Larry Perkins

On 28 January 1992, at the 1103 Studio in Nashville, he recorded a set of old fiddle and banjo pieces, among them “Golden Slippers,” “Soldier’s Joy,” “Black Mountain Rag” and “John Henry,” with Leroy Troy on clawhammer banjo and Terry Eldredge on bass, Perkins playing three-finger guitar; the tracks came out in 2008 as Three Fingers and a Clawhammer.

A Touch of the Past was recorded in Nashville between November 1992 and May 1993 at Suite 2000 and Studio 19. Perkins plays banjo or lead guitar throughout, and the guests sing or play on a track or two each: Earl Scruggs plays banjo on “Foggy Mountain Top” with John Hartford on fiddle, Del and Ronnie McCoury sing “No One to Welcome Me Home,” Alison Krauss and Bobby Osborne sing “The Storms Are on the Ocean,” Mac Wiseman plays rhythm guitar on the instrumental “Louis Collins,” the Reno brothers sing one song, and Benny Martin, Josh Graves, Glen Duncan, David Grier and Gene Wooten are among the players. Glad Reunion Day (RME, 1998), made from sessions between 1991 and 1997, drew on a still wider circle, including Doc Watson, Jimmy Martin, Curly Seckler, Brother Oswald, Doug Dillard, Benny Martin and Hartford.

In the same years he played banjo on Lonesome Standard Time’s Mighty Lonesome (Sugar Hill, 1993), with Larry Cordle and Butch Baldassari, and with the Sidemen, the house band at the Station Inn, on Almost Live at the Station Inn (Red Clay, 1994), with Eldredge, Ronnie McCoury, the fiddler Jimmy Campbell, Wooten and Mike Bub. He played guitar on the fiddler Chubby Wise’s Pinecastle sessions at Studio 20 in Nashville in 1994 and was among the players on Kevin Williamson’s Write Between the Lines (Pinecastle, 1993). He also worked with John Hartford in his last years, playing banjo on Good Old Boys (Rounder), recorded in Nashville around the summer of 1999, and banjo, bass and fiddle on Hamilton Ironworks, recorded with John and Jamie Hartford in Durham, North Carolina, in August 2000.