Episode 309 of The String opens with my memories of Jan. 9, 2025 when I enjoyed one of the most enriching and exciting shows in my long history of seeing bluegrass at the Ryman Auditorium. The evening was billed as Peter Rowan and the Sam Grisman Project Playing Old & In The Way. To many in Nashville and beyond, this marquee might read like a mysterious riddle, but to my musical compadres, they were magic words - a beacon - even before they announced a raft of special guests, which I’ll get to shortly.
Old & In The Way, to get everyone caught up, was a short-lived but wildly influential supergroup of string band pickers in the early 1970s that unified the spirit of Bill Monroe’s bluegrass with the free thinking adventurism of the Grateful Dead. Jerry Garcia played banjo. Peter Rowan was the handsome, high-voiced lead singer and guitarist. For the storied shows that became the one Old & In The Way album of 1975, they engaged super-fiddler Vassar Clements. Finally, the mandolinist, and composer of the band’s titular song, was David “Dawg” Grisman, a musician of deep inventiveness and credibility among both old-school bluegrass conservatives and the hippie aficionados of an emerging world of jamgrass.
Which brings us to Sam Grisman, my guest this week. Yes, he’s David’s 35-year-old son, a guy who grew up with Jerry Garcia hanging around their family home and casually picking timeless folk music with Dawg. Sam’s early influences included other family friends like bluegrass star Sam Bush and Jim Kerwin, bass player in the David Grisman Quintet. Sam Grisman tells us that according to family lore, his first word was “BASS!”, exclaimed in a restaurant when a bass solo came on the house soundtrack. And he was playing the instrument from the time he was old enough to hold up a half size cello. It’s little surprise that he became a musician adept at and appreciative of the art of songcraft and improvisation in equal measure.
“I grew up listening to all these masters expertly navigate through (chord) changes, and it just never seemed like something that should be intellectualized. It seemed like something that was just a natural inflection of somebody's personality,” Grisman says in this conversation. “One of the first bluegrass improvisers that I gravitated towards was the great Jerry Douglas, just because his phrasing is so beautiful and melodious, you know? And he always seems to play something within the frame of the song that serves the song, while also bringing virtuosity to the equation. But taste is the underlying message.”
Sam Grisman spent his twenties touring with a variety of bands and artists as a sideman, including the risk-taking virtuoso band the Deadly Gentlemen and country star Lee Ann Womack. Then, in early 2023, he launched the Sam Grisman Project, a collective that’s carved out a unique place in the acoustic and jam band world because of its heritage, repertoire and mission. According to his website, that is “to build a platform for my friends and me to showcase our genuine passion and appreciation for the legacy of Dawg and Jerry’s music.” While it’s not all Grisman/Garcia and Grateful Dead music (singer/guitarist Logan Ledger contributes some of his smooth western country songs for example), the shows conjure the spirit of those great ensembles and speak to a jamband community that’s been so vibrant and engaged for so many years.
And that brings us back to the Ryman in early January. Peter Rowan was the patriarch on the show poster, but it was Grisman’s thoughtful organization of his band and his reputation in the bluegrass community that pulled together such an extraordinary parade of artists that night, including Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Jerry Douglas, Sam Bush, Ronnie and Rob McCoury, and Tim O’Brien. I told a friend it was like being at my beloved Merlefest back twenty years ago, taking in all my heroes. But it was the players from Grisman’s own generation that made the night and the music that much more historic and legacy-building. The SGP included Logan Ledger and Max Flansburg on guitar, Chris English on percussion and voice, Dominic Leslie on mandolin, Alex Hargreaves and John Mailander on fiddles, Nat Smith on cello and Victor Furtado on banjo. Lindsay Lou and Phoebe Hunt stepped on here and there to sing. Oh yeah, and a certain guitar player named Billy Strings made an explosive surprise walk on.
My conversation with Grisman took place about a month before that show, so it was all about the anticipation and the concept and the years of experience that brought Sam Grisman to this moment. We talk about his passion for the bass at such an early age (and I can say as a student of the bass that he’s an exceptional player), and about experiencing Grateful Dead shows as a toddler with his older sister, and about his years of tutelage as a sideman and how all that brought him to this pivotal year.
And as we close out, Sam Grisman does a fine job describing what he’s aiming for. “I wanted to use my relative musical privilege for the greater good in some kind of way,” he says. “It's an impossible legacy to live up to, being David Grisman’s son. I'm just trying to honor his legacy, you know, and to make my own space in this musical landscape for myself and my friends, who I think are some of the most exceptionally talented and beautiful people I've had the privilege of being around. So it just seems like an obligation to share that with the world, or as many folks as are willing to get quiet enough to hear it.”