I visited a reproduction of the cabin Bill Monroe spent his latter teen years in, and which was quite common in his day, and not entirely uncommon to this very day in some parts of the country, even if they now have more rooms. His mother died when he was eight, if memory serves, and his father when he was 16. That sort of thing used to be common even in this nation, prior to the advent of all of the benefits of a largely free market economy.
The cabin belonged to his Uncle Pen, who himself had had two children, both of whom died, and after which his wife left him. He lived all alone until Monroe came along, and played the fiddle every night.
The thing was one room, and of course the privy would have been in the back and consisted in a structure built over a hole in the ground, presumably without toilet paper. The cablin was cooler than I would have supposed, since the walls were quite thick and without leaks.
They ate fatback, molasses and corn cakes for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day.
This is the song about him: Uncle Pen. This music is very energetic, since it is intended for sad people leading hard, uncomfortable lives, and just trying to make their way in the world. They would often play all night long.
Most of the world still lives like this, and the policies designed to help them have, in aggregate, made things worse. For much of the world, you could take this basic poverty, make food unreliable, and add political oppression enabled by foreign aid.
Anyway, here are the lyrics:
Oh the people would come from far away
They’d dance all night till the break of day
When the caller hollered “do-se-do”
You knew Uncle Pen was ready to go
Late in the evening about sundown
High on the hill and above the town
Uncle Pen played the fiddle lord how it would ring
You could hear it talk, you could hear it sing
He played an old piece he called “Soldier’s Joy”
And the one called “The Boston Boy”
The greatest of all was “Jenny Lynn”
To me that’s where the fiddle begins
I’ll never forget that mournful day
When Uncle Pen was called away
They hung up his fiddle, they hung up his bow
They knew it was time for him to go