The Masters

Each of the four came with a long history. Adcock had played banjo in the Country Gentlemen from 1959; McReynolds had led Jim & Jesse with his brother since the 1940s; Baker had been Bill Monroe’s fiddler for most of the years from 1957 to 1984; and Graves had joined Flatt & Scruggs’s Foggy Mountain Boys on Dobro in 1955. Baker and Graves had been working as a fiddle-and-Dobro duo since 1984, and Eddie and Martha Adcock had their own band.

The group recorded its first album in 1988 at Hilltop Recording Studios in Nashville, with Mike Castleman on bass. CMH issued The Masters in 1989: a dozen instrumentals, among them “Josh-Away,” “Thomas Jefferson Breakdown,” “Whisky Chitto” and “Roadside Breakdown.” The IBMA named it Instrumental Recorded Performance of the Year at its 1990 awards. A second CMH album, Saturday Night Fish Fry, recorded at Hilltop in 1989 and released in 1990, added piano and drums, with Charlie Cushman and Missy Raines on bass. Raines also played bass on Laid Back (Pinecastle, 1997), recorded in 1996 at the Delivery Room in Pegram, Tennessee, on which each member brought something of his own: Adcock’s “Draggin’ the Cow,” Baker’s “Happy Time Waltz” and his arrangement of “St. Anne’s Reel,” McReynolds’s “Wayfarin’ Stranger” and Jim & Jesse’s “Stoney Creek,” Graves’s “Evelina” and “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” and Bill Monroe’s “Jerusalem Ridge” and “Roanoke,” along with “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

The Masters toured only occasionally, and the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame dates the group from 1989 to 1997. Graves died in 2006, Baker in 2011, McReynolds in 2023 and Eddie Adcock on 19 March 2025.