Barry Mitterhoff

Born in Newark in 1952 and raised in Irvington and Springfield, he was handed his first mandolin by his aunt Sylvia Reuben, who played in the Workman’s Circle Orchestra, a 15-piece mandolin group in Newark. A guitar teacher, Bob Appelbaum, played him his first bluegrass mandolin records, and with his high-school friend Danny Weiss he played folk, blues, jug band music and bluegrass. At Rutgers he joined his first full bluegrass band and studied jazz with the guitarist Ted Dunbar.

From 1971 to 1977 he played mandolin with Bottle Hill, first called the Bottle Hill Boys, which recorded two albums for Biograph and toured the Northeast; the first night he played a full evening of bluegrass was with Bottle Hill and the fiddler Tex Logan. In the late 1970s he also worked in the band Logan put together with Peter Rowan, the Green Grass Gringos. In 1977 he joined Weiss, the bassist Larry Cohen and the banjo player Tony Trischka in Skyline, which toured the United States and Europe for about twelve years and made four albums for Flying Fish, among them Stranded in the Moonlight (1984). While with the band he recorded his own mandolin album, Silk City, begun in February 1988 and released that September, with Trischka, Stuart Duncan, Kenny Kosek and Matt Glaser among the players. When Skyline stopped in 1989, he, Weiss and Cohen went on as Silk City with the violinist Marty Laster.

In the 1990s he toured the United States and Europe with Lynn Morris and worked with Chris Jones, and he played with Hazel Dickens on and off for more than 25 years, including on her albums Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People and Heart of a Singer. In New York he took film, theater and jingle work, playing on the soundtracks of You’ve Got Mail and Mickey Blue Eyes and recording for O Brother, Where Art Thou?, though that work was not used. He spent six years with the West End Klezmorium, played with Margot Leverett and the Klezmer Mountain Boys and the New York Mandolin Symphonette, and recorded Mandolin X 4 with Todd Collins in the late 1990s.

In June 2002, through the Dobro player Sally Van Meter, he began playing in Jorma Kaukonen’s band, working up the country blues of Kaukonen’s Blue Country Heart along with Hot Tuna and Jefferson Airplane songs, and he went on to tour with Kaukonen and Hot Tuna for years. In April 2016 the New Jersey Folk Festival at Rutgers gave him a lifetime achievement award for nearly fifty years of playing and teaching bluegrass in the state, and he played a reunion set there with Trischka, Weiss and Cohen. He has taught mandolin throughout his career, and as of 2025 was still teaching from his home in Scotch Plains.