrett and Gail Watts – International Bluegrass Music Museum

Smith’s list of such songs from Bill’s pen is not exhaustive, as any Monroe aficionado can see.  The psychology behind them is even more complicated than can be explained solely by looking at his childhood trauma.  By the time Monroe wrote songs like “Dreadful Snake” and “Sweet Voice Calling,” he was so busy as a working musician on the road that he was not able to spend much time at all with his own family, particularly his adoring children and their cousins.  As well, he was involved in extra-marital affairs both casual and serious.

Yet, if you read Smith’s biography you’ll see a great deal of hard evidence that Monroe was by and large a truly decent, kind, and loving human being.  Such people may still stray of course, but perhaps they pay a higher price in doing so.  The conflict between love and abandonment, between honor and guilt, must have vibrated like a serpent’s rattle in Monroe’s inner self.  That he had the creative wherewithal to take all that and turn it into multiple examples of art is to our benefit.  That such songs resonate with all sorts of people to this day suggests we also might have more in common with that cross-eyed whelp of a boy in Kentucky, or with that fictional snake-bit girl in the Appalachian woods, than we might care to admit.

Thanks for reading and listening this week, folks!