Peter Rowan

Music was made at home in the Rowan house. Both his parents sang and played piano, an uncle played guitar, and the boy heard local square dances and the radio program Hayloft Jamboree; at twelve he was given an Arthur Godfrey ukulele by his father. In high school his band, the Cupids, played songs by Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley. He heard Joan Baez sing Child ballads in Harvard Square and, too young to be let in, stood outside Boston’s Hillbilly Ranch to listen to the Lilly Brothers and Don Stover. In 1960 and 1961 he performed at the annual Boston T Party as one of the “Kingston Trioists,” with Bob Emery and David Perkins.

He spent two years studying literature at Colgate University. One summer he went south to hear the young Country Gentlemen at the Shamrock in Georgetown, and he jammed at the fiddlers’ conventions in Galax, Virginia, and Union Grove, North Carolina. Then he left school, formed the Bonney Hill Boys and played dates in northern New York, before going back to Boston to join Bill Keith and Jim Rooney, whose group included the mandolinist Joe Val. Friendship with another Boston band, the Charles River Valley Boys, got him a run of northeastern dates with Bill Monroe in the fall of 1963, and at the end of it Monroe told him, “You ought to come to Nashville, I can help you.”

He joined the Blue Grass Boys in 1964, one of the first northern, college-educated musicians to work for Monroe, following closely on Steve Arkin, Bill Keith and Sandy Rothman. He played the Opry, sometimes drove the band’s bus, took part in the first multi-day bluegrass festival, and co-wrote two songs with Monroe, “The Walls of Time” and “It’s Love.” He also sang on five recording sessions that produced fourteen songs, most of them issued on the 1967 album Blue Grass Time.

Early in 1967 he left Monroe and formed the psychedelic rock group Earth Opera with mandolinist David Grisman. It made two albums for Elektra, Earth Opera and The Great American Eagle Tragedy, the second carrying “It’s Love” and other Rowan songs. In 1969 he joined another former Monroe sideman, the fiddler Richard Greene, in Seatrain, and appeared on two of its Capitol albums produced by George Martin, Seatrain and The Marblehead Messenger. Bluegrass drew him back in 1973 with Muleskinner, a group with Greene, Bill Keith, David Grisman, Clarence White and others that was never meant to tour full time; it made one Warner Brothers album, Muleskinner – A Potpourri of Bluegrass Jam, and a West Coast television special.

Later in 1973 he formed Old and in the Way with Grisman, fiddler Vassar Clements, banjoist Jerry Garcia and bass player John Kahn. The band lasted a year or less and played an estimated thirty to fifty shows, and its self-titled LP came out only after it had broken up. The record carried three of his songs, “Midnight Moonlight,” “Panama Red” and “Land of the Navajo,” and became one of the best-selling bluegrass releases of all time. Through the middle and late 1970s he toured and recorded with his brothers Lorin and Chris as the Rowans, who made three albums for Asylum, and over the years his music also took in Tex-Mex, conjunto, reggae and solo singer-songwriter work; in 2002 his manager, Keith Case, said he was still performing in five or six formats.

Other artists kept taking up his songs. The New Riders of the Purple Sage had a hit with “Panama Red,” and in the 1980s Nashville followed: Ricky Skaggs recorded “You Make Me Feel Like a Man,” a BMI Award winner, George Strait “Dance Time in Texas” and Janie Fricke “Where Does Love Go When It’s Gone.” His own records came back to bluegrass with Walls of Time in 1982 and The First Whippoorwill, an album of Monroe songs, in 1985. New Moon Rising (1988), made with the Nashville Bluegrass Band, earned a Grammy nomination; All on a Rising Day (1991) featured Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Roy Huskey Jr., Stuart Duncan, Alan O’Bryant and Alison Krauss; and in 1996 he released Bluegrass Boy and Yonder, a duet album with Jerry Douglas.

His only Grammy win came for the various-artists Monroe tribute True Life Blues, to which he contributed two songs. Later albums include The Light in Carter Stanley’s Eyes and Calling You from My Mountain, which was nominated for the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album in 2022. BMI lists 343 compositions, co-compositions and arrangements under his name, “Land of the Navajo,” “That High Lonesome Sound” and “The Walls of Time” among them. The Americana Music Association gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015, and he was inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2022.