“Dawg’s Rag” is a David Grisman tune whose title uses the nickname Jerry Garcia gave him. It was in circulation before Grisman’s quintet existed: Garcia played it a handful of times in 1974 with the Great American String Band. Grisman’s Dawg Works series gathers recordings of his compositions in the order he wrote them, and it places the tune in the first volume, covering 1963 to 1975.
The David Grisman Quintet’s first recordings were made in Grisman’s living room on 15 October 1975. Grisman and Todd Phillips played mandolins, Tony Rice guitar, Darol Anger violin and Joe Carroll bass, and they played “Dawg’s Rag” twice. Both takes appeared in 2021 on Acoustic Disc’s First Recordings: Live in Dawg’s Living Room.
The studio version was cut in October 1976 at 1750 Arch Studio in Berkeley, California, with Bill Amatneek now on bass. It closes The David Grisman Quintet (Kaleidoscope F-5, 1977), and at 9:04 it is the longest track on the album. The tune stayed with the band. A performance at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on 5 March 1979, with Mike Marshall on mandolin and Phillips on bass, was later issued by Acoustic Disc. On 23 February 2001, Grisman, Rice, Anger, Phillips and Marshall reunited at the Wintergrass festival in Tacoma, Washington, for the quintet’s 25th anniversary. They played the whole first album, “Dawg’s Rag” included, and the concert was released in 2011. Grisman and Rice also recorded it as a duo on Dawg and ‘T’: Live at Acoustic Stage, issued in 2017.
