Monroe Queener Biography

UPDATED MARCH 4, 2012

I have a personal blog about Monroe Queener on my banjohangout page
which includes all the audio clips.

As you may be aware, I have posted some audio clips and photos about Monroe Queener, a great dobro player I had the pleasure of picking with in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Here is more info about Monroe Queener:

MONROE QUEENER: Born in 1926 in rural Campbell County, Tennessee, Monroe Queener came of age right along with the radio medium. As a child on his family’s tobacco farm, Queener listened in each morning, at noontime, and on Saturday nights, to the country music broadcasts out of Knoxville and Nashville. For him, the music of Roy Acuff was best of all. More than Acuff’s singing and fiddling, though, it was the dobro playing of his longtime sidekick “Bashful Brother Oswald,” that produced the greatest impression. By his mid-teens, Queener began playing an Oswald-inspired dobro technique in a variety of local country bands.

Queener’s earliest success came in the band of Esco Hankins, a local Acuff disciple who enjoyed a following on East Tennessee and southeastern Kentucky radio. With Hankins, Queener played principally, while still in his teens, on Knoxville’s Cas Walker program in the early 1940s. A young guitar player also in the band named Josh Graves, likely learned certain dobro stylings from Queener, and eventually went on to tremendous success and influence with bluegrass pioneers Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. For Queener, the next stop after the Hankins band was a stint in the army during WWII, and participation in the Battle of the Bulge. Returned from overseas, Queener played for a period on Atlanta radio stations. Back in Campbell County after a trip North for employment, Queener joined several popular bluegrass and country bands, including Pap and the Youngins, the Pinnacle Mountain Boys and the Blue Valley Boys. As an original member of the latter group, Queener helped start the earliest version of the Tennessee Jamboree, making him a pioneer of barn dance radio in his home community.

Queener remained with the Jamboree regularly until around 1970, and then as a frequent guest until the program’s end in 1978. His distinctive dobro playing made him one of the most popular musicians on the program. It also created a great demand for his playing, and he was able to circulate among several bands in East Tennessee. For most of these years he was able to play music with some assemblage, either on other small-town radio broadcasts, at dances, in local jams, or for tourists, somewhere in East Tennessee every single night, all while working days on road construction for the state.

(Borrowed from and ©2000-2009 by Firends of the Cumberland Trail)