Del McCoury and David Grisman

They met on 8 February 1963 at New York University in Greenwich Village, at the first show McCoury played with Monroe, on banjo. Three years later, in 1966, they played their first gig together, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Grisman had been offered $200 to put a bluegrass band together, and he hired Del, Del’s bass-playing brother Jerry, with whom Grisman played in Red Allen’s band, and the banjo player Winnie Winston. The show was taped, and Grisman later released part of it on Early Dawg (Sugar Hill, 1980), an album on which Del plays guitar throughout and sings lead on “Little Maggie,” “Dark Hollow,” “The Prisoner’s Song” and “I Wonder Where You Are Tonight.” Later in 1966, at the second bluegrass festival at Fincastle, Virginia, McCoury asked Grisman to play a set with him, in a band that had Chris Warner on banjo.

McCoury turned up again and again on Grisman’s projects. On Home Is Where the Heart Is (Rounder, 1988), Grisman’s double album, Del sang lead on “True Life Blues,” “Close By,” “My Little Georgia Rose” and “Memories of Mother and Dad,” with Herb Pedersen on banjo, Bobby Hicks on fiddle and Jim Kerwin on bass, and Ricky Skaggs singing tenor on the first of them. For Bluegrass Mandolin Extravaganza (Acoustic Disc, 1999), which Grisman co-produced with Del’s son Ronnie, McCoury played the guitar behind a gathering of mandolinists that included Sam Bush, Bobby Osborne, Jesse McReynolds, Frank Wakefield, Buck White, Ricky Skaggs, Ronnie and Grisman.

On trips west in 1992 and 1999 the Del McCoury Band recorded jam sessions with Grisman at his studio, some as duets and some with the full band: Ronnie McCoury on mandolin, Rob McCoury on banjo, Jason Carter on fiddle and Mike Bub on bass. A few of these sides appeared on Grisman’s Life of Sorrow (Acoustic Disc, 2003), among them “Unwanted Love,” “Cabin of Love” and a duo “Tennessee Waltz,” and on Dawg Plays Big Mon (2012). In June 2012 Grisman released sixteen of them, eleven previously unissued, as Del and Dawg – Hardcore Bluegrass in the Dawg House, first as a download through Acoustic Oasis, the digital arm of Acoustic Disc, and later on CD. It opens with a duet, “John Henry,” and includes “Highway of Regret,” “The Hit Parade of Love,” “Country Boy Rock and Roll” and “20/20 Vision.”

One night from those years was taped as well. On 28 January 2000 the Del McCoury Band played a sold-out concert in Palo Alto, California, and near the end of the second show Del invited up Grisman and Peter Rowan, who had played together in Old & in the Way. They stayed for ten songs, and the performance, recorded with one microphone, was issued more than a quarter of a century later as A Bluegrass Summit on Acoustic Oasis.

In 2014 the two began playing as a duo, under the name Del & Dawg, in shows that mixed bluegrass standards with stories of the musicians they had worked with. Del & Dawg Live!, recorded on 20 November 2015 in Portland, Maine, and released by Acoustic Disc in 2016, holds twenty-three numbers on two discs: songs such as “Feast Here Tonight,” “Shackles & Chains,” “East Virginia Blues,” “Toy Heart” and “Man of Constant Sorrow,” their theme, “Del & Dawg,” a medley of “Salt Creek,” “Devil’s Dream” and “Shenandoah Breakdown” dedicated to their late friend Bill Keith, and a closing “Farewell Medley” that runs “Life’s Railway to Heaven” into “Shalom Aleichem.”

On 10 December 2016 they marked fifty years since that first gig by playing again on the Rensselaer campus, at its EMPAC arts center, where Jerry McCoury and Chris Warner joined them for a set. The duo kept touring: in March 2019 they played the Birchmere on the 15th and the Tarrytown Music Hall on the 23rd, Grisman’s 74th birthday, a few weeks after McCoury had turned eighty. In December 2019, at a Capitol Theatre concert in Port Chester, New York, celebrating McCoury’s eightieth year, the two opened the second set alone before the Del McCoury Band joined them on “My Long Journey Home.”