Alan Rhodes
Alan Rhodes is a New Zealand singer and guitarist who founded the Hamilton County Bluegrass Band in Hamilton with the banjo player Paul Trenwith. He recorded with the band from its first sessions in 1966, including the album Two Shades of Bluegrass it made with Bill Clifton in 1970, and was still singing and playing guitar with it in 2016.
The band started performing in 1966. Its first recordings, made that year, probably in Auckland, had Rhodes singing and playing guitar, banjo and autoharp alongside Trenwith, Sandy McMillin, Len Cohen and Dave Calder. In the late 1960s it recorded for the Kiwi label, including Live at the Poles Apart (1968), taped at the Poles Apart Folk Club in Auckland, The Country Touch (1968) and Yesterday’s Gone (1969), and it moved to His Master’s Voice for Fifth Season (1970).
Bill Clifton recorded with the band live at the National Banjo Pickers Convention in Hamilton on 29 March 1970 and at Mascot Studio in Auckland on 31 March and 1 April, with Rhodes singing and playing guitar, Trenwith on banjo, Calder on mandolin, Colleen Trenwith on fiddle and Lyndsay Bedogni on bass. The studio sessions became Two Shades of Bluegrass on Kiwi.
Rhodes stayed with the band through the early 1970s, when Graham Lovejoy played mandolin and Miles Reay bass. That lineup recorded at EMI Studios in Sydney in 1971 and made Country Road (Kiwi, 1974), with Rhodes singing and playing guitar and banjo. In 2016 he sang and played guitar on new recordings at the Depot Sound in Auckland, with Pam Findlay, Paul Trenwith, Keith MacMillan and Tim Trenwith.
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Bill Clifton and the Hamilton County Bluegrass BandPlayed on recording with Bill Clifton and the Hamilton County Bluegrass Band
