“Waiting on Vassar” is a David Grisman composition whose title names the fiddler Vassar Clements, who plays on it. Grisman and Clements had both been members of Old & In the Way, the bluegrass band that also included Jerry Garcia, Peter Rowan and John Kahn. The tune was recorded on 9 January 1976 for The David Grisman Rounder Album (Rounder 0069), where it is the third track and runs just over six minutes. The players were Grisman on mandolin, Tony Rice on guitar, Clements on fiddle, Bill Keith on banjo, Jerry Douglas on dobro and Todd Phillips on bass.
Grisman’s quintet took it up soon afterwards. On 5 and 6 March 1979 the group played it at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, with Rice on guitar, Darol Anger and Mike Marshall on fiddle and mandolin and Phillips on bass; the March 5 performance came out on Live at the Great American Music Hall, 03/05/79 in 2008 and again in a 1979 set in 2018. A performance by Grisman, Rice, Anger, Phillips and Marshall (on fiddle and mandolin) was chosen for DGQ-20, the 1996 retrospective of previously unreleased quintet recordings. The first volume of the Dawg Works series, issued in 2022 as a collection of Grisman’s compositions in the order he wrote them (covering 1963 to 1975), also includes the tune, in a previously unreleased performance with Todd Phillips on a second mandolin, Bill Keith, Tony Rice, Richard Greene and Darol Anger and Joe Carroll on bass.
The fiddler Mike Barnett recorded it on his 2017 album Portraits in Fiddles with Grisman on mandolin.
