David Grisman

Dawg music

David Jay Grisman was born on March 23, 1945 in Hackensack, New Jersey, raised in Passaic, and had piano lessons at seven. He plays mandolin, mandola and mandocello, and is a composer, producer and label owner. Jerry Garcia gave him the nickname Dawg in 1969 when he invited him onto the Grateful Dead's American Beauty. In the early 1960s he was in the Greenwich Village folk scene, where Ralph Rinzler took him to hear Bill Monroe in 1961; he played in the Even Dozen Jug Band and with Red Allen, co-founded Earth Opera with Peter Rowan in 1967, and in the 1970s played in Muleskinner and Old & in the Way with Garcia, Rowan and Vassar Clements.

The David Grisman Quintet formed in the mid-1970s, with Tony Rice on guitar, Darol Anger on fiddle and later Todd Phillips and Mike Marshall. The David Grisman Rounder Album came in 1976 and the debut The David Grisman Quintet was recorded in 1976 and released in 1977 on Kaleidoscope, produced by Grisman, with engineer Bill Wolf and mixing by Bob Shumaker; the cover lists the instruments, a 1927 Gibson F-5 for Grisman, an 1856 Marconcini violin for Anger, a 1935 Martin D-28 for Rice and an 1875 Czech flatback bass. Americana UK calls it the first clear manifestation of Dawg Music, and AllMusic gave 4 stars. Hot Dawg (1978, A&M-Horizon) reached 14 on the jazz albums chart, with Stéphane Grappelli as a guest, and a Warner Bros. deal for five albums was, according to Americana UK, unheard of at the time for an acoustic music act.

Later records include Quintet '80, Mondo Mando (1981), Home Is Where the Heart Is (1987), Dawg '90, Dawgwood (1993), Dawganova (1995), DGQ-20 (1996), Dawgnation (2002) and Dawg's Groove (2006). He founded his own label, Acoustic Disc, in 1989 or 1990, with more than a hundred projects. He recorded a live album with Grappelli in 1991, and the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame inducted him in 2023. He now leads the David Grisman Bluegrass Experience and the Dawg Trio. His "Dawggy Mountain Breakdown" was the theme of NPR's Car Talk. Setlist.fm shows 234 setlists for the Quintet.