Dan Mitchell

After Hot Rize broke up in 1990, Sawtelle formed Charles Sawtelle and the Whippets with Mitchell on string bass and vocals, Fred Zipp on mandolin and Jim-Bob Runnels on banjo. Mitchell appears on “Gonna Paint the Town” on Sawtelle’s only solo album, Music From Rancho DeVille (Acoustic Disc, 2001), recorded largely at Sawtelle’s studio near Boulder and released after his death. He also played on, and mixed, the 1996 album Celebrating the Magic by the group In Cahoots.

With Open Road he played fiddle on eight of the thirteen tracks of the band’s Rounder album Cold Wind (2002), recorded in October 2001 at Velvet Studio in Boulder with Bradford Lee Folk, Caleb Roberts, Jim Runnels and Ben O’Connor; Stuart Duncan and Eddie Stubbs played fiddle on the rest. In 2003, after the death of the Dobro player Rick Bradstreet, he joined the Bluegrass Patriots on fiddle and guitar, the band’s only lineup change in its history to that point. He had been a picking partner of the Patriots for some 25 years, and he plays on their album E Pluribus Bluegrass (2008).