Tom Gray

He was born in Chicago on 1 February 1941 and moved to Washington at the age of seven, in 1948, when his father took a job with a trade association. A babysitter introduced him to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio. After lessons on accordion and piano he took up the guitar at twelve and then the mandolin, and he came to the bass when Tom Morgan left one in the Grays’ basement after a jam session. His models were the Shuffler brothers, George and John, who played bass on the Stanley Brothers’ Columbia and Mercury records, and later the Washington jazz bassist Keeter Betts, who worked with Charlie Byrd.

At Western High School and George Washington University he played with fellow students in the Rocky Ridge Ramblers, with Monte Monteith on guitar, Jerry Stuart on mandolin, Bob Lindter on banjo and Ron Roswell on fiddle. He played guitar on Stuart’s mandolin instrumental “Rocky Run” for the Folkways album Mountain Music Bluegrass Style (1959), produced by Mike Seeger, and worked on bass with Bill Clifton’s Dixie Mountain Boys in 1959 and with Buzz Busby and Pete Pike’s Bayou Boys in 1959 and 1960.

He had been a regular at the Country Gentlemen’s shows since high school and sometimes sat in, and when the bass job opened in September 1960 he took over from Jim Cox. With Charlie Waller, John Duffey and Eddie Adcock he made up what came to be called the “classic” Country Gentlemen. The band encouraged him to play walking 4/4 lines and to take solos, and Duffey had the engineer Pete Kuykendall raise the bass on their Folkways recordings, since it had been nearly inaudible on their Starday releases. Gray sang mostly duets with Duffey and parts in the gospel quartets. In September 1961 the band played a multi-artist Carnegie Hall bill sponsored by Sing Out!, and six tracks from it later appeared on a reissue of the Folkways live album On the Road; Starday also put out a studio album titled The Country Gentlemen at Carnegie Hall with Gray on bass. Their nationally distributed Mercury album Folk Session Inside followed in 1963. By then he had married and started a family, and in July 1964 he left the band, replaced by Ed Ferris.

For the next two decades he compiled and edited maps for the National Geographic Society, while playing bass several times a week around Washington with Benny and Vallie Cain’s Country Clan, Red Allen, Buzz Busby, Leon Morris, Bill Emerson and Cliff Waldron’s New Shades of Grass, and with the Stanley Brothers, Jim & Jesse and Bill Monroe, as well as the New Sunshine Jazz Band. In 1969 he began going to the weekly jam sessions in Ben Eldridge’s basement in Bethesda, where John Starling, Mike and Dave Auldridge and, before long, Duffey also played, and late in 1971 that group became the Seldom Scene, its first public date being at the Rabbit’s Foot club on 1 November.

Gray played bass with the Scene for sixteen years. Its double live album Live at the Cellar Door includes his solo feature on “Grandfather’s Clock,” and he is also heard on the band’s 15th-anniversary concert album and, as a returning alumnus, on its 20th. He was voted best bluegrass bass player eight times while in the band. Outside it he played on Tony Rice’s California Autumn (Rebel, 1975) and Bill Keith’s Something Auld, Something Newgrass, Something Borrowed, Something Bluegrass (Rounder, 1976), and in all he has played on more than 100 albums. As the Scene moved toward a more modern sound in the 1980s, Gray, the most traditional-minded member, chose to step aside, and in October 1987 T. Michael Coleman replaced him on electric bass.

He has written or arranged several pieces recorded by the Country Gentlemen, the Seldom Scene and others, among them “Walking the Blues,” “You Left Me Alone” and “Silence or Tears,” whose melody he set to words from a poem by Lord Byron, and he was co-arranger of “(I Know You) Rider.” In 1989 he rejoined Waller, Duffey and Adcock for Classic Country Gents Reunion on Sugar Hill, which the International Bluegrass Music Association named Recorded Event of the Year in 1990, and he made four international tours with Bill Clifton.

From the late 1980s he played part-time in a long list of bands: Paul Adkins’ Borderline Band (1988–1989), the Gary Ferguson Band (1990–1999), the Dixieland group the Federal Jazz Commission (1994–2008), a trio with Roger Green and Fred Travers (1994–1996), the Hazel Dickens Band (1998–2003), Randy Barrett and the Barretones, Jay Armsworthy & Eastern Tradition, Eddie & Martha Adcock, and John Starling & Carolina Star, which also backed Emmylou Harris in 2006 and 2007 and recorded Slidin’ Home (Rebel, 2007). In 1996 he became the first bassist in the IBMA’s Hall of Honor, as one of the classic Country Gentlemen, and in 2014 he entered it a second time with the original Seldom Scene.