“Sugar Hill Ramble” is one of David Grisman’s early mandolin tunes. Its earliest known recording dates from 1966, when Grisman, born in 1945, was in his early twenties. It has Grisman on mandolin with Bill Keith on banjo and Artie Rose on guitar. Grisman’s label, Acoustic Disc, reissued the 1966 material in 2022 as Early Dawg: Deluxe Edition, and that edition groups the tune with “Opus 57,” “Opus 38,” “Little Sadie” and “Caravan” as recordings made at Grisman’s apartment in New York that year. A concert taped at RPI in Troy, New York, is listed separately.
The tape stayed unissued for fourteen years. Sugar Hill Records released it in December 1980 as the second track of Early Dawg (SH-3713), an LP of Grisman’s 1966 recordings plus a 1973 “Black Mountain Rag” with Frank Wakefield on second mandolin. The album credits Del McCoury (guitar and vocals) and Jerry McCoury (bass) as its supporting musicians, with Keith and Rose added on some tracks. Beside Grisman’s own “Fanny Hill,” “Opus 57” and “Opus 38,” the program has three Bill Monroe instrumentals (“Blue Grass Twist,” “Shenandoah Breakdown” and “Rawhide”), Flatt and Scruggs’s “Dear Old Dixie,” and Duke Ellington’s “Caravan.” The tune’s title is older than the label that issued it, which was founded in Durham, North Carolina, in 1978.
The tune also appears on later Grisman collections, among them The Book of the Dawg: Dawg Grass (2021) and Dawg Works Vol. 1: 1963–1975 (2022). Frank Solivan II recorded the tune for his 2002 album I Am a Rambler.
