Dick Staber
Dick Staber is a mandolin player who spent the first half of the 1970s with Del McCoury and the Dixie Pals and then played with Don Stover and with Bob Paisley and the Southern Grass. He made three albums of his own, ran a music hall in New York in the 1980s, and since the 1990s has performed bluegrass and old-time music in a duo with his wife, the singer Judith Chasnoff.
He joined the Dixie Pals at the end of the 1960s and stayed until 1975. He is on the band’s session at Glaser Sound Studio in Nashville on 9 August 1971, with McCoury on guitar, John Farmer on banjo, Buddy Spicher and Jimmy Buchanan on fiddles and Dewey Renfro on bass, which produced “Rain and Snow,” “Don’t Let Your Sweet Love Die” and Bill Monroe’s “Bluest Man in Town”; the sides were issued by Grassound as Collector’s Special in 1976 and by Rebel as Livin’ on the Mountain in 1992. In August 1972 he played on High on a Mountain, released by Rounder in 1973, with Bill Runkle on banjo, Billy Sage on fiddle and Jerry McCoury on bass, and in 1974 he and Donnie Eldreth shared the mandolin parts on the Revonah album Del McCoury & the Dixie Pals, which includes “Cabin on a Mountain” and “If You’ve Got the Money, Honey.” In the same period he played mandolin with the fiddler Tracy Schwarz in the Old Home String Band, on its four-song Rounder 45 (1975), which opens with his own “If It’s Got Soul.”
He played with Don Stover in 1977 and 1978 and then joined Bob Paisley and the Southern Grass. On the band’s first Rounder album, issued in 1981, he played mandolin and sang baritone behind Bob and Danny Paisley, with Randy Stewart on banjo, Jerry Lundy and Leroy Mumma on fiddles and Earl Yager on bass, on songs such as “Leaving Detroit” and “Eat at the Welcome Table.” He was still with the band on 31 March 1982, when it recorded Pickin’ in Holland at Harpel in the Netherlands for Strictly Country, with Paul Silvius on banjo, Mumma on fiddle and Mike Paisley on bass, and he is on the same label’s Live in Holland, issued in 1991. He also worked with Leon Morris and Bill Clifton, among others, and made three albums of his own, among them Pickin’ Around the Cookstove for Rounder.
In the 1980s he left touring to run a music hall in New York. He came back to performing in the 1990s after meeting Judith Chasnoff at a jam session in July 1993; they married soon after and have toured as Staber & Chasnoff, playing original and traditional bluegrass and old-time songs with brother-duet style harmonies. Based in upstate New York and later in Montreal, they have played the Fountain General Store in North Carolina each January on their way south for the winter. In 2025 Staber published a memoir of his life in bluegrass, and that April he was interviewed about it on the Bluegrass Unlimited podcast.
