David Grisman

He was born on 23 March 1945 in Hackensack, New Jersey, and grew up in Passaic. His father, a store owner, had been a professional trombonist, his mother played piano, and the piano was his own first instrument, at seven. In high school he helped bring the folklorist and mandolinist Ralph Rinzler, who lived four blocks away, to give a demonstration. Rinzler played him tapes of Bill Monroe and Doc Watson, and in 1961 took him to see Monroe and Frank Wakefield at New River Ranch in Maryland. What first hooked him on bluegrass, though, was a record: Earl Taylor’s fast “White House Blues.” At about sixteen he was invited on stage by Doc Watson at Gerde’s Folk City.

He studied at New York University from 1962 to 1966, and those years produced his first records. He played with the Even Dozen Jug Band, alongside John Sebastian and Maria Muldaur, on its 1963 Elektra album, and at eighteen co-produced a Folkways LP by Red Allen and Frank Wakefield. His own New York Ramblers won the band contest at the 1964 Union Grove fiddlers’ convention. By March 1966 he had joined Red Allen’s Kentuckians, his first job with a working bluegrass band, but the next year he turned to folk-rock, forming Earth Opera with Peter Rowan. He played electric mandolin and mandocello in the group, which made two albums for Elektra before it broke up in 1969, and he then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area.

There he played mandolin on “Friend of the Devil” and “Ripple” on the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty (1970), and by 1979 he had also recorded with Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt, Dolly Parton and Judy Collins. In 1973 he was in two bluegrass bands at once: Muleskinner, with Rowan, Richard Greene, Bill Keith and Clarence White, and Old & in the Way, with Garcia on banjo, Rowan on guitar, Vassar Clements on fiddle and John Kahn on bass. Grisman wrote the title song of that band’s 1975 live album, recorded at the Boarding House in San Francisco, and it was Garcia who named him “Dawg.”

Working with Greene in the Great American Music Band in 1974, he found he could build a whole show on instrumentals. In 1975 he met Tony Rice, who moved to California to join him, and the David Grisman Quintet first played in 1976. Its debut album (Kaleidoscope, 1977) had Rice on guitar, Darol Anger on fiddle, Todd Phillips on second mandolin and Bill Amatneek on bass. All of the Quintet’s music was instrumental and mostly his own. Hot Dawg (A&M Horizon, 1979) brought in Stéphane Grappelli and Mike Marshall, Warner Bros. issued Mondo Mando (1981) and Dawg Jazz/Dawg Grass (1983), and later members included Mark O’Connor and, from 1989, Joe Craven.

Traditional bluegrass kept drawing him back. The David Grisman Rounder Album (1976) had Rice, Clements, Keith, Jerry Douglas and Ricky Skaggs; Here Today was made with Herb Pedersen and Vince Gill; and Home Is Where the Heart Is (Rounder, 1988) was a double album with Del McCoury, J.D. Crowe, Doc Watson and Red Allen, among others.

In 1989 he formed Acoustic Disc with his manager, Craig Miller, and his friends Artie and Harriet Rose. The label began issuing records in 1990, every one produced or co-produced by Grisman. Five of them are with Garcia, among them Jerry Garcia & David Grisman (1991), Not for Kids Only and Shady Grove (1996), and Rice joined the two of them on The Pizza Tapes (2000). His Tone Poems albums, on which each track is played on a different vintage instrument, paired him with Rice (1994) and Martin Taylor (1995), and the label’s Bluegrass Mandolin Extravaganza, with Sam Bush, Bobby Osborne, Jesse McReynolds, Frank Wakefield and others, won two IBMA awards in 2000. His “Dawggy Mountain Breakdown” became the theme of NPR’s Car Talk, and his friendship with Garcia is the subject of Grateful Dawg (2001), a documentary directed by his daughter Gillian.

By 2005 he was leading the David Grisman Bluegrass Experience, which recorded DGBX in 2006 with Keith Little, Chad Manning, Jim Nunally and his son Sam Grisman on bass, and in 2015 he formed the Dawg Trio with Danny Barnes and Sam. In 2020 he and his wife, the artist Tracy Grisman, took over the running of Acoustic Disc themselves as a digital label, issuing among other things Dawg Works, six volumes of his own compositions in chronological order. The IBMA Hall of Fame inducted him in 2023.