Peter Rowan: A Darker Blade of Bluegrass

"For me, a bluegrass song should have an otherworldly quality to it. One of the great strengths of bluegrass is this inherited, Celtic, almost beyond-this-world sort of feeling," says singer, songwriter and guitarist Peter Rowan during a phone interview from the Nashville airport, bound for the annual Merlefest bluegrass gathering in North Carolina.

"Bluegrass can handle really big themes," he continues, "but bluegrass has lost its topical flavor—traditionally, it was informed by tragic events and the lives of everyday people. It often is expressed the dark side of life."

Rowan knows a thing or two about the haunting side of bluegrass music. As a member of the pioneering band Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys, he co-wrote, with Monroe, the oft-covered bluegrass classic "Walls of Time," one of the most haunting songs in the bluegrass canon.


A Grammy Award-winner and five-time nominee, Rowan has lived up to that standard during a career that has spanned five decades.


Still, he's not above spinning some "slinky, funky" bluegrass tunes himself, but these days his music is steeped mainly in the legacy sound that infuses most of his latest material—the night before his flight, Rowan and his new band had wrapped up a weeklong Nashville recording session for an as-yet-untitled album slated for release on the Compass label. The special guests included country stars Ricky Skaggs and Del McCoury as well as the progressive bluegrass duo Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.

"If there is a theme to the songs [on the new album] it's built around redemption, probably family redemption and reconciliation," says Rowan, "the intensity of interpersonal relationships and how they drive our lives, really."


The core band—Rowan, guitarist and vocalist Keith Little, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Jody Stecher and bassist Paul Knight—has roots in West Marin, a waystation of the cosmic cowboy sub-culture: It coalesced when Rowan sat in at the occasional Sunday jam sessions that Knight hosts at the Station House Cafe in the rural coastal town of Pt. Reyes Station, California.


That lineup returned to the restaurant this month for a benefit dinner and concert to raise funds for the cash-strapped art program at a local elementary school. Rowan and his band captivated the audience with such Rowan favorites as "Panama Red" as well as classic Bill Monroe tunes. The new songs, including the standout "Night Prayer," are among Rowan's best.


Rowan and his brothers grew up playing bluegrass around their home in Wayland, Massachusetts. In 1964, at age 22, Rowan became the first non-Southerner invited to join Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys.


He stayed with Monroe until 1967, leaving to join mandolinist David Grisman in the progressive folk-rock band Earth Opera. Moving to the Bay Area, he teamed up with Grisman, Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia and others on 1975's breakthrough progressive bluegrass album Old & in the Way, and contributed the song "Midnight Moonlight."

Beginning in 1982, and for the next 25 years, Rowan released a string of critically acclaimed and artistically diverse albums, ranging from folk (1990's Dust Bowl Children) to straight-ahead bluegrass (2002's High Lonesome Cowboy) to hybridized country (2005's Reggaebilly).

The ability to straddle the joyful sounds and otherworldly fare, he says, is something of a balancing act. "I'm always trying to write that bluegrass tune that might have something real in it, writing a song that's based on a real-life experience as  opposed to simply crafting a song in the singer-songwriter style," he says.

"These darker tunes range from challenging authority to mournful kinds of songs—bluegrass is famous for its mournful sound. But still, we also express joy in our music—we don't want to be hidebound. So it's a dance, really. After all, we're in a business called 'show.'"

—by Greg Cahill