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Kenny Baker, the longtime member of
Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys band whose
polished “long bow” sound made him one of bluegrass music’s most emulated fiddle players,
died Friday, July 8, in Nashville. The 85-year-old musician, who lived in
Sumner County, suffered a stroke earlier in the week.
“For me, Bill Monroe never sounded as good as when Kenny was playing with him,”
said Country Music Hall of Famer Bill Anderson, who shared
the Grand Ole Opry stage with Monroe and Mr. Baker on many nights
in the 1960s and ’70s. “God, what a touch he had on the fiddle. He was just so good.”
Known as “The Father of Bluegrass,” Monroe introduced Mr. Baker to audiences
as “The greatest fiddler in bluegrass music.” While such a tag is inherently
subjective, Mr. Baker’s style certainly changed both Monroe’s sound and the sound
of the fiddle in bluegrass. He was the genre’s dominant fiddler of the 1970s,
and he has influenced generations of players.
“He brought a smoothness to the music that hadn’t been prevalent before,” said
Eddie Stubbs, a WSM and Grand Ole Opry announcer who logged many
years as a fiddle player in bluegrass band The Johnson Mountain Boys. “His playing
impacted not just up-and-coming talent but also people who were already
playing professionally. He was Monroe’s instrumental voice during a very
important time in the music.”
Born in the far eastern Kentucky town of Jenkins, Mr. Baker began playing
fiddle at age 8 before switching to guitar. He worked for Bethlehem
Steel in Kentucky coal mines as a teenager, and he joined the Navy during
World War II. He was transferred into a military entertainment outfit because
of his guitar skills, but while in the service he began playing fiddle again,
and he worked to master the fiddle after he left the Navy.
Ultimately, he arrived at a style that was rooted in old-time fiddling forms
but that also nodded to jazz, swing and even classical violin. He first joined the
Blue Grass Boys in 1957, though his stints with Monroe were sporadic
until he embarked on a 16-year stretch beginning in 1968. He was the key
band member for that time, serving as an onstage foil to Monroe, and
the International Bluegrass Music Museum credits him as playing longer than
anyone else with the Blue Grass Boys.
Aside from his work with Monroe, which included a starring role
on Monroe’s much-lauded Uncle Pen album, Mr. Baker contributed to classic
albums including Tom T. Hall’s Magnificent Music Machine
and the Osborne Brothers’ Bluegrass Collection. He also released
numerous solo instrumental albums, most on County Records, that were the basis
of many fiddlers’ education on their instrument.
Mr. Baker left Monroe’s band acrimoniously in 1984, and the two men did
not reconcile until 1994, when they reunited at Monroe’s Bean Blossom bluegrass
festival. In the meantime, Mr. Baker played numerous shows with Dobro great
Josh Graves.
“Ornery and irascible, cheerful and charming, demanding musically yet frequently
found jamming all night with sleepy, mediocre musicians, stubborn and bullheaded,
witty and warm, Kenny Baker, like bluegrass music itself, is complex, contradictory
and deep,” wrote music scholar (and western band Riders in the Sky leader)
Douglas Green in the liner notes to Mr. Baker’s 1976 album,
Kenny Baker Plays Bill Monroe.
In 1993, Mr. Baker received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National
Endowment for the Arts.
Funeral arrangements and survivor information are incomplete.
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