Dan Crary

He was born on 29 September 1939 and grew up on the edge of Kansas City in the 1950s. He took up the guitar at twelve, drawn by the open-string sound of a local country singer, Don Sullivan, on a noon radio program, and for years he played folk songs and country songs off the radio. After high school he studied theology at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago from 1957, moved to Lawrence in 1960 to attend the University of Kansas, where he sang and played guitar in a trio called the Carltons, and in 1965 went to San Francisco to study at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, playing locally and teaching guitar to make a living. There he first heard players taking fiddle tunes on the guitar, and soon afterward the recordings of Doc Watson. His church background and seminary years gave him the nickname “Deacon Dan.”

In 1967 he moved to Louisville, Kentucky, to work toward a doctorate at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and in 1968 he became a co-founder of the Bluegrass Alliance, which was soon the house band at the Red Dog Saloon. The fiddler Lonnie Peerce made it his business to interest Crary in fiddle tunes, playing him “Forked Deer” one night at the Red Dog early in 1968, and Crary set about learning them. The result was Bluegrass Guitar (American Heritage, 1970), twelve instrumentals with his lead guitar backed by members of the Alliance: Wayne Stewart on rhythm guitar, Buddy Spurlock on banjo, Danny Jones on mandolin, Peerce on fiddle and Ebo Walker on bass. Its program of “Cross the Big Sandy,” “Reuben,” “Dusty Miller,” “Devil’s Dream,” “Blackberry Blossom,” “Salt Creek,” “Black Mountain Rag,” “Sweet Sunny South,” “Monroe’s Hornpipe,” “Forked Deer,” “Gold Rush” and “Fishin’ Creek” brought several of those pieces into bluegrass as guitar instrumentals for the first time. Sugar Hill reissued the album in 1992.

By the time the record came out he had left the band, in 1970, to change course: Sam Bush took over his place on guitar, and Crary returned to Kansas City to work on a doctorate in communication studies, playing only local dates. He later held two earned doctorates, the first in theology and the second in speech communication. In 1974 he moved to California to teach at Cal State Fullerton, where he was a professor of speech communication until 2004, fitting his performing into weekends and summers.

In California he met Byron Berline, who was then leaving Country Gazette, and the two formed Sundance with John Hickman on banjo and Jack Skinner on bass; the band recorded late in 1975 and its album Byron Berline & Sundance came out on MCA in 1976. When the band chose to tour heavily behind the record, Crary, tied to his teaching, dropped out. His second solo album, Lady’s Fancy (Rounder 0099, 1977), recorded in Los Angeles in December 1976, is an instrumental album of fiddle tunes, rags and waltzes, among them “Huckleberry Hornpipe,” “Lime Rock,” “Grey Eagle” and the title track, with Berline, Hickman and Vince Gill on some tracks and Sam Bush, Courtney Johnson, Curtis Burch and John Cowan of New Grass Revival on others. He also played on Berline’s Dad’s Favorites (1977). Sweet Southern Girl (Sugar Hill, 1979), again with Berline and Hickman, brought his singing forward, with Herb Pedersen and Vince Gill on harmony.

Late in the 1970s Berline, Crary and Hickman toured Japan together, and in 1981, the year they played the Cambridge Folk Festival in England, they began recording as Berline, Crary & Hickman, or BCH, for Sugar Hill: Berline • Crary • Hickman (1981), Night Run (1984), BCH (1986) and, with the bassist Steve Spurgin added, Now They Are Four (1989). With Spurgin and John Moore the group became California, the IBMA’s Instrumental Group of the Year in 1992, 1993 and 1994. Through the 1980s Crary also wrote a monthly flatpicking column for Frets magazine, and Taylor Guitars, whose instruments he had taken up after Stuart Mossman stopped making guitars, built a Dan Crary model to his design, with heavy braces and a thin top meant to sound well in front of a microphone.

His solo records for Sugar Hill continued with Guitar (1983), made at the Studio by the Pond in Hendersonville, Tennessee, with Béla Fleck, Sam Bush, Mark O’Connor and T. Michael Coleman, and ranging from “Cotton Patch Rag” and Stanley Brothers and Bill Monroe medleys to Irish reels and an adaptation of Mozart; Take a Step Over (1989), with Fleck, Bush and John Cowan, which includes “Raleigh and Spencer” and “Lord, Build Me a Cabin”; and Thunderation (1991), made with the violinist Billy Oskay, which won the independent distributors’ “Indie” award for best string instrumental album. Jammed If I Do (1994) set him alongside the guitarists Doc Watson, Tony Rice, Norman Blake and Beppe Gambetta, with a short spoken exchange with each, and Holiday Guitar (1997) won the Association for Independent Music’s 1998 “Indie” for best seasonal album. He also played on Berline’s Fiddle and a Song (1995).

After California he worked in several smaller groupings. In 1999 he formed a band with the banjo player Lonnie Hoppers, which recorded Crary & Hoppers and Their American Band for Pinecastle in 2000, and from 2002 he toured and recorded with the Italian guitarist Beppe Gambetta, with whom he made Synérgia (Felmay, 2001). The original BCH trio returned for Chambergrass (Sugar Hill, 2002), and Crary’s liner notes for it won the IBMA’s liner-notes award in 2003. Renaissance of the Steel String Guitar followed in 2003. In September 2006 he produced Primal Twang: The Legacy of the Guitar, a four-night staged history of the guitar at the Birch North Park Theatre in San Diego with Doc Watson, Albert Lee, Eric Johnson, Mason Williams and others, later issued on DVD. In 2009 he began performing with a new band, Thunderation, which made Perfect Storm (Blue Night, 2011) with the singer and bassist Steve Spurgin, and from 2017 he worked in a trio with the banjo player Bill Evans and the bassist Wally Barnick, which released Prime Time on Native and Fine in 2020. In 2022 the IBMA presented him with its Distinguished Achievement Award.