Alan Munde

He was born in Norman on 4 November 1946. His first instrument was a guitar his older brother brought home from the Navy, with a 78 rpm instruction record, and around sixteen he bought a banjo, a Pete Seeger-model Vega, and frailed it for a year until a birthday present, Flatt and Scruggs’s Foggy Mountain Banjo, turned him to three-finger picking. He took two lessons from Gary Price and was teaching banjo himself at a Norman music store by about eighteen. At the University of Oklahoma, where he took a degree in education in 1969, he met the fiddler Byron Berline; the two played as the Bluegrass Gentlemen, and Munde backed Berline’s father, Lou, at fiddle contests across Oklahoma and Texas, learning the Texas style of contest backup. The banjo player Ed Shelton, who played with Berline on Oklahoma City television, became his mentor, and through Shelton he joined three Dallas players, Lonnie Kraft, Mitchell Lande and H. E. Williams, as the Stone Mountain Boys, playing banjo with them for the rest of his college years.

In 1969 he moved to Hopkinsville, Kentucky, to form a trio, Poor Richard’s Almanac, with the guitarist Wayne Stewart and the teenage Sam Bush; before Munde left for his draft examination the three recorded a tape of instrumentals, later issued by Ridge Runner as Poor Richard’s Almanac. The Army turned him down, and in October 1969 he went to Nashville, where Doyle Lawson, then Jimmy Martin’s mandolinist, persuaded Martin to hire him. Martin wanted a banjo player in J. D. Crowe’s style, and Munde played it. In two years with the Sunny Mountain Boys he recorded thirteen tracks with Martin at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet, produced by Owen Bradley: a session on 3 March 1970, the gospel album Singing All Day and Dinner on the Ground on 5 May 1970, and “I’d Like to Be Sixteen Again” on 3 March 1971.

He left Martin in October 1971, meaning to move west. Berline and the bassist Roger Bush had started Country Gazette in Los Angeles, and Berline invited him first to tour Europe with the Flying Burrito Brothers, playing electric guitar as well as banjo; the first show was in Breda, the Netherlands, on 1 January 1972. With the guitarist and singer Kenny Wertz the four then set up Country Gazette properly, spent the summer of 1972 playing at Disneyland, and that September recorded A Traitor in Our Midst for United Artists, whose “Keep On Pushin’” and “Hot Burrito Breakdown” made the charts in the Netherlands and Britain. Don’t Give Up Your Day Job followed in 1973. That May he played banjo with Clarence, Roland and Eric White as the New Kentucky Colonels for two nights at the Mosebacke club in Stockholm, recordings that Rounder issued in part in 1976 and Roland White later released complete as Live in Sweden 1973.

Through the changes that followed, with Roland White joining in 1973 and Berline leaving in 1975, Munde stayed. The band recorded for Transatlantic, Ridge Runner and Flying Fish, by 1977 with Munde and White as its core, and with partners including Joe Carr, Gene Wooten and David Grier, until its last album, Keep On Pushing (Flying Fish, 1991), credited to Alan Munde and Country Gazette. Living in southern California in the mid-1970s, he also played on film soundtracks such as Disney’s The Nashville Coyote.

His own albums began with Alan Munde’s Banjo Sandwich (Ridge Runner, 1975), recorded in Fort Worth with Roland White, Roger Bush, Dave Ferguson and Doc Hamilton. Together Again for the First Time (1977) reunited him with Sam Bush, and a run of Festival Favorites albums of fiddle tunes and banjo standards followed in the 1980s, with Festival Favorites Revisited in 1993. He recorded duets with Joe Carr (Windy Days and Dusty Skies, 1995) and two albums with the mandolinist Billy Bright, Bright Munde (2017) and Es Mi Suerte (2019), and his album of original instrumentals Excelsior (Patuxent, 2023) includes “Lloyd’s of Lubbock,” nominated for the IBMA’s Instrumental Recording of the Year in 2024.

He was one of the first well-known bluegrass banjo players to publish his recorded solos in tablature and to teach workshops, and much of his teaching has appeared through Mel Bay and Texas Music and Video. In 1986 he joined the creative arts department of South Plains College in Levelland, Texas, as the bluegrass specialist in its commercial music program, where he wrote Getting into Bluegrass Banjo; he retired from the college in 2007. With Beth Mead-Sullivan he arranged seventy songs for The Great American Banjo Songbook (Hal Leonard).

• 2001: IBMA Instrumental Recorded Performance of the Year, as one of the players on Knee-Deep in Bluegrass: The AcuTab Sessions
• 2008: IBMA Distinguished Achievement Award, shared with Joe Carr
• 2021: Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass (shared with Don Vappie)
• 2022: American Banjo Museum Hall of Fame
• 2024: Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame