Ron Thomason

He joined Ralph Stanley in 1969, and with the Clinch Mountain Boys he worked on his mandolin playing and developed the stage manner that later defined his own band. He is on the band’s live recordings from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1970, playing mandolin with Stanley, Roy Lee Centers on guitar, Curly Ray Cline on fiddle and Jack Cooke on bass, and on 9 January 1971 in Nashville he played mandolin at the session for the Jalyn album Tribute to the Stanley Brothers, on which the teenagers Keith Whitley and Ricky Skaggs sang Stanley Brothers songs, among them “Little Glass of Wine,” “White Dove” and “Lonesome River,” with Stanley and Centers on banjo.

His first album under his own name, Mandolin & Other Stuff by Ron Thomason & Some Confreres (Kanawha, 1975), mixed Bill Monroe instrumentals such as “Big Mon,” “Big Sandy River” and “Monroe’s Hornpipe” with old fiddle tunes, and included pieces of his own. Dry Branch Fire Squad, named for the small place in Southwest Virginia where he was born, began with John Baker on guitar, Robert Leach on banjo and John Carpenter on bass, and issued three albums on its own labels in 1977. From 1979 to the 2000s the band recorded for Rounder, beginning with Born to Be Lonesome, and with Thomason as the one constant it went through many lineups, with Mary Jo Leet, Suzanne Thomas, Dan Russell, Bill Evans, Adam McIntosh, Brian Aldridge and Tom Boyd among the players. He sometimes plays banjo or guitar on stage and demonstrates the hambone, which he learned as a child. In 1980 he played mandolin on Hazel Dickens’s Rounder album Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People.

Outside the band he made Branching Out (Gordo, 1984), recorded at Audio Productions in New Carlisle, Ohio, on which he sang lead and played mandolin, banjo, guitar and bass, with Eugenia Snyder singing harmony; Strong at Heart (Gordo, 1987), with the guitarist Bill Lowe, on which he played mandolin, frailing banjo and guitar, sang, and performed a hambone piece; and Bygone Days (2013), with the fiddler Heidi Clare.

From 1984 Dry Branch Fire Squad hosted the new Winterhawk Bluegrass Festival, later the Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival. The band also hosts High Mountain Hay Fever in Westcliffe, Colorado, has played the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in San Francisco every year since 2003, and for forty years opened the Sunday gospel set at the Gettysburg Bluegrass Festival. From 2014 it issued its own records, among them Don’t Forget This Song and The Gospel Way (both 2014) and Tearin’ Outta the Wilderness (2018), and in 2017 a performance was filmed for Bluegrass Court Jester, a film about Thomason. Away from music he has worked as an educator and is a horse trainer.