Dave Calder

Calder came from the Waikato and was studying in Auckland to become a teacher. At Auckland University he and the guitarist Len Cohen founded FolkSoc, the university’s folk music society, and performed as a duo. In March 1966 he hitchhiked to Hamilton and met Paul Trenwith and Alan Rhodes, who had a record by the Dillards. Taken with Dean Webb’s mandolin playing, Calder was soon playing the instrument with them, and the three appeared as the Muleskinners at the 1966 Massey University Arts Festival. By September the band had a full lineup, with Colleen Bain on fiddle, Trenwith on banjo, Calder on mandolin, Rhodes and Cohen on guitars and Sandy McMillin on bass. Calder’s early years in church choirs helped him arrange the band’s harmonies.

The band recorded its first LP in Auckland in January 1967 and backed the host Tex Morton and a run of New Zealand singers on The Country Touch. It turned professional at the start of 1969, when Calder had finished a master’s degree in French. That year he and his wife, Andrea “Panda” Calder, also released an LP of their own on Kiwi, Come In Stranger, as David and Panda. In 1970 Kiwi paired the band with the visiting American singer Bill Clifton for the album Two Shades of Bluegrass, recorded at Mascot Studios with Calder on mandolin.

When the band decided to move to Australia at Tex Morton’s urging, Calder chose to stay behind, preferring to concentrate on folk music and to travel in Europe, and Graham Lovejoy took over the mandolin in late 1970. The band reunited in the early 1990s, with Calder playing again alongside Trenwith, Rhodes and Bain, and he stayed until 2012, when the Hamilton luthier Keith MacMillan replaced him.