Like you said in another post, “Good music.” Enough with the labels. Too many, especially BG “purists”, ignore the fact that Monroe and other first generation masters were innovators.

Miss Dixie and Tom T. Hall will be inducted into Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Hall of Fame during the 44th Annual Hall of Fame & Uncle Pen Days Festival in Bean Blossom, Indiana, September 19-22. The induction ceremony will be held on the main stage Saturday, Sept. 22, around 4 p.m. at the end of the supper break before the evening show begins. Candidates for the Hall of Fame, housed in the Bill Monroe Museum at Bean Blossom, are selected by a committee of 100 industry leaders in a three ballot, anonymous voting process.

The Halls have had a powerful impact on bluegrass music during the past 50 years primarily as songwriters, although they also owned and operated a recording studio, the Blue Circle record label, and the Good Home Grown Music publishing company. From 1999-2015 Miss Dixie and Tom T. wrote more than 3,000 bluegrass songs together. Miss Dixie, the most prolific female bluegrass songwriter in the history of the genre, had more than 500 of her songs recorded by other artists, with 11 going to #1 on the Bluegrass Unlimited National Survey radio airplay chart.

The Halls were named SPBGMA Songwriters of the Year for 10 consecutive years, and in 2004 they were honored with IBMA’s Distinguished Achievement Award for their lifetime contributions to bluegrass music. Songs from Miss Dixie’s “Daughters of Bluegrass” albums won Recorded Event of the Year IBMA Awards in 2001, 2006 and 2009. The fourth Daughters recording was a four-CD boxed set featuring 134 female bluegrass musicians performing 69 songs written by the Halls.

Country Music Hall of Fame member Tom T. Hall, known as “The Storyteller” for his legendary talents as a songwriter and artist, retired in 1982. “I came off the road and at that time Miss Dixie was working 18 hours a day on Animal Land shelter projects over in Brentwood, with a horseback riding program for handicapped children,” he said. “She was trying to rescue all the puppies and dogs and cats and goats in the world, so when I retired that meant I went to work for Animal Land, too.

“I said, ‘Hey, I’ll make you a deal.’ Bluegrass was her favorite type of music, and of course I grew up in it. I said, ‘If you’ll retire from Animal Land, we’ll write some songs.’ Miss Dixie said, ‘Let me get a piece of paper.’ She wrote out an agreement on a pad of legal paper and I signed it. We added a music studio to the house, and the rest is history. The whole Blue Circle Records and Good Home Grown Music thing was her idea.”

Tom T. had never co-written songs before the legal pad contract with his wife. “If I had a song idea in the old days, I’d go off by myself and write it,” he said. “I always thought writing a song was a very personal thing, like writing a letter to your mother. Why would you need two or three people involved in something like that? With Miss Dixie, I helped with the mechanics of writing songs. One or the other of us would get an idea, and I started on it with a guitar. After about 10-15 minutes she would say, ‘I got it,” and I would go back to the garden or whatever I was doing out at Fox Hollow that day. Then in a couple of days or a week, Miss Dixie would finish the song.”

Originally from England, Miss Dixie moved to the States in 1961 to work for Starday Records, promoting artists like The Stanley Brothers, The Lonesome Pine Fiddlers, String Bean, Lonzo & Oscar, Carl Story, Grandpa Jones and Bill Clifton. She met Maybelle Carter and the Carter Family and lived with them for a while at their home in Madison, TN, writing some songs with Maybelle. At Music City News, Dixie worked her way up from being an office worker to the editor of the publication. She also worked briefly with Louise Scruggs, helping her set up a publishing company for Flatt & Scruggs. Dixie and Tom T. met at a BMI Awards Show in 1964, and they were married in 1968.

“It’s kind of a cultural phenomenon,” Tom T. said. “Miss Dixie understood bluegrass music better than I did. I grew up in it, but I was in the middle of the forest. You’ve heard the expression, ‘You can’t see the forest for the trees?’ Miss Dixie was standing off to the side, and she could see the trees.”

The day the call came with the news about the Halls’ induction into the Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Hall of Fame, Tom T. says there was “a lot of laughing and crying and jumping up and down.” He and the staff at Fox Hollow—Annette Kelley, Melissa Lawrence Buck and Melissa Spaulding, “were thinking mainly that this would have been a glorious day in Miss Dixie’s life.”

The Halls knew Bill Monroe personally. “Bill would be asked to go somewhere, and the CMA would get us to go too and take Bill with us,” Hall said. “We went to the White House together. We had a lot of fun together and visited, although he was not a guy to invite people over to his farm. He had a great sense of humor, but he didn’t want you to be in on the joke. He liked to go out behind the barn by himself and laugh about things. I asked Bill once, ‘You named the Blue Grass Boys after Kentucky. Why do you have a theme park in Indiana?’ He said, ‘I own the property.’”

Monroe liked Tom T. because he was from Olive Hill, KY. In fact, “part of Bill Monroe’s religion was Kentucky,” Hall said. “If you were from Kentucky, you could do no wrong. You could go out and rob a bank and then be in the Blue Grass Boys band the next day. He’d say, ‘He’s a good Kentucky boy.’”

Miss Dixie had a close connection with Bean Blossom, with her own personal parking spot backstage. She would arrive in her motor home and stay for the whole week, bringing along 30 pans of homemade cornbread for the annual ham & bean supper on Tuesdays. “I think it was Maybelle’s recipe,” Tom T. said. “Jimmy Martin would also kill animals and barbecue them, and throw them in the mix.”

Monroe’s music had a tremendous influence on Tom T. Hall. “I was six or seven years old, and for Christmas an older brother got me a Gibson guitar and three 78 Bill Monroe records—which launched my music career,” he recalls, smiling. “There was a mandolin player who lived down the road from us, and we both ended up as members of the Kentucky Travelers in Olive Hill. Man, I was climbing the walls that Christmas. My brother, Quentin bought those records for me, and we never dreamed I’d be in Bill Monroe’s Hall of Fame.”

In addition to their writing and promotional efforts, the Halls have helped bluegrass music by encouraging and supporting dozens of musicians and bands behind the scenes. If Dixie connected with you about bluegrass music, then you were a part of the family. She would cook meals for you, invite you to stay at the farm, and let you record an album at their studio at no charge—which then would be released on her label—with the artist retaining ownership of the masters. Then she would go about making the album a success for you on radio and in the press. She did everything but book gigs for bands.

“I was trying to ease their way, in the same way the Carters and so many others have eased mine,” Dixie told a reporter a few years ago. “If a few dollars’ worth of studio time or groceries or conversation made someone feel a part of the bluegrass family, then that’s what I want to do. It’s a family, and it’s important that it stays that way, so that tradition continues.”

Although she passed away January 16, 2015, the songs the Halls wrote are still topping bluegrass music charts and the bands she promoted are doing well. A legacy has been built at Fox Hollow by Miss Dixie and Tom T Hall, with a foundation of love for bluegrass music supporting towering walls of creativity, persistent work, kindness and generosity. And of all the awards the two have won together and individually over the years, being made members of their old friend, Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Hall of Fame is probably the highest honor yet.

What is the bluegrass sound? Monroe with Clyde Moody playing Texas style sock rhythm and an accordion? Jimmy Martin with electric guitar? J. D. Crowe with electric bass and pedal steel? Is fiddle required? Banjo? Monroe played mandolin. Is mandolin required? Many of the great Stanley records had no mandolin. Can any band include cello and still be bluegrass?