Chris Hillman and Herb Pedersen

Both came out of the California bluegrass scene of the early 1960s, Hillman on mandolin with the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers and the Golden State Boys before he joined the Byrds, Pedersen on banjo with Vern & Ray before he joined the Dillards in 1968. Pedersen sang tenor to Hillman’s lead on Hillman’s Sugar Hill album Morning Sky (1982) and played rhythm guitar on Desert Rose (1984), and in 1985, after both had toured and recorded with Dan Fogelberg on High Country Snows, Hillman formed the Desert Rose Band with Pedersen, who arranged its vocals. The band’s MCA/Curb records, among them the 1988 country No. 1s “He’s Back and I’m Blue” and “I Still Believe in You,” ran until it broke up in 1994.

Bakersfield Bound, released by Sugar Hill in May 1996, is a set of honky-tonk and country songs: Buck Owens’s “He Don’t Deserve You Anymore” and “There Goes My Love,” Red Simpson’s “Close Up the Honky Tonks,” Jim and Jesse McReynolds’s “Congratulations, Anyway,” “Lost Highway” and two of Hillman’s own, “Just Tell Me Darlin’” and the title song, written with Steve Hill. Hillman sings lead and plays mandolin throughout, with Pedersen on guitar and harmony, Gabe Witcher on fiddle, Larry Park on lead guitar, Jay Dee Maness on steel, Lee Sklar on bass and Willie Omelas on drums. That year the two also began recording with Tony and Larry Rice as Rice, Rice, Hillman & Pedersen, which made three Rounder albums between 1996 and 2001.

Way Out West (Back Porch, 2002), seventeen tracks, mixes country standards such as “Invitation to the Blues,” “No Longer a Sweetheart of Mine,” “The Old Cross Road” and “Are You Missing Me?” with “Save the Last Dance for Me.” At Edwards Barn was recorded live at Edwards Barn in Nipomo, California, on 7 November 2009, with Larry Park, Bill Bryson, formerly of the Desert Rose Band, and David Mansfield, and Rounder released it in 2010. Its fifteen songs go back over Hillman’s career, from the Byrds’ hits “Turn! Turn! Turn!” and “Eight Miles High” to “Sin City,” which he wrote with Gram Parsons for the Flying Burrito Brothers, and his Desert Rose Band song “Love Reunited,” and they also include the Louvin Brothers’ “If I Could Only Win Your Love,” which Pedersen had sung with Emmylou Harris, “Together Again” and “Wait a Minute.” Pedersen was later executive producer of Hillman’s 2017 solo album Bidin’ My Time.