Vassar Clements

He was born on 25 April 1928 in Kinard, a small town in the Florida panhandle. He taught himself the fiddle at about the age of seven and formed a string band with his cousins Carroll and Gerald Clements that played around Florida. He never learned to read music, he said. His early influences were the big band records of the 1930s and, later, the fiddling of the Florida native Chubby Wise.

In 1949 he went to Nashville to audition for Bill Monroe, who hired him, and he worked with the Blue Grass Boys off and on for about eight years. He fiddled on ten songs from Monroe’s first Decca sessions in 1950, among them “Blue Grass Ramble,” “New Mule Skinner Blues,” “I’m On My Way to the Old Home” and “The Old Fiddler.” In 1953 he played in an Army Special Services band in Germany. Five years later Jim and Jesse McReynolds found him working at a containerboard mill in Clyatville, Georgia, and persuaded him to join the Virginia Boys. He stayed until 1961, recording fourteen songs and instrumentals with them for Starday and six more for their first Columbia and Epic releases, including the instrumentals “Border Ride” and “Dixie Hoedown.”

For much of the early and middle 1960s he worked outside music, as a plumber at NASA, as a switchman for the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad and as the owner of a potato-chip delivery franchise. He then moved to Nashville and played with Jimmy Martin’s Sunny Mountain Boys for most of 1967, recording “Goin’ Ape” and “Steal Away Somewhere and Die,” and by 1969 he was working both with Faron Young and with Bobby Smith and the Boys from Shiloh.

In 1971 he became a founding member of John Hartford’s Dobrolic Plectral Society and recorded Aereo-Plain with it. He moved on to the Earl Scruggs Revue, played on the August 1971 sessions for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s three-LP set Will the Circle Be Unbroken, and stayed with Scruggs until early 1974. During those years he also played in Old and in the Way, a short-lived bluegrass group in California with Jerry Garcia, David Grisman, Peter Rowan and John Kahn, whose live album, Old and in the Way, came out in 1975.

His first major-label solo album was made for Mercury in 1973, and from 1975 he led the Vassar Clements Band for nearly a decade. He recorded about 25 albums under his own name, mostly for Rounder and Flying Fish, among them Crossing the Catskills (Rounder, 1973), Vassar Clements, John Hartford, Dave Holland, Together at Last (Flying Fish, 1987) with the French jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli, and the bluegrass album Grass Routes (Rounder, 1992). The first of his Hillbilly Jazz albums appeared on Flying Fish in 1974, and Hillbilly Jazz Rides Again followed in 1986. The phrase was his wife’s, and she also inspired his fiddle instrumental “Silly Millie.” He played on two of Rounder’s Bluegrass Album Band records, Sweet Sunny South (1989) and Instrumentals (1996).

He is reported to have played on anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000 recordings by other artists, among them the Allman Brothers Band, the Grateful Dead, Elvin Bishop, Hot Tuna, the Marshall Tucker Band, Papa John Creach, the Monkees and Kris Kristofferson. ASCAP credits him with 18 published compositions, including “Crossing the Catskills,” “Fiddle Pack,” “Westport Drive” and “Lonesome Fiddle Blues.”

At the 2005 Grammy Awards the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s “Earl’s Breakdown,” credited to the band featuring Earl Scruggs, Randy Scruggs, Vassar Clements and Jerry Douglas, won Best Country Instrumental Performance. He died at home in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, on 16 August 2005, aged 77, and was inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2018.