Old and in the Way

The band was together from January 1973 to April 1974. Garcia played banjo and sang, Grisman played mandolin and sang, Rowan played guitar and sang, and Kahn played bass. The fiddle chair took longer to settle. Richard Greene joined in April 1973 but left after a couple of months, and John Hartford took his place before Vassar Clements took it over.

Most of the group’s live work fell in 1973, when it played about fifty shows; it reconvened once more in 1974, for a bluegrass festival. Forty-seven of its performances are documented. On 8 October 1973 Owsley Stanley and Vickie Babcock recorded the band at the Boarding House in San Francisco, and from those tapes Grisman produced the album Old & In the Way, which Round Records released in 1975, after the group had broken up.

The record mixed older songs with the band members’ own. Alongside the traditional “Pig in a Pen” and Carter Stanley’s “White Dove” were three songs by Rowan, “Midnight Moonlight,” “Panama Red” and “Land of the Navajo”; Grisman’s “Old and In the Way”; Clements’s “Kissimmee Kid”; and the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses.” For many years it was the best-selling bluegrass album, until the soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou? passed it.

Until 2023 every official release by the band came from live recordings made in San Francisco in October 1973. That High Lonesome Sound appeared on Acoustic Disc in 1996 and Breakdown in 1997, followed by Live at the Boarding House (Acoustic Oasis, 2008) and Live at the Boarding House: The Complete Shows (2013). Live at Sonoma State – 11/4/73 (2023) comes from a show the following month at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California.

By 2002 Garcia and Kahn had both died. That year the surviving members, Rowan, Grisman and Clements, made a studio album, Old & In the Gray, with Herb Pedersen on banjo, guitar and vocals in Garcia’s place and Bryn Bright on bass in place of Kahn.