Old & In The Way

The bluegrass ensemble Old & in the Way existed only briefly, yet its influence endured long afterward. Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead member who handled banjo and vocals, assembled the group in 1973 to revisit his bluegrass origins and affirm his deep appreciation for the genre. He completed the lineup with fiddler Vassar Clements, bassist John Kahn, and the West Coast session musicians David Grisman on mandolin and vocals plus guitarist and vocalist Peter Rowan, the pair having previously worked together in Muleskinner. The name itself came from a Grisman piece. The musicians performed a limited number of shows, most of them during October at San Francisco’s Boarding House. Recordings from those concerts supplied the tracks for the self-titled album, which appeared in 1975 on Round, the Grateful Dead’s own imprint. The release mixed traditional material with Rowan originals that would themselves become standards. Although that record remained the only one issued by this particular configuration during the 1970s, the players continued collaborating in shifting combinations across the next two decades, and sales of the album stayed steady. After Garcia’s death in 1995 the band reconvened, issuing the 1973 recordings That High Lonesome Sound in early 1996; a further collection of 1973 material followed at the end of 1997.