“Dawgmatism” is a David Grisman composition and shares a root with “Dawgma,” another of his pieces. Both were recorded for David Grisman Quintet ’80 (Warner Bros. BSK 3469, 1980) at 1750 Arch Studio in Berkeley, California: “Dawgma” opens the album and “Dawgmatism” is the second track on side two, at 5:04. The two pieces are very similar, and Grisman’s own Dawg Works series, which collects his compositions in the order he wrote them, lists one performance of the pair as “Dawgmatisma (Dawgmatism/Dawgma).”
On the 1980 track Grisman plays mandolin, with Darol Anger on fiddle, Mike Marshall on mandolin, Mark O’Connor on guitar and Rob Wasserman on bass.
The tune stayed in his repertoire. In 1992 he recorded it again for Dawgwood (Acoustic Disc ACD 7), with Rick Montgomery on guitar, Joe Craven on fiddle and percussion, Matt Eakle on flute and Jim Kerwin on bass; that track runs 6:39. Grisman and the guitarist Martin Taylor played it at Wigmore Hall on 21 April 1996, a performance released in 2011, and Taylor is the guitarist on the “Dawgmatisma” performance included in the second volume of Dawg Works (1976–1981, issued 2022). The tune is also one of the twenty pieces in Dawg Latin, the fourth volume of his Book of the Dawg series, whose audio companion came out in 2021.
