Charles Sawtelle

Sawtelle was born in Austin, Texas, in 1946 and grew up in Colorado, and he had played steel guitar as well as guitar. Before Hot Rize he was in the bands Monroe Doctrine and the Rambling Drifters, the second of them with Tim O’Brien and Pete Wernick in 1976, and he played on both of the solo albums O’Brien and Wernick made in 1977, O’Brien’s Guess Who’s in Town for Biscuit City and Wernick’s Dr. Banjo Steps Out for Flying Fish.

Hot Rize grew out of those two records. Wernick and O’Brien formed a band with friends from the Denver Folklore Center to promote them, and the first shows, in Boulder in January 1978, had Sawtelle on bass and Mike Scap on guitar. When Scap left early on, Sawtelle switched to guitar, and with Nick Forster joining on 1 May 1978 the lineup of O’Brien, Wernick, Sawtelle and Forster was set; it lasted twenty years. Sawtelle played guitar and sang an occasional lead, and offstage he was the band’s sound-system specialist. He also mixed the band’s first album, Hot Rize (Flying Fish, 1979), and played through Radio Boogie (1981), In Concert (1984), and the Sugar Hill albums Traditional Ties (1985), Untold Stories (1987) and Take It Home (1990). In the band’s country alter ego, Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers, he played bass as “Slade.” Hot Rize stopped working full time in 1990, the year the IBMA named it the first Entertainer of the Year; Take It Home was nominated for the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album, and its “Colleen Malone” won the IBMA’s Song of the Year award in 1991.

In the 1990s Sawtelle built a career as a guitarist, engineer and producer. He ran the Rancho deVille recording studio, led his own band, Charles Sawtelle and the Whippets, with Fred Zipp on mandolin, Jim-Bob Runnels on banjo and Dan Mitchell on bass, and performed and recorded with Peter Rowan, including on Rowan’s Bluegrass Boy (1996). His production and mixing credits from those years include Leftover Salmon’s Bridges to Bert (1992), the Bluegrass Patriots’ The Last Waltz, Mary Flower’s Blues Jubilee, Peter Rowan and the Rowan Brothers’ Tree on a Hill (1994) and Mollie O’Brien’s Big Red Sun (1998). Hot Rize kept up reunion dates each year; a 1996 show at the Boulder Theater became the live album So Long of a Journey, issued in 2002, and the original four played together for the last time at Targhee, Wyoming, in August 1998.

Sawtelle died in Nashville on 20 March 1999. Music from Rancho deVille, which he and Laurie Lewis produced, came out on Acoustic Disc in 2001. Recorded mostly at his studio, it gathers friends from across his career: Wernick, Forster and O’Brien from Hot Rize, Norman Blake singing three A.P. Carter songs, Vassar Clements, Michael Doucet, Darol Anger and Richard Greene on fiddle, David Grisman and Sam Bush on mandolin, Jerry Douglas on Dobro, Flaco Jiménez on accordion on Woody Guthrie’s “The Ranger’s Command,” and the Whippets with Peter Rowan on “Gonna Paint the Town.” Sawtelle sings Si Kahn’s “Aragon Mill,” and several of the instrumentals are his own compositions. Bryan Sutton took the guitar chair when Hot Rize regrouped in 2002, and the band was inducted into the IBMA’s Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2025.