The Bluegrass Album Band

Rice put the musicians together to fulfill a record deal with Rounder, with no plan to tour or even to make a second album. The idea was to bring the classic repertoire of twenty-five to thirty years earlier, much of it then out of print, to a newer generation of listeners. The Bluegrass Album was recorded on 22–24 September 1980 at 1750 Arch Studios in Berkeley, California, with Rice producing, and issued by Rounder in 1981. Rice sang lead, Crowe baritone, Lawson tenor and fiddler Bobby Hicks bass, with Todd Phillips playing bass fiddle, on songs that included “Molly and Tenbrooks,” “Toy Heart” and “We Can’t Be Darlings Anymore.”

The same five returned to 1750 Arch in October 1981 for Vol. 2 (1982), on which Jerry Douglas’s Dobro was added to two songs, “We May Meet Again Someday” and “Take Me in the Lifeboat.” Douglas then played on every track of Vol. 3: California Connection, recorded there in January 1983, with songs such as “Devil in Disguise,” “Please Search Your Heart” and “Big Spike Hammer.” The band’s name came only with its one tour, that same year: the promoter, Milton Harkey, took it from the album title for his flyers, and it stuck.

Vol. 4, recorded at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, followed in 1985, again with Douglas, and included “Cheyenne” and “Cora Is Gone.” For Vol. 5: Sweet Sunny South (1989) the band moved east to Bias Recorders in Falls Church, Virginia, with Vassar Clements on fiddle and Mark Schatz on bass and Lawson taking some of the leads. At the first IBMA awards show, held in Owensboro, Kentucky, on 27 September 1990, the band performed and was named Instrumental Group of the Year. Its last album, the all-instrumental Vol. 6 (Rounder, 1996), again produced by Rice, had Hicks and Clements both on fiddle and Phillips back on bass, and in 1997 the IBMA named it Instrumental Recorded Performance of the Year.

On 16 February 2013, thirty years after the 1983 tour, the original five reunited at the Bluegrass First Class festival in Asheville, North Carolina, with Josh Williams singing Rice’s leads; it was their first set together in twenty-three years. The show was billed as the start of a run of dates through 2013, and a further set, with Rickey Wasson singing lead, was announced for May at a festival in Sevierville, Tennessee. Between 2003 and 2024 six of the band’s musicians were inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame.

• 2003: J. D. Crowe
• 2012: Doyle Lawson
• 2013: Tony Rice
• 2017: Bobby Hicks
• 2018: Vassar Clements
• 2024: Jerry Douglas