Boone Creek

Skaggs and Douglas had been in J. D. Crowe’s New South, and when that lineup came apart after its August 1975 tour of Japan they left to start a band of their own. Skaggs recruited Baucom, from Monroe, North Carolina, to play fiddle and Golding to play guitar. Marc Pruett was to be the banjo player but backed out to help his brother run a music store in Asheville; Baucom offered to play banjo until someone else could be found, and once the others heard him he stayed on it. Skaggs played mandolin, fiddle and guitar and sang lead and tenor, with Golding as the other lead singer. The band worked the Holiday Inn lounge circuit six nights a week and played festivals at weekends, and it went through several bass players, among them Vince Gill.

The first album came out of two sets of sessions. Rounder found some of what the band first brought in too commercial, and the band went back into the studio for more traditional bluegrass, so the released LP (Rounder 0081, 1977) puts Bill Monroe’s “Dark Is the Night,” Lester Flatt’s “Gonna Settle Down,” “White House Blues” and “Drifting Too Far from the Shore” beside Golding’s “Dixieland,” “Satisfy My Mind” and the title song “Boone Creek,” on which Karl Himmel plays drums and Fred Wooten bass and steel guitar. “Sugar Daddy” adds harmonica, horns and a Moog synthesizer, and Cheryl White sings harmony on two tracks. Jack Tottle wrote the liner notes.

One Way Track (Sugar Hill SH-3701, 1978), with Steve Bryant on bass, was the first number in the Sugar Hill catalog and was much closer to straight bluegrass. Before recording it the band had been playing for a while at Barton’s Inn in Canada, where Baucom remembered Skaggs and Golding writing the title song, and the band worked up the album there. Alongside that song are Monroe’s “Little Community Church” and “Can’t You Hear Me Calling,” Curly Seckler’s “No Mother or Dad,” Golding’s “Mississippi Queen,” “In the Pines,” the gospel “Daniel Prayed” and the fiddle tune “Sally Gooden,” with Douglas and Baucom adding baritone and bass voices to the quartets. Skaggs and Douglas mixed it. The band recorded it already knowing that Skaggs was leaving to play with Emmylou Harris, whose Hot Band he joined, and Boone Creek broke up shortly after the album came out.

Douglas went on to Alison Krauss & Union Station, Baucom was a founding member of Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver in 1979 and later of IIIrd Tyme Out, and Golding played with the Shenandoah Cut-Ups and co-founded Wes Golding & Sure Fire. Baucom died in December 2023. The Rounder album, out of print for decades, was reissued by Craft Recordings and HighTone on 26 June 2026, its first time on CD and streaming services, with four tracks from the original sessions that had been lost with the master tapes, among them “Hitchhiking to California,” “Dream Song” and “Misty Wind,” on which Vince Gill sings harmony.