Versatile Peter Rowan is one of those country performers who has never made it to mainstream stardom. Peter Rowan was one of the most popular cult bluegrass artists of the '80s, cultivating a devoted, international cult fan base through his independent records and constant touring. A skilled singer/songwriter, Rowan also yodels, plays stringed instruments and the saxophone.

1. EARLY INFLUENCES

Since both of his parents played piano and sung and many of his relatives were musicians, it seemed only natural that Rowan too would become one. He learned guitar from his uncle. When he was a teenager, Rowan frequently hung out at the Hillbilly Ranch (legendary Boston nightclub) where he heard such bluegrass and old-time bands as The Lilly Brothers and also Geno Foreman, singing traditional music. All these guys came up from New York - Dave van Ronk, Ramblin' Jack Elliott. He also enjoyed listening to the blues - Texas bluesman Lightnin' Hopkins was a big influence.

There was also a show called Hayloft Jamboree on radio, Rowan says, that played a lot of country music. Jack Clements was (a regular) on the show.

In Wayland, there was a real cosmopolitan mix of country music and rock'n'roll, he says. I was always playing rock'n'roll as a teenager. The first band that I played with was with Bob Emery (former member of Northern Lights) The Cupids. We played a lot of record hops.

2. THE CUPIDS

In 1961 Rowan attended Colgate University for three years and then decided to become a professional musician.

In 1963, a 21-year-old Peter Rowan dropped out of Colgate University and went in search of the men behind the bluegrass records he had fallen in love with. He didn't head for the hills of West Virginia or east Kentucky, however. Instead he hitchhiked to M Street in Washington where the Country Gentlemen were playing at the Shamrock Bar.

Before I even went inside, Rowan remembers, I looked through the window and I saw Charlie Waller lifting up his guitar to the microphone to accent a phrase. I'd been listening to the records and I loved the dynamics, but I wasn't sure how they did it. Now here it was; I could see how it was done. I realized you didn't have to drive way out in the hills to hear the Stanley Brothers and then try to decipher their formal demeanor. Here were guys doing it in the middle of a big city seven nights a week with a visual flair and an enthusiasm that let you in on the secret a bit. I was converted on the spot; I thought bluegrass was it for me.

3. MOTHER BAY STATE ENTERTAINERS

4. BILL MONROE & HIS BLUE GRASS BOYS

He met and played with Monroe for the first time when Monroe toured in New England. One thing I started to like about the Monroe style was that there was a lot more blues in it than the other styles of bluegrass, Rowan said. It was darker. It had more of an edge to it. And yet it still had the ballad tradition in it, and I loved that. He would do things like stand in the back of the band and chop that mandolin, just drive the whole band, or center the time. He was conducting purely by ear by his mandolin chops, said Rowan.

To play (bluegrass) right, Rowan claims, you've got to learn it from someone like Bill Monroe, who has it in his genes. Bill's a very strong leader. He wouldn't stand for any messing with his music. After he goes, very few people will be able to do anything but a fast or slow tune. Bluegrass isn't a dance style anymore. All the old steps are being forgotten.

I guess I could have done the Dylan singer-songwriter thing that everyone else was doing in those days, Rowan speculates, but to me bluegrass was more exciting. I liked it because it had blues and ballads, and when Bill Monroe played the mandolin, fire came out. I think that band -- me, Richard Greene on fiddle, Maryland's Lamar Grier on banjo and Bill's son James on bass -- was one of Bill's best.

5. EARTH OPERA

Rowan's quest for what he calls the simplicity of music goes back just to Earth Opera. It was just David and me at first, Rowan remembers. It had a real sparse sound. When we started to bring other people in, there were all kinds of problems. Earth Opera found themselves a victim of their own eclecticism, and of the embryonic, wide open state of the music business at the time.

6. DAVID GRISMAN

7. SONGWRITING

8. SEATRAIN

We were six young guys tied up in a project not knowing what we were doing. Some people tried forcing their musical directions. But if we'd been mature enough to take some time off, and then regroup, we'd still be together, says Rowan.

9. THE ROWAN BROTHERS

10. OLD & IN THE WAY

Their 1973 album remains the biggest selling bluegrass record of all time. It bridged the gap between classic hillbilly and bluegrass and new age. It was the only album the lineup recorded until the additional tapes from this same 1973 session were released in 1996 and 1997 on Grisman's own Acoustic Disc label.

11. MULESKINNER

12. THE ROWAN BROTHERS (AGAIN)

13. MEXICAN AIRFORCE

He plays also on album by Flaco Jimenez for Arhoolie Records along with Ry Cooder - Flaco's Friends (1989).

14. WILD STALLIONS

15. DUST BOWL CHILDREN

This album reflects ecological and humanitarian concerns as we enter the end of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of one who lives on the land and seeks harmony with the elements in order to grow food and create a home. From rural farms in Tennessee to the Hopi Mesas in the Southwest desert to the teeming cities of our land the basic needs of food supply, water, fresh air and non-violent cooperation need to be met with new awareness for the survival of life on our mother-earth.

Dust Bowl Children was the product of a journey. I wrote that stuff on the road. I wrote it in England, in France, and so on. Often I get a better idea artistically who I am in a different country, because I don't fit in as part of the culture and so I find myself standing out in high relief, and you're treated that way too. So as I prepared to move away from town again in '89, down to Austin, that was my voice, Dust Bowl Children. I'd already done an album of Bill Monroe songs, The Last Whippoorwill, and I'd done the album with the Nashville Bluegrass Band, which was just a joy to make our music the best we could make it. That was kind of my departure from Nashville, Dust Bowl Children.

Dust Bowl Children won NAIRD's (National Association of Independent Record Distributors) Folk Album of the Year Award, as well as Best Cover Art.

16. AWAKE ME IN THE NEW WORLD

I had to do Awake Me in the New World as a personal journey, to bring together a vision that started with Land of the Navajo in terms of a historical context. Using our history as a kind of mythology of personal journey. That's a novelistic approach. Awake Me in the New World is meant to put together new combinations of new world sounds that exist here. The flamenco guitar player that I know plays with percussionists so for him to play with the percussionists in my band is not odd. Awake Me in the New World started three years before the Columbus expedition. One of my songwriting buddies in Nashville, Gary Nicholson, gave me what became the opening line to the song Sail Away -- I was just another waterfront kid, hanging around the harbor. That started the whole thing. There's another half hour of music for that album that was edited out, possibly causing some confusion to the listeners who are trying to follow the story. What was left in was what the record company thought was the most musical. A lot of the narration is missing so that it was an album of music rather than an album of the ancient tale. But all is not lost. I have another one in mind.

17. TREE ON A HILL

The new Rowan Brothers recording is in the tradition of great family singing groups like the Osborne Brothers or the Carter Family.

18. WITH NORTHERN LIGHTS

In 90s Peter Rowan worked also with New England contemporary bluegrass band Northern Lights. Rowan, whose vocals can be heard on one verse of Winterhawk has used Northern Lights as his band for a few shows. Playing with Peter is alternately uplifting and maddening, Taylor Amerding, lead vocalist from Northern Lights reflects. He doesn't like to rehearse. You've got to have a working knowledge of his music. It can be frightening. But, his rhythm guitar playing is so strong that the whole band gets locked in. There's a feeling of confidence. Of course, he's got a great set of vocal chords. It's a joy to sing with him. It's like being in a band that's really well known.

19. THE PANAMA RED RIDERS

20. BLUEGRASS BOY

With the help of fellow Blue Grass Boy alums Del McCoury (harmony vocal) and fiddler Richard Greene (the latter also played with Rowan in Seatrain and Muleskinner), Rowan, plucking mandolin and wielding his clear, mighty, yodel-capable tenor, practically embodies Monroe on Bluegrass Boy. Additional support comes from such leading lights of contemporary bluegrass as Laurie Lewis (harmony vocals), Charles Sawtelle (guitar), Roy Huskey, Jr. (upright bass), Mike Munford (banjo) and Buell Neidinger (upright bass). The title track, in particular, is a tender tribute to the farmer who became the Father of Bluegrass.

Also, John Duffey died in December,1996, just three months after Monroe passed away. The deaths of these two mandolin giants rocked the bluegrass world as a whole, but they hit Rowan particularly hard for they were both crucial influences at the beginning of his career.

I just remember Duffey's tenor voice breaking the stratosphere the first time I heard it, he whispers after a long pause. Some of the folk purists thought the Country Gentlemen weren't as authentic as the Stanley Brothers, but I never felt that way. They were just interpreting bluegrass their own way, which is all that any of us can do. After another pause, he adds, You see these people year after year, and then suddenly they're gone. I don't know what else to say. Maybe that song on my new album, Weep Not for the Dead, sums it up best. The final verse of Rowan's Weep Not for the Dead contains these lines: In your eyes I see no sorrow/ From your lips I hear you pray/ Save your tears for the living/ Before God takes you away.

At the heart of Bluegrass Boy, though, is Let The Harvest Go To Seed, Rowan's metaphorical take on the musical and spiritual legacy of Bill Monroe. Until the last few years, he'd be plowing with his mule behind the cabin at his farm in Goodlettsville, Tenn., says Rowan. I was saying to one of his assistants that this really is the backbone of bluegrass, that the father still plows his earth behind a mule - such a romantic idea, really! - and the assistant said, 'Yes, but he never harvests anymore.' And I thought, 'He's still alive and planting but letting the harvest go to seed, letting the wild birds and critters have something to eat, returning substance to the soil.' That's how bluegrass is today, Rowan says. There are pop offshoots, but there's still the great cultural lineage in the haunting, otherworldly overtones of the original pure, high lonesomeness of Bill Monroe. Maybe he won't be there to plow his field, but he's left us the seeds.

It's a way of me saying I was a bluegrass boy - and still am a bluegrass boy, says Rowan, and that I inherited from Bill Monroe certain things that have allowed me to continue his style of bluegrass. At this point, I'm the same age as Bill was when I came to work with him. Bill was in his 50s and we were in our 20s, so he interplayed with our energy and did a lot of almost savage playing, Rowan says. Del has the Monroe quote 'Crowd me,' which was a Monroe thing where we'd sing shoulder to shoulder into the same microphone, almost like wrestlers. I've been on-stage where he almost tried to force me away with his body! He relied on us to burn him like a fire and keep him going forward. He'd attack on his mandolin, and the other instruments would come together at the right beat, and your hairs would stand up! And that's what I want - to keep alive that fire and friction. You can get out there and play safe bluegrass, but I'd like to think the music on Bluegrass Boy is not safe bluegrass.

In the mid-'80s, I was playing with Jerry Douglas, Sam Bush, Roy Huskey and Larry Atamanuik every Thursday night at the Station Inn in Nashville, Rowan recalls, and Bill Monroe would sometimes show up and in that inimitable way of his ask if he could get up and play a few songs. I realized he was trying to mend fences. He didn't look at me like I had abandoned him anymore; he looked at me as if he realized I had to go out on my own and that I still had tremendous respect for the music. So we started hanging out together, especially in the past few years. It was very touching to have a meal with him. I mean, he still had that Bill Monroe charisma of walking into a room and dominating it, but when you sat down with him you could see the years were weighing on him.

He said he could never stop playing bluegrass because it would let his bands down and disappoint his fans. He felt you had to stay with a style of music and follow it, so it could develop and people can hear the continuity in it. But he told me he heard this other kind of music he could have played, and the way he described it to me made it sound like what I was doing with Flaco Jimenez and Jerry Douglas.

He used to tell me, `You can try to get away from bluegrass, Pete, but it will always call you back.' It did, but for a long time I couldn't make a bluegrass record, because to me bluegrass was playing guitar in Bill Monroe's band and if he wasn't there it would just be a copycat imitation. When I started writing songs on mandolin, however, I found I bypassed my old role as a guitarist in Bill Monroe's band and took Bill's role. Instead of strumming the guitar, I was chopping out mandolin chords and playing leads, and that was a whole different muse for me. After that, the album wrote itself.

21. WITH RICHARD GREENE & THE GRASS IS GREENER

22. OTHERS

23. RESUME

A follower of Tibetan Buddhism, Rowan is well-traveled and well-schooled. He compares Monroe and his pioneering music to the nature poets and painters of the seventh-century Chinese Tang dynasty, who similarly evoked the 'high lonesomeness' that he says is at the heart of Monroe and bluegrass. He always follows his muse, says Bev Paul, Sugar Hill Records' director of sales and marketing. He does world music projects, old-timey music, and now he's back to bluegrass, where his roots are. He's even starting to look like Bill Monroe, she says.

Rowan represents what is coming to be known as third-generation bluegrass, says Paul. Monroe and people like Earl Scruggs were the first wave, and then there was a flurry of activity in the mid-'60s. Now we're feeling the third wave roll into the 21st century --- and Peter's leading that charge.