Russ Barenberg

He was born on 8 October 1950 and began playing the guitar at thirteen in Chester County, Pennsylvania, west of Philadelphia, taking lessons from Alan Miller, the older brother of his future bandmate John Miller. Doc Watson, Mississippi John Hurt and Clarence White were his early models, and he later published a study of White’s playing.

At Cornell University in 1970 he joined Pete Wernick, Tony Trischka, Kenny Kosek and Miller in Country Cooking. In its four years the band made two Rounder albums of instrumentals, 14 Bluegrass Instrumentals (1971) and Barrel of Fun (1974), and backed the mandolinist Frank Wakefield on a third, and Barenberg also played on several of Trischka’s solo records of the 1970s. When Country Cooking broke up in 1975 he switched for a time to electric guitar with a jazz-rock band, Carried Away. In 1977 he moved to New York and formed the string band Heartlands with Trischka, Miller and the fiddler Matt Glaser, and Heartlands backed him on much of his first solo album, Cowboy Calypso (Rounder, 1979).

In 1979 he moved to Boston and joined Glaser and the fiddler and mandolinist Jay Ungar in the three-fiddle band Fiddle Fever, which made two albums; its recording of “Ashokan Farewell” later became the centerpiece of the soundtrack of Ken Burns’s The Civil War (1990), and Barenberg also played on the soundtracks of Burns’s Brooklyn Bridge, The Shakers and Huey Long. With Glaser and the mandolinist Andy Statman he played in the bluegrass-and-jazz band Laughing Hands. His second solo album, Behind the Melodies (Rounder), and his part on Jerry Douglas’s Fluxedo (1982) began his long run of work with Douglas. In Boston he also played regularly for contra dances, recorded with the fiddler Rodney Miller on Airplang (1985), and saw several of his own instrumentals taken into the contra dance repertoire.

He moved to Nashville in 1986. With Douglas he accompanied the Irish singer Maura O’Connell for several years, and his third solo album, Moving Pictures (Rounder, 1988), brought in Douglas, Meyer, Béla Fleck, Mark O’Connor and Stuart Duncan. From 1989 to 2001 he worked in a trio with Douglas on Dobro and Meyer on bass, whose all-instrumental Skip, Hop & Wobble (Sugar Hill, 1993) the three produced themselves. His session work of those years included Hazel Dickens’s It’s Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song and Alison Krauss’s Too Late to Cry (both 1987) and Randy Travis’s Always & Forever (1987) and High Lonesome (1991), and in 1996 he made the soundtrack for the film Homecoming with Douglas, the fiddler Darol Anger and the producer Snuffy Walden.

The Transatlantic Sessions, devised by the Shetland fiddler Aly Bain, brought musicians from the British Isles and the United States together for television series filmed in Scotland and shown on the BBC; Barenberg, who knew Bain from his Fiddle Fever days, was in the house band for the first series in 1995, the second in 1998 and four more between 2007 and 2013, and has toured with the live show, which began in 2001 and first came to the United States in 2017. His fourth solo album, When at Last (Compass, 2007), was nominated for the IBMA’s Instrumental Album of the Year, and its opening track, “Little Monk,” for the 2008 Grammy for Best Country Instrumental Performance. In 2008 he worked on Steve Martin’s banjo album The Crow, Charlie Haden’s Rambling Boy and Jesse Winchester’s Love Filling Station. He has written guitar instruction books and recordings and teaches at music camps in the United States and Europe.