"Do we need one more book on Bill Monroe?" asks the prominent country music historian Bill C. Malone in a quote on the back cover. Of course he answers yes. Readers -- virtually all of whom will be Monroe fans like me -- will agree.

As the title suggests, Mark Hembree, a bass player, served in Monroe's band, known variously as the Blue Grass or the Bluegrass Boys, between 1979 and 1984. In those years Hembree was young and not Southern (in fact a Chicago-born product of Wisconsin), which meant that he suffered both culture shock and the shock of being on the road with an outsized character such as Monroe. Hembree soon learned why stories of Monroe's personality are legion.

Before we proceed, however, I need to register this spelling/grammatical complaint: the repeated use of the monstrous non-word "alright," which is very definitely not all right, throughout the text. This dopey error should have been caught without trouble. The University of Illinois Press employs usually well trained editors, after all. And Hembree is himself identified in an author's note as a professional editor. For that matter, why, too, didn't Spell Check catch this? Grrr....

Anyway, that aside, On the Bus with Bill Monroe is an undeniably entertaining excursion. If it produces no startling new revelations, it still has a bucketful of engaging anecdotes to pass on. If you've read the other Monroe books (including fellow Blue Grass Boy Tom Ewing's exhaustive, sometimes exhausting biography, Bill Monroe: The Life & Music of the Blue Grass Man, reviewed in this space on 22 December 2018), you'll recognize the guy: stand-offish, eccentric, suspicious, tight-lipped, wounded for much of his career (which began in the 1930s) by resentments stemming from brutal childhood conflicts with his musician brothers Charlie and Birch, then by the conviction (beginning in the late 1940s) that others were stealing the music he had invented, not called "bluegrass" until the 1950s.

Monroe began to mellow somewhat when he at last understood that the great musicians (Flatt & Scruggs, the Stanley Brothers and more) were not stealing what he had done but honoring and expanding it, creating a brand-new genre in the process. He became known as the Father of Bluegrass, a title he would treasure, and is still famous as such.

But Monroe was never easy. He was a hard taskmaster, and he was not blessed with a noteworthy sense of humor. Characters with personalities like that fill biographies that no one would mistake for hagiographies. For example, Eileen Sisk's 2010 Buck Owens: The Biography will likely steer you away from that artist, depicted as close to being a depraved sociopath, for the rest of your days. Yet, though Monroe's faults are on display in just about every piece of writing that touches on his personality, no one seems to have disliked him more than passingly. To the contrary, something about him caused those who knew him best to love him. No doubt both Monroe's acts of unexpected kindness and his stunning musical genius -- does anyone less get to establish a world-famous original style? -- worked significantly in his favor.

Women certainly loved him. Some of the writing, Ewing's prominently, documents his active romantic and sex life. (Virginia Stauffer, among his lovers, composed the Monroe classic "With Body and Soul.") Hembree explicitly avoids that more private part of Monroe's life in favor of less intimate, yet often more bewildering, episodes.

In closing, here's my favorite (p. 39):

[Recording artist and one-time Blue Grass Boy] Peter Rowan told me a story about driving Monroe around on the north side of Nashville when he pointed at a driveway and told Peter to pull in. Peter drove up, and Bill got out and walked to the house. A man answered the door, and Bill decked him with a single punch. Then he returned to the car and told Peter to go.

They rode along in silence for a minute or two until Peter finally asked who that was. "That was Charlie," Bill said.

"Charlie?"

"My brother," Bill said, and offered no further explanation.