Atop a hill near Rosine, Ky., stands the archetypal country porch – the Country Porch of America. Rosine is located two hours north of Nashville, but we approach it the pretty way, a three-hour drive from Lexington. This is the region of central Kentucky, where the grass supposedly grows blue; locals insist it shows a turquoise tinge in early spring. Lexington is also the world’s top breeding centre for championship racehorses, making it a playground for the world’s upper crust, like Belinda Stronach’s father, Frank, who owns the place next door to the Crown Prince of Qatar.

As the drive winds past a series of white-fenced stables, bourbon distilleries and old Kentucky homes, two of bluegrass music’s defining features become apparent: no electric instruments and no drums. The audio system’s megabass button gives the music an extra dimension but without the aggressive whooomph of modern music.

We arrive in Rosine, turn onto a dirt road, cross the railroad tracks (“To get to any bluegrass landmark, you must first cross the tracks,” Lynn observes) and climb Jerusalem Ridge. This is the home of the Father of Bluegrass, Bill Monroe. Monroe was born in 1911, learned the mandolin as a child, created what we know as the bluegrass sound in 1945 and has been a legend ever since. Nestled among cedar and maple trees, the Bill Monroe Home Place is a wood cabin with a cedar shake roof. Its defining feature is the porch; four of the five rooms open on to it.

Rosine has a population of 41 people, seven of whom are waiting for us. They are members of the Bill Monroe Foundation, and they all have a personal connection to the man. The first to greet me is an elderly, bearded fellow with a drawl thick as gravy. I understand his name to be Darryl; he explains that it’s actually spelled “Durl.” He used to look after Monroe’s foxhounds. Foundation treasurer Sharon Autry, a white-haired Kentucky belle, lived for a while in the only other home on Jerusalem Ridge. She explains that the Home Place was abandoned for many years; after Monroe’s death in 1996, people would come here and rip boards out to take home. “Someone ripped the mantle right off the fireplace,” and the porch was gone too, whether from theft or rot, she says with a “tsk” in her voice. “The family played a lot of music on that porch.”

In 2001, the foundation raised $300,000 and gave the place a restoration fit for a castle. Tall windows suffuse every room with soft sunlight and offer a view of the wooded holler behind the house. As Autry continues with a stream of myth-making anecdotes (“Bill’s mother was a fiddle player, but the day before he was born, they say she sat beneath the front maple tree and played… the mandolin”), I’m distracted by serenity and the distinctly noticeable absence of drums, amplification or whooomph. They are the outward, inaudible signs of an inward, spiritual grace.

Back in Nashville, we stop in at the annual convention of “spigma,” as locals call the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music in America (SPBGMA). We arrive expecting to find a gathering of 78-rpm record collectors, folklorists and as many music critics – opponents of modern country music, true defenders of the faith – as musicians.

We walk into the massive hotel lobby and witness a scene that would humble any critic: hundreds of pickers playing in small circles through the lobby and the inner courtyard. Mandolin and fiddle prodigies are playing with the family members who taught them, playing with strangers, whoever. Hotel management has posted signs reading, “No Jamming Beyond This Point,” which are funny to see, doubly so because they will surely go unheeded, like trying to herd pigs with traffic lights.

The picking will continue unabated until about 5 a.m. It will break for five or six hours, then the bluegrass will begin again. 

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