Old and in the Gray

Old & In the Way had played for little more than a year, from 1973 into 1974, and every album issued under its name came from live tapes made in San Francisco in October 1973. By 2002 Garcia and Kahn had both died. Grisman produced the new record, with Craig Miller as co-producer and Larry Cummings as recording engineer, and it was the group’s first studio album. Rowan and Grisman played their usual instruments, Pedersen played banjo and some guitar, and the three of them shared the singing, with Clements adding a bass voice on Rowan’s “Rainmaker.”

The fourteen tracks lean on the bluegrass and country repertoire: Carter Stanley’s “The Flood,” A. P. Carter’s “When the Springtime Comes Again,” Don Reno and Jim Davis’s “Barefoot Nellie,” Ira Louvin’s “Childish Love,” John Duffey’s “Victim to the Tomb,” Charlie Waller and Duffey’s “Two Little Boys” and Bill Monroe’s “On the Old Kentucky Shore.” Alongside them are John Hartford’s “Good Old Boys,” Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho & Lefty,” the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women,” Rowan’s “Meadow Green” and “Rainmaker,” and Clements’s instrumental “Vassar’s Fiddle Rag.” The album reached No. 9 on Billboard’s bluegrass albums chart and No. 72 on its country albums chart. Clements died in August 2005, and no further record appeared under the name.