Larry Nager

A New Yorker with a degree in anthropology from Ohio State University, he was hired as a young man by the Cincinnati singer and bandleader Katie Laur as the bass player in her bluegrass band; she later wrote that he knew as much about American music as anyone she had met. He also became the band’s chief booking agent, getting it work at bluegrass festivals and clubs, and in the late 1970s it played Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion. He is credited, with Rich Flaig, on bass on the Katie Laur Band’s Misbehavin’ (Vetco, 1979), recorded in Cincinnati in 1978. Through him Laur discovered the 1930s singer Mildred Bailey and early jazz, and together they produced her jazz album Black Tie (Octev, 1982). He left the band when he married.

In February and March 1984 he played electric bass on Suzanne (Folkways, 1985), the album by the Dayton band of Harley Allen and Mike Lilly, recorded at Jewel Studios in Cincinnati with Scott Adams on mandolin and David Moore Jr. on fiddle, and he and Allen mixed it.

As a journalist he covered music for the Cincinnati Post for eight years in the 1980s, then for four years for the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and from the mid-1990s for eight years for the Cincinnati Enquirer, where he created the paper’s Pop Music Awards, the Cammys, for local musicians; his time there ended in January 2004. His book Memphis Beat: The Lives and Times of America’s Musical Crossroads was published by St. Martin’s Press in 1998. With the filmmaker Steve Gebhardt he wrote and co-produced Bill Monroe: Father of Bluegrass Music (1993). He was later the producer behind Rock My Soul, a 2015 public-television special on gospel music, wrote for GRAMMY.com’s 2013 series on the Memphis chapter of the Recording Academy, and in 2017 returned to Cincinnati as a music historian to speak on early bluegrass venues in southwestern Ohio.