Milwaukee’s Mark Hembree was ‘On the Bus with Bill Monroe’

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In 1979, Mark Hembree was working at Land & Sky waterbeds and living in Bay View, a low-rent neighborhood in those years. When he heard that the founder of bluegrass, Bill Monroe, was seeking a new bassist, he applied. Hembree already had a solid musical resume—but in the “newgrass” genre, and Monroe was on record as against anything new. Also, Hembree had long hair and Monroe had no truck with hippies.

Despite those disqualifications, Hembree passed the audition. He tells the story in his new book for the University of Illinois Press, On the Bus with Bill Monroe: My Five-Year Ride with the Father of Blue Grass.

“I aced the audition because I knew what I had to do, how to play” Hembree recalls. “But it took a while to catch the groove; Monroe’s beat was unique, very aggressive, always pushing, and my job was to get there first, be right on top of the beat.

“The difficulties were more personal—adjusting to Southern culture, co-workers who were not really friendly and constantly gave me shit. I was 10 years younger than the next youngest member, a Yankee, and completely new to the circuit.”

Hembree grew up in a household where dad listened to the Grand Ole Opry and played recordings by rustic performers such as Monroe. Like many of his generational peers in the ‘70s, Hembree entered music through the still-happening folk revival, moving swiftly from campus coffeehouses into the burgeoning newgrass scene. He played around the Appleton area before joining one of the seminal newgrass bands, the Denver-based Monroe Doctrine.

“The Doctrine was progressive and getting even more so. Tony Trischka played banjo with us on a couple of tours; he was telling us about this 14-year-old student he had in NYC who was scaring him, came in there playing Charlie Parker solos on banjo (it was Bela Fleck),” Hembree says. “Later we had Bill Millett on banjo, and he played progressive, jazzy single-note solos that Fleck would echo later. For instance, we played Hoedown by Eric Dolphy and Oliver Nelson. We were a jam band long before there were such things as Yonder Mountain, String Cheese Incident …”

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Hembree’s fine track record as a young musician wasn’t enough to remove skepticism from fellow members of Monroe’s band, The Blue Grass Boys. “Certainly no one in the band was shy about letting me know I sucked,” he says. “Kenny Baker was a pretty harsh judge, as was Butch Robins, and I don’t think any of them thought I was as good as Randy Davis (my predecessor, also one of Monroe’s best bassists).

“Monroe couldn’t clearly verbalize any of his complaints; they came in ‘bluegrass code’ as Peter Rowan called it. He would definitely let you know if he didn’t like what you were playing, but just by looking at you or making a crabby remark. He couldn’t explain what he wanted. I do think Bill appreciated that I was finding the subtleties in his rhythms. Although his style was well-defined, a settled matter, he also expected you to bring something of your own to it.”

On the Bus with Bill Monroe collects many funny, quirky stories of life on the road with the reigning king of bluegrass. Once Hembree tried to explain to Monroe that his suit was “funky,” needing a trip to the drycleaner. Later that day, in the Opry dressing room, Monroe dressed down the band, saying, “I heard somebody say their suit was funnnky. I ain’t never heard that word around bluegrass.”

Acknowledging the fallibility of memory, Hembree’s text distinguishes passages he wrote during his time as a Blue Grass Boy from the recollections he penned 40 years on. It was a wild bus ride and the trip was bound to end.  Hembree left and joined a band of young players, the Nashville Bluegrass Band. “The idea of being with contemporaries and a more-equal member of the band seemed much more promising,” Hembree explains. Then came an accident in 1988 while driving the Nashville band’s bus.

“My wife had endured many moves over the past few years, always according to my career, and she kept talking about being back in Wisconsin,” he says. “So, after 10 years in Nashville, I put it to her to decide what to do next. Her father was ill—turns out he had Parkinson’s—and she wanted to come back. To her surprise, I agreed.”

Since then, Hembree recorded a couple western swing albums with The Western Box Turtles, played festivals as part of tributes to Monroe and other roots Americana artists, sat in with newgrass players and was bass instructor at Tennessee’s Monroe Mandolin Camp.

“After the Box Turtles broke up, I started what turned out to be The Best Westerns. Now we have ex-Box Turtle Eddie Rivers, retired from Asleep at the Wheel, playing steel with us. He and guitarist Tim Ferguson are old bandmates going back to the days of Radio Flyer and Ida Red. Drummer Andy Pagel (ex-Turtle) and I have been playing together for more than 20 years now; he’s the only drummer I’ve ever been in a band with. Fiddler Mark Roeder is a multi-instrumentalist and a great singer, too. Jeff Stehr (late of the Tritonics) has been playing piano, and Anna Brinck (once in Dead Man’s Carnival) will be spelling him some this summer.

“I let myself get flattered into putting together a bluegrass band,” he continues. “I decided to go ahead and call it the Mark Hembree Band—if I called it the River Valley Mountain Boys or something like that no one would know who that is at all. I suppose I owe it to the internet that anyone besides my old friends knows who I am.”