Bill Monroe at Capitol Center

In April 1977, when he was sixty-six years of age, Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass music, appeared with Roy Acuff, Minnie Pearl, Grandpa Jones, and other stars of the Grand Ole Opry at the Capitol Center in Largo, Maryland, near Washington. The Capitol Center is a giant convention hall comparable in size to Madison Square Garden or the Cow Palace, with a floor spacious enough for hockey and basketball games, three-ring circuses, ice pageants, and rodeos and a seating capacity running to nearly twenty thousand—approximately the population of Batavia, New York.

For the country music show a high platform has been erected at one end of the arena, to which the performer ascends in near darkness by a narrow flight of raw-plank stairs. Ahead of him he sees a human multitude diabolised by a lurid red glow reflected from the stage, which drifts upwards toward the huge outcroppings of darkness at the back of the hall; glacial shafts of concentrated light converge upon him from above, out of a kind of counterfeit night. Beyond the glare of the spots he can just make out, along the topmost tier of seats, like passengers high on the deck of some departing ocean liner, a filament of tiny human heads and the pale yellow lamps of the concourse behind them. He can be, for them, though his voice in the gigantic loudspeakers may have the amplitude of a tidal wave, little more than a diminutive mechanical doll, who with a few disproportionate gestures curiously remote from his song, presents a bizarre, spectral, and inconclusive manifestation of himself. Seen in silhouette from under the scaffolding backstage, he might be some terror-stricken mortal strumming his guitar at the dark gates of a world built on a different scale and on a different principle than this one.