Jerry Douglas, Russ Barenberg and Edgar Meyer

The three had been playing together for years before it. Barenberg, born in 1950, moved to Nashville in 1986 and worked often with Douglas and Meyer; he had played on Douglas’s own albums since Fluxedo in 1982, through Under the Wire (MCA, 1986) and Changing Channels (MCA, 1987) to Slide Rule (Sugar Hill, 1992). Meyer, born in 1960 and raised in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, had learned the double bass from his father and moved between classical music and the Nashville acoustic scene, and in 1989 he and Douglas had been two of the five members of Strength in Numbers, whose only album, The Telluride Sessions, came out on MCA.

The trio recorded the album between November 1992 and March 1993, with Bil Vorndick engineering and mixing, and the three produced and arranged it themselves; Barenberg wrote the liner notes. Douglas plays resonator guitar, Barenberg acoustic guitar and Meyer acoustic bass throughout, and Sam Bush joins on mandolin for “Big Sciota” and “Monkey Bay.” Meyer contributed “Why Don’t You Go Back to the Woods,” “The Years Between” and “Open the Present”; Barenberg “Big Bug Shuffle” and “Here on Earth”; Douglas “From Ankara to Izmar”; and Douglas and Barenberg together “The Hymn of Ordinary Motion,” while “The Travels of Mr. Hulot,” “Squeezy Pig” and “Monkey Bay” are credited to all three. The album was issued on CD and cassette (SH-C 3817).