Skip Conover

In November 1974 he sat in on Dobro with Country Gazette, then Berline, Roland White, Alan Munde and Roger Bush, at McCabe’s guitar shop in Santa Monica. The live recordings, mostly songs sung by White along with “Black Mountain Rag” and “Sally Goodin,” were issued in Japan by Trio in 1979 as Live at McCabe’s. He was also one of the guests on Country Gazette’s first album, A Traitor in Our Midst (United Artists, 1972).

When Berline formed Sundance, Conover played Dobro and sang harmony on every track of its first album, Byron Berline & Sundance (MCA, 1976), with Berline on fiddle, Crary on guitar, Hickman on banjo, Jack Skinner on bass and lead vocals, Allen Wold on electric guitar and pedal steel and Dallas Taylor on drums. He stayed for the band’s live album, Live at McCabe’s (Takoma), recorded at the same Santa Monica shop with Vince Gill on mandolin, on which the band played Bill Monroe’s “Molly and Tenbrooks,” Reno and Smiley’s “Dixie Breakdown” and the Berline and Hickman instrumental “Ghost Dance.”

He played on Berline’s fiddle album Dad’s Favorites (Rounder, 1977), recorded at Easy Street Recordings in Studio City, on “Ragtime Annie,” “Stone’s Rag” and “Sweet Memories Waltz,” and on an album by the singer and bones player Cecil Hiatt with Berline, Crary and Hickman on the Double Stop label. On Herb Pedersen’s Lonesome Feeling (Sugar Hill, 1984), cut at Saylor Recording in Hollywood with Chris Hillman on mandolin, he played Dobro on every track. On Crary’s Take a Step Over (Sugar Hill, 1989) he played resonator guitar and sang with Crary and Pedersen on “Lord Build Me a Cabin,” with Berline and Hickman again in the band.