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Old & In The Way
Description
**Old & In the Way** stands as a monumental artifact from the mid-1970s American roots music renaissance, a live capture from October 8, 1973, at San Francisco's legendary Boarding House. Though released in February 1975 on Rounder Records, this bluegrass album was the product of Owsley Stanley and Vickie Babcock's cutting-edge sound engineering-eight microphones, four per channel, mixed live onto stereo Nagra tape, a technical marvel for its time under producer David Grisman's supervision. The caricatured sleeve art, illustrated by Greg Irons, hints at the playful irreverence that would accompany a recording that, for many years, held the title of best-selling bluegrass album of all time until the cinematic *O Brother, Where Art Thou?* soundtrack finally displaced it on sales charts.
Musically, the ten-track collection features the core ensemble-Jerry Garcia on banjo and vocals, Vassar Clements on fiddle, John Kahn on acoustic bass, Peter Rowan on guitar, and Grisman himself on mandolin-performing with a purity that feels like a séance into an earlier America. Traditional tunes like "Pig in a Pen" and "Knockin' on Your Door" coexist with compositions like David Grisman's self-titled opener and Peter Rowan's "Midnight Moonlight," all bound by soaring multi-part harmonies and fiddle lines that seamlessly interweave with guitar, banjo, and mandolin. Peter J. D'Angelo's review on AllMusic captures the spirit well: *"This is the sound of purists re-creating the music they grew up with and it's both enjoyable and inspiring to listen to."*
Beyond its critical stature, the album reveals a fascinating footnote in recording history: the Boarding House's cramped, basement-dwell atmosphere, which Grisman and Owsley embraced to preserve the raw live sound rather than polish it to studio perfection. That the band-often conflated with Grateful Dead circles-never officially formed until after this recording remains an enduring piece of bluegrass lore.
<div class="citations">
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_%26_In_the_Way_(album)">Wikipedia</a> ·
<a href="https://www.allmusic.com/">AllMusic</a>
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