Then it happened. The gravitational forces serving to contain that creative drive in the proto-universe were simply too weak to keep it together, and The Monroe Brothers as a performing unit were no more, but bluegrass music was about to emerge and expand out into the universe.

The conditions immediately following the Monroe Brothers’ Big Bang are worthy of a quick survey here. When physicists speak of the state of matter following the Big Bang, they mention slight irregularities in the original, expanding mass that led to the eventual formation of galactic clusters, as well as relatively empty areas, rather than a uniform distribution of matter throughout the available space. (Remember the photo of the atomic fireball at the start of my talk.) The tendency of Bill and Charlie was at first to follow their original momentum and form two units almost identical to the original group. Bill searched for a guitar player / lead singer, while Charlie wanted a mandolin player and tenor singer. Note that neither brother considered joining an already-established band as a sideman - they were both determined to be band leaders, having no interest in having a "boss". Following our cosmological framework, we can consider both Bill and Charlie as centers of mass, which soon attracted other performers, falling, so to speak, into their gravitational fields.