The Black Mountain Boys

Garcia and Hunter had played together since 1961, and with Nelson they had been in the Hart Valley Drifters in November 1962. In its first lineup, heard on tapes from the fall of 1963 and from 10 January 1964, the Black Mountain Boys had Garcia on banjo and guitar, Nelson on mandolin, Thompson on guitar and Hunter on bass, all four singing. Their material came from the first-generation bands: Don Reno’s “Barefoot Nellie,” Carter Stanley’s “She’s More to Be Pitied,” Charlie Monroe’s “Rosa Lee McFall” and the Bill Keith and Bill Monroe instrumental “Salt Creek,” on which Garcia’s banjo already follows Keith’s style.

By 6 March 1964 Rothman had taken the guitar and Levin the bass. The tape from that date runs to seventeen performances: fiddle tunes such as “Paddy on the Turnpike,” “Black Mountain Rag” and a “Devil’s Dream” and “Sailor’s Hornpipe” medley; the Louvin Brothers’ “Love and Wealth”; Jim and Jesse’s “Stony Creek”; Ralph Stanley’s “If I Lose”; and Bill Monroe’s “Raw Hide” and “True Life Blues.” A last recording, from the spring, has the band down to Garcia, Nelson and Rothman.

That spring Garcia and Rothman drove east with a reel-to-reel tape recorder to hear the bands they had learned from, going as far as Bill Monroe’s park at Bean Blossom, Indiana. They saw Monroe several times, and at Sunset Park in Pennsylvania they met the mandolin player David Grisman. Back in California, Rothman went on the road with Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, while Garcia moved on to Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions and then to the Grateful Dead, for whom Hunter became the lyricist. Nelson was a founder of the New Riders of the Purple Sage, and in 1987 he and Rothman joined Garcia again in the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band.