J.D. Crowe and the New South

Crowe was born in Lexington in 1937, and he was twelve when he heard Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs & the Foggy Mountain Boys at WVLK’s Kentucky Mountain Barn Dance in September 1949. He played banjo with Jimmy Martin’s Sunny Mountain Boys in the summer of 1954, went back to school that fall, and rejoined Martin full time from 1956 to 1961, a period when the band was working the Louisiana Hayride and the Wheeling Jamboree and recording for Decca.

In 1961 he returned to Lexington, took a day job and played weekends in local taverns with a band called the Kentucky Mountain Boys, which soon included Doyle Lawson on guitar and mandolin and Bobby Slone on bass and fiddle. In 1968 the band was asked to play five nights a week at the Red Slipper Lounge in Lexington’s Holiday Inn North, one of the first times a bluegrass group had worked an upscale room for a largely college-educated crowd. Crowe brought in Red Allen on guitar and lead vocals, and that lineup recorded Bluegrass Holiday for Lemco before Allen left in 1969. Larry Rice then came from California to play mandolin and sing lead, Lawson moved to guitar, and two more Lemco albums followed as the band headlined the early summer festivals and worked clubs in Lexington, Louisville and southern Indiana.

When Lawson left for the Country Gentlemen in late summer 1971, Larry’s brother Tony Rice took the guitar chair, and the band became the New South. It went to Starday Sound Studio in Nashville on 2 April 1973 to record Bluegrass Evolution, with piano, steel guitar and drums added to the band, though Starday did not issue it until 1977. Late in 1974 Larry Rice left and Ricky Skaggs came over from the Country Gentlemen, adding a strong tenor voice. At the same time the band dropped its electric instruments, and it settled into five nights a week at the Lexington Sheraton Inn.

In January 1975 that group recorded J.D. Crowe & the New South (Rounder 0044) at Track Recorders in Silver Spring, Maryland, with Crowe on banjo, Tony Rice on guitar and lead vocals, Skaggs on mandolin, fiddle and tenor, Slone on bass, and Jerry Douglas guesting on Dobro. The songs ran from “Old Home Place” and “Sally Goodin” to newer material by Gordon Lightfoot, Ian Tyson, Utah Phillips and Rodney Crowell. Douglas joined for that summer’s festivals and an August 1975 tour of Japan, where Trio issued New South Live. The lineup came apart at the end of the tour: Tony Rice went to California to join David Grisman, and Skaggs and Douglas left to form Boone Creek.

Crowe rebuilt the band with players including Jimmy Gaudreau, Harley Allen, Glenn Lawson, Paul Adkins, Wendy Miller and Tony King, while Slone stayed on into the mid-1980s. You Can Share My Blanket (Rounder 0096, 1977), with Glenn Lawson singing lead, added steel guitar, piano, electric bass and drums. Keith Whitley, who had left Ralph Stanley in 1977, joined in 1978 and sang lead on My Home Ain’t in the Hall of Fame (Rounder 0103, 1979), recorded in Madisonville, Kentucky, with Gaudreau on mandolin, Slone on fiddle and Steve Bryant on electric bass, and on Somewhere Between (Rounder 0153, 1982), made in Nashville with Wendy Miller on mandolin and the Jordanaires singing harmony. Whitley went on to a solo country career. “Fireball,” credited to the New South, won the Grammy for Best Country Instrumental Performance at the 26th Annual Grammy Awards in 1984.

Alongside the New South, Crowe made six albums with the Bluegrass Album Band, a studio group formed to bring the classic repertoire back into circulation, with Tony Rice, Doyle Lawson, Bobby Hicks and Todd Phillips and later Jerry Douglas, Vassar Clements and Mark Schatz.

After a break from touring, Crowe came back in 1993 with Richard Bennett, Don Rigsby, Curt Chapman and Phil Leadbetter (who had joined in 1990), the band heard on Flashback (Rounder 0322, 1994). Come On Down to My World (1999) brought in Dwight McCall, Greg Luck and Rickey Wasson, and Lefty’s Old Guitar (Rounder, 2006), which added Ron Stewart and Harold Nixon, tied with the Infamous Stringdusters’ Fork in the Road for Album of the Year at the 2007 International Bluegrass Music Awards. Crowe had been inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2003, and he died on 24 December 2021, aged 84. The 1975 Rounder album entered the National Recording Registry in 2024 and the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2025.