Tom Bekeny

He played in the band Done Gone, which issued The Done Gone Band on the Police label in 1979. That year Laurie Lewis formed the Grant Street String Band with Bekeny, Beth Weil, Greg Townsend and Steve Krouse, the band in which her songwriting came to the fore, and he is on its 1983 album for Bonita. In 1988 he joined Butch Waller’s High Country, a California band formed in 1968 and rooted in the styles of Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs and the Stanley Brothers, as its fiddler; he is on its albums Sunset on the Prairie (1995), The Earthquake (1997) and Perfect Companions (2009), and on stage he sometimes joins Waller for twin-mandolin numbers and sings any part, bass included on the gospel quartets. He was also one of four mandolinists, with John Reischman, Tom Rozum and Waller, on Together, Kathy Kallick and Laurie Lewis’s duet album for Rounder in 1991.

When Kallick formed her own band in 1996, Bekeny took the mandolin chair, with Avram Siegel on banjo and Amy Stenberg on bass; that lineup made Walkin’ in My Shoes for Live Oak and, with Brian Wicklund on fiddle, A Warmer Kind of Blue (Copper Creek, 2005), on which he also sings. By 2010 he and Kallick were joined by Annie Staninec on fiddle and Greg Booth on Dobro and banjo, with Dan Booth and later Cary Black on bass, for Between the Hollow and the High-Rise (2010), Time (2012), Foxhounds (2015), Horrible World (2018) and The Lonesome Chronicles (2023). He also writes for the band: the instrumental “Old Red Mandolin,” a tribute to Frank Wakefield, on Time; “Edale” on Horrible World; and “Reunion” on The Lonesome Chronicles, where he also added words with Kallick to “Never Been So Lonesome.” He played on Kallick’s Cut to the Chase (2014) as well.

His mandolin draws on the blues and on Jesse McReynolds’s split-string technique, with nods to Monroe, Jethro Burns and Wakefield. Over the years he has appeared with Tony Trischka, Steve Goodman, Jethro Burns, Peter Rowan, David Grisman, Jody Stecher, Jerry Garcia, David Nelson and Phil Lesh, among others. He plays mandolin in two jazz groups, the Missing Man Quartet and the Jazz Hands, and in 2013 released Jazzolin, an album of jazz standards, on Dog Boy. He has also played in Bill Evans’s band Bangers & Grass, fronts Tom Bekeny and Friends, made a mandolin instruction DVD, and played on Butch Waller’s The Waltz Collection (2015) and with the Quake City Jug Band (2010). He teaches mandolin and fiddle privately and at music camps, among them the California Bluegrass Association’s camp, Walker Creek in California, Nimblefingers and Camp He Ho Ha in Canada, and the Haapavesi festival in Finland.