Michael Anderson
Michael Anderson is a bass player and singer who was a member of Country Gazette from 1978 to the end of 1981, with Alan Munde on banjo, Roland White on mandolin and Joe Carr on guitar, and who played bass on all four of Munde’s Festival Favorites banjo albums, from 1980 to 1983.
Before Country Gazette he and Carr played in Roanoke, a Texas bluegrass band with Dan Huckabee and Mark Maniscalco, whose 1977 album for Ridge Runner, with liner notes by Munde, included songs written by Anderson and Carr. The two joined Munde and White in Country Gazette in 1978, and in the fall of that year the new lineup recorded All This, and Money, Too, issued by Ridge Runner in 1979.
The same four backed one another on a run of Ridge Runner albums: Munde’s The Banjo Kid Picks Again, with Sam Bush, Slim Richey and Jerry Douglas as guests; the Dobro player Dan Huckabee’s Acoustic Steel, recorded in September 1979 with Munde and Anderson; and, at the end of 1980, Munde’s Festival Favorites volumes one and two, with Robert Bowlin on fiddle. In the winter of 1980–81 Country Gazette recorded American and Clean for Flying Fish, on which Anderson played acoustic bass and sang, with Sam Bush as a guest. A live recording of this lineup came out in 1984 on the band’s Live on the Road.
Anderson left Country Gazette at the end of 1981; Greg Kennedy took his place for a few months before Bill Smith became the band’s bass player in the spring of 1982. He kept playing on Munde’s records, though: the last two Festival Favorites albums, Nashville Sessions (1982), with Carr, White, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas and Marty Stuart among the players, and Southwest Sessions (1983), with White, Bob French and Robert Bowlin, both list him on bass. Rounder’s Festival Favorites Revisited (1993) drew twenty tracks from the series, among them “Devil’s Dream,” “Molly Bloom” and “Little Rock Getaway.”
