Roland White

Musician · 1938–2022 · Madawaska, Maine · Also a recording artist
Best known for Mandolin Lead Vocals

Roland White (1938–2022) was a mandolinist and singer from Madawaska, Maine, who moved to California as a teenager and played there with his brothers Clarence and Eric in the band that became the Kentucky Colonels. He went on to play with Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt, Country Gazette and the Nashville Bluegrass Band, led the Roland White Band from 2000, and taught and wrote books on bluegrass mandolin; he was inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2017.

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He was born Roland Joseph LeBlanc on 23 April 1938 in Madawaska, at the northern tip of Maine, into a family of Acadian and French-Canadian descent that later took the English form of its name, White. His father, Eric Sr., played fiddle, guitar, tenor banjo and harmonica, and one day simply handed Roland a mandolin, with no lessons to go with it. It was at Roland’s insistence that his younger siblings were drawn into a family band, with Eric Jr. on tenor banjo, Clarence on guitar, Roland on mandolin and their sister Joanne on bass.

In 1954 the family moved to Burbank, California, where the three brothers performed as the Three Country Boys. First place in a Pasadena talent contest run by the radio station KXLA opened the way to regular spots on California television, Town Hall Party among them, and in 1955, after Roland bought a Bill Monroe record, the group turned toward bluegrass. By 1959 it was the Country Boys, with Billy Ray Latham on banjo and LeRoy Mack on Dobro, and had a first single out on Sundown. Around 1960 the band began playing the Ash Grove in Hollywood and appeared in two episodes of The Andy Griffith Show.

From mid-1961 Roland served two years in the Army, and so missed the group’s first long-playing record. While he was away, in 1962, the executive producers Joe Maphis, Merle Travis, Tex Ritter and Johnny Bond suggested a new name, and the band became the Kentucky Colonels. He was back for Appalachian Swing! (World Pacific, 1964), a twelve-track instrumental album with a heavy concentration of Clarence’s lead guitar. The Colonels played the Newport Folk Festival and clubs in New York and Cambridge, among them Gerde’s and Club 47, but work ran short, and they disbanded at the end of October 1965.

For a time he played electric bass in southern California lounge bands. Then Bill Monroe toured the West Coast in April 1967, and afterward White joined the Blue Grass Boys, playing rhythm guitar and singing lead. Over two years he took part in three sessions with Monroe, nine tracks in all, among them “The Gold Rush,” “Kentucky Mandolin” and the duet “The Walls of Time.” In early 1969 he moved to Lester Flatt’s new Nashville Grass as a charter member, back on mandolin, and with Flatt he played on twenty-one sessions and ninety-three vocal songs and instrumentals spread over nine albums, three of which paired Flatt with his old singing partner Mac Wiseman.

When Clarence left the Byrds, Roland left Flatt, in January 1973, and the brothers formed the New Kentucky Colonels, with Herb Pedersen and then Alan Munde on banjo. The reunion lasted one European tour. In July 1973 Clarence was killed by a drunk driver after a club date in California.

Immediately afterward Roland joined Country Gazette, a Los Angeles band that blended bluegrass with country-rock, alongside Alan Munde, Roger Bush and Byron Berline. With the band’s backing he made his first solo album, I Wasn’t Born to Rock ‘n’ Roll, and in the same years he joined Bela Fleck, Blaine Sprouse, Pat Enright, Mark Hembree and Jerry Douglas in the studio band the Dreadful Snakes for their album Snakes Alive.

When mandolinist Mike Compton left the Nashville Bluegrass Band, White took his place and stayed eleven years. He made five albums with the group, The Boys Are Back in Town, Home of the Blues, Waitin’ for the Hard Times to Go, Unleashed and American Beauty, and two of them, Waitin’ for the Hard Times to Go and Unleashed, won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album. He also recorded a second solo album, Trying to Get to You, and played on True Life Blues, the Bill Monroe tribute named IBMA Album of the Year in 1997.

In 2000 he started the Roland White Band with his wife, Diane Bouska, on guitar and vocals; its first album, Jelly on My Tofu, was nominated for the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album. He taught at mandolin camps and workshops, and with Bouska he co-wrote instructional books, among them Roland White’s Approach to Bluegrass Mandolin and The Essential Clarence White Bluegrass Guitar Leads. He died in Nashville on 1 April 2022, aged 83.

  • 2010: SPBGMA Preservation Hall of Greats
  • 2011: IBMA Distinguished Achievement Award
  • 2017: Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame
  • 2019: the Kentucky Colonels enter the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame

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