Hot Rize

The band began with two solo records. In 1977 Wernick and O’Brien helped each other make solo albums and decided to put a band together to play that music, drawing on friends from the Denver Folklore Center, where both of them taught lessons, Forster worked in the instrument repair shop and Sawtelle ran the guitar shop. The first shows were in Boulder in January 1978, with Sawtelle on bass and Mike Scap on guitar. Scap soon left, Sawtelle moved over to guitar, and on 1 May 1978 Forster completed the band on electric bass, harmony vocals and emcee duties. They took the name Hot Rize from the leavening ingredient in Martha White flour, the long-time sponsor of Flatt and Scruggs, and the Martha White theme became a regular part of their shows.

Their first album, Hot Rize, was recorded at Colorado Sound in Denver in January 1979 and issued by Flying Fish that year, with “Nellie Kane” among its songs. Radio Boogie followed on the same label in 1981, and by 1982 the band had toured Europe twice and played the Grand Ole Opry. Their shows also made room for Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers, introduced as a band of “older fellas” traveling with Hot Rize and playing the country music of the 1940s and 1950s; in fact they were the same four musicians in costume. Red Knuckles turns up on the live In Concert (Flying Fish, 1984) and went on to make albums of its own, among them Shades of the Past (1988).

The move to Sugar Hill brought Traditional Ties (1985), Untold Stories (1987) and Take It Home (1990). Much of what the band played was original material by O’Brien, Wernick and Forster, and songs such as “Hard Pressed” and “Walk the Way the Wind Blows” were taken up at jam sessions far and wide. Through the 1980s Hot Rize made regular visits to A Prairie Home Companion, appeared on Austin City Limits in 1987, and toured as far afield as Japan and Australia.

O’Brien signed with RCA for a country career, and in 1990 the band stopped working full time, leaving with a farewell tour and Take It Home, which was nominated for the Best Bluegrass Album Grammy. Its “Colleen Malone,” written by Pete Goble and Leroy Drumm, was IBMA’s Song of the Year in 1991. Reunion dates carried on through the 1990s, and a concert at the Boulder Theater in March 1996 became the live album So Long of a Journey. The original four played their last show together at Targhee, Wyoming, in August 1998, and Sawtelle died on 20 March 1999.

The long-delayed release of the live album gave the band a reason to start again, and its first choice for the guitar chair was Bryan Sutton. The new lineup first played in Oregon in June 2002. In June 2013 the four went into the studio at eTown Hall in Boulder and recorded in a small circle, with no headphones; the result, When I’m Free, was their first studio album in twenty-four years and their first with Sutton. Issued on Ten in Hand in 2014, it entered Billboard’s Bluegrass Albums chart at number one.

Hot Rize marked its fortieth anniversary with three nights at the Boulder Theater in January 2018, with Jerry Douglas, Stuart Duncan and Sam Bush as guests, released as 40th Anniversary Bash. In 2022, while the band was headlining the fiftieth RockyGrass festival, its induction into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame was announced from the stage, and IBMA’s Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame followed in 2025.