Image No. 63-2N-14 "Brad" Keith on banjo 1963 Newport Folk Festival In the early 60s, Cambridge banjo picker Bill Keith raised Earl Scruggs' three-fingered method of banjo playing to the next level, an achievement that Bill Monroe recognized when he introduced Keith to the audience at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival. "I don't think there's a man in the country," Monroe said, "that can touch this boy when it comes to playin' a five-string banjo." (When Keith joined the Blue Grass Boys, the father of bluegrass felt it might be confusing to have two Bills in the band, so Keith was "Brad" for the time he played with Monroe.)

Image No. 63-2N-6 Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys 1963 Newport Folk Festival (Left to right) Bessie Lee Mauldin (bass), Billy Baker (fiddle), Bill Keith (banjo), Bill Monroe (mandolin), Del McCoury (guitar) Shortly after World War II, Bill Monroe added a 5-string banjo player named Earl Scruggs to his band. Scruggs' revolutionary melodic fingerpicking style of playing the banjo, together with Monroe's mandolin playing, high-tenor lead singing, and his close-harmony vocal arrangements, created the distinctive sound that came to be called bluegrass music. In the early 1960s, it was Earl Scruggs, together with Lester Flatt, another alumnus of Monroe's group, who introduced bluegrass to folk audiences in the northeast. It seemed the folk revival might pass the founder by, until Ralph Rinzler brought Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys to the 1963 Newport Folk Festival.

Image No. 63-2N-11 Bill Monroe, Bill Keith, Del McCoury 1963 Newport Folk Festival