Mike Compton and David Grier

Compton, a Monroe-style mandolinist from Meridian, Mississippi, had been a founding member of the Nashville Bluegrass Band and had left it at the end of the 1980s. Grier, born in Washington, D.C., in 1961, who had settled in Nashville in 1985, was the son of the banjo player Lamar Grier, a former Blue Grass Boy; he had played with Full Time, Country Gazette and Doug Dillard and had made his first solo album, Freewheeling, for Rounder in 1988. When Compton came back to Nashville, the two began playing together.

They produced Climbing the Walls themselves, with Bil Vorndick engineering and Tony Trischka writing the liner notes. Its twelve instrumentals mixed four of their own pieces with older ones: the title track, “Honky Tonk Swing,” “Waters Street Waltz,” “Huffy,” “Going Up Caney,” “Over the Waterfall,” “Flop Eared Mule,” “Paul’s Blues” and others. “Black Mountain Rag” and “The New Five Cents” were played by the two alone, with unison crosspicking on the latter; on most of the other tracks they were joined by Blaine Sprouse on fiddle and by Roy Huskey Jr. or Billy Rose on bass, and a clarinet and a hammered dulcimer each appear on one track. Grier was named the IBMA’s Guitar Player of the Year in 1992, 1993 and 1995.

The partnership continued alongside other work. While Compton was John Hartford’s mandolinist from 1994, he still often played with Grier, and he was on a three-week trip to the West Coast with him in December 1999 when Alan O’Bryant called to offer him his old place in the Nashville Bluegrass Band. In 2015 the two were half of the string band Helen Highwater, with Shad Cobb on fiddle and Missy Raines on bass, which released a self-titled EP.