During 1963 and 1964, Del McCoury was a member of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys. Since 2011 is the 100th anniversary of Monroe’s birth, it’s fitting that McCoury revisits his stint with that group with Old Memories: The Songs Of Bill Monroe. The recording will be released digitally on September 27 and on vinyl October 25. As McCoury explains, “I had done songs of his on different albums I made through the years but I’d never really thought about doing a whole album until the day we were flying home from the Grammy awards—and by the time we got to Nashville, I’d made a pretty good list of what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to do a lot of things that everybody had already done; I wanted to do some things that weren’t real popular but were really good. Some were songs I’d never heard him sing, some were songs that he’d sing on a show—and some were songs that he sang on the record, but he made me learn the lead. And I wanted to do them in the same keys he did, because if you change that, you just don’t have the same sound he had on them.” The 16 tracks include such songs as “Watermelon On The Vine,” “Close By,” “Rose Of Old Kentucky,” “The Girl In The Blue Velvet Band” and “Alabama Waltz.”