“Dawg’s Breath” is an instrumental written by Ricky Skaggs, the singer, mandolinist, and bandleader who has moved between bluegrass and country across a long career. It appears on his 2006 album “Instrumentals,” a record for which Skaggs wrote all the material and which won that year’s Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album.
The tune is a bluegrass instrumental built as a feature for the full band, with Skaggs on mandolin alongside banjo and fiddle. Its title appears to nod to the mandolinist David Grisman, long nicknamed “Dawg,” whose jazz-inflected acoustic style left a mark on a generation of players.
This recording features Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder, his longstanding band of bluegrass musicians, performing the tune on “Instrumentals.”
