Ron Block spent more than a dozen years on banjo with Alison Krauss & Union Station and various other ensembles before issuing his first solo project, the gospel album Faraway Land, which Rounder Records released in 2001. Roughly four years in the late 1980s had already been given to Weary Hearts, the band he helped found, and a shorter period early the next decade was spent with the Lynn Morris Band. He stepped into Alison Krauss & Union Station in 1991, taking the chair vacated by Alison Brown, and has since supplied the group with durable, graceful songs that often explore themes of faith. Michael W. Smith, Randy Travis, Rhonda Vincent, the Forbes Family, fellow Union Station member Dan Tyminski, and the Cox Family are among those who have cut his material. His instrumental and vocal work has also graced sessions for Vince Gill, Dolly Parton, Clint Black, Susan Ashton, Brad Paisley, Billy Dean, and Bill Frisell, among many others. In addition to his writing and playing, Block produced the Forbes Family’s bluegrass-gospel album In the Shadow of Your Wings. The supporting cast on his debut reads like an elite roster, encompassing Alison Krauss & Union Station, Chris Thile together with his Nickel Creek colleagues Sara Watkins and Sean Watkins, and the Forbes Family.
Block’s father ran a music store in Lawndale, California, and the future musician acquired his first guitar at age eleven. Two years later a televised Lester Flatt performance ignited his fascination with the banjo, leading his father to give him a Kay model as a Christmas present that same year. After high school he enrolled at South Plains College in Texas to study country and bluegrass music, where he joined Eric Uglum and Mike Bub to form Weary Hearts; Chris Jones and Butch Baldassari later joined the group. Beyond Flatt he cites Earl Scruggs, Bill Monroe, Jerry Douglas, Tony Rice, and Ricky Skaggs as formative influences, while subsequent inspiration arrived from B.B. King, Benny Goodman, Eric Clapton, Pat Metheny, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, and Larry Carlton. Rounder issued his second solo album, DoorWay, in 2007, and his third, Walking Song—whose songs were co-written with poet Rebecca Reynolds—appeared in summer 2013.
