Recounting the story from his home in his native Knoxville, Tenn., Grasstowne's Phil Leadbetter acknowledges that from the moment he answered the phone shortly before Thanksgiving 2006 to the early August release of the band's debut CD, "The Road Headin' Home," it has been an intense, but rewarding experience.

The voice at the other end of the line that day was longtime friend Steve Gulley, whom he had met on the same night more than 30 years ago that Leadbetter got the chance to play with his idol, the late Josh Graves.

"I started playing about '74, playing Dobro." says Leadbetter, now 45. "When I first got one, I had no idea what it was. My brother played banjo at the time, and he got to talking about a Dobro, and I had no idea what it was. He brought me a Flatt and Scruggs record, and I heard Josh Graves, and I really liked the sound - about three months later from the time I started playing, I actually got to meet Josh Graves, and he invited me up on stage to play with him. I got to play a tune called 'Shuckin' The Corn' with him - that was the first tune I ever heard him play on a record. That actually hooked me."

Gulley, it turned out, was in one of the other bands on the lineup that night.

"Steve was playing bass, and I was about 12 years old at the time...From about that point, I was just amazed at what a great singer he is. Steve and I are six months apart in age. Over the years, we got to be buddies. We played in different bands and around town."

As the years passed, the friendship endured, though their professional careers never seemed to intersect in the same band at the same time.

"I went to Nashville and worked with Vern Gosdin and Grandpa Jones and kind of got tired of the Nashville thing, (so I) moved back to Knoxville and got hired by J. D. Crowe. One of my first shows out (with Crowe) was at the Festival of the Bluegrass in Lexington (Ky.), and I ran into Steve again, and he had just went on with Doyle Lawson. So, my first big bluegrass gig was Crowe, and his was Doyle, so it was another chance we didn't get to play together."

At roughly the same time, they both opted to strike out on their own, though again in different ways. After leaving Crowe, Leadbetter stepped out as co-founder and a driving force in Wildfire, a band with enough of a following to not only maintain an active touring schedule, but to rack up three successful CD releases on Pinecastle Records as well, while Gulley and fellow Lawson alum Barry Abernathy founded Mountain Heart, with Gulley as lead singer and guitarist.

"Time went by, he put together Mountain Heart, I put together Wildfire. The opportunity didn't happen then, but in the last of November (2006) Steve called me one morning and said he wanted to do something different and was just ready for a change. He'd been with Mountain Heart eight years, and I'd ' been talking about a change also, and he asked if I was interested in trying to put something together. I told him he couldn't have called at a better time. We hooked up about an hour later, I drove up to Steve's house, and we threw some names around."

The first name that popped up was that of another well-traveled bluegrass veteran.

"I worked with a band around 1980 called New Dawn, and we had a mandolin player named Gary Brown (who) used to talk about his cousin being a great mandolin player, and that was Alan Bibey."

Gulley expressed doubt that Bibey (who was also an original member of IIIrd Tyme Out) would be willing to give up his long-running tenure with Blue Ridge, but as Leadbetter continues, "I'd just talked to Alan probably two or three weeks earlier, and I kind of detected that he might be wanting to do something else. So, we called him, and he agreed. The three of us got together and threw around some different names of people we really liked, and Jason Davis, who plays banjo, was one of those."

Rounding out the nascent band was bassist Lee Sawyer, though Leadbetter notes that the band's burgeoning travel schedule and commitments forced Sawyer to drop out shortly after the album was recorded, to be replaced by Jamie Booher.

With the basic pieces of the puzzle in place and facing the challenge of getting a band up-and-running from scratch, they turned to a tool that Bill Monroe never had the opportunity to utilize.

"We had the band together prior to Dec. 1st, but (that day) we made an announcement, and just with the speed and technology of the Internet and all, we really got this thing out real quick. We kind of set us a deadline, I told all the guys, 'Let's make us a plan that we're gonna be in the studio, we'll have us a record deal and everything before the first couple of weeks of January. And we did. We signed with Pinecastle Records. They were real happy...We really got working on this thing, started getting a lot of material that had been vetoed when I was in Wildfire and some that had been vetoed when Steve was with Mountain Heart. We pulled together, and we really liked these tunes...and we told (Pinecastle boss) Tom Riggs we'd have him a record before March 1, and we did."

What made the band click from the start was not only that the core was a trio of established veterans, but also that their mutual friendships were based in large part on having much in common as far as their musical tastes and directions.

"It was real neat being with three guys who were all on the same page. When you've got three guys working toward the same goal - as opposed to some bands where you've got one guy working toward a goal - it just gives you a lot more energy."

Bibey in particular seems to be thriving in the new environment.

"I'm hearing Alan play with us more like he played during the time of IIIrd Tyme Out, when he helped form that band. He's playing a lot more 'in your face' style, and since he's come into our band...I'm starting to hear Alan in the way I used to hear him and realize why I was such a fan of Alan Bibey's. He's really making waves again on his mandolin - he was the 2007 (SPBGMA) Mandolin Player of the Year, and he'd never won that before."

A lot of energy, Leadbetter says, went into choosing a name for the band as well.

"I knew we wanted something short and something fairly easy to spell, but more than that, we - Steve and I especially - had come out of bands that were a little progressive and a little more progressive than I wanted to be, and Steve would tell you the same...We were wanting to try not to alienate any of the people that really had supported us through the years, we didn't want to leave the music that we'd had, but we wanted to put a different turn on stuff without being, you know, a progressive band - still being true to roots, but bringing material in that sounded old with a new message. So I felt like the name 'Grasstowne' with the word 'grass' kind of told that we were a bluegrass band...and we kind of put an 'e' at the end of it to make it look a little different, and that's kind of how we came up with that name."

The CD's opening track, Leadbetter says, is a prime example of that desire to put their own distinctive, yet traditional twist on tunes that struck their fancy.

"I was sitting around one day talking to Steve about a Travis Tritt tune and told him about a tune, 'Dixie Flyer,' and I said, 'Man, I always thought that would be a great tune to do,' and Steve started laughing and said, 'Man, you know I've wanted to do that tune also.' But like in (Wildfire), I'd talk about it, but it would never carry any farther, and Steve told me he had done the same in Mountain Heart with that tune. They just didn't think it was the right thing. When I told him about it, he started singing it on the other end of the phone, and I thought wow, he does know this song?"

Leadbetter also enthuses about the fun to be had in recording classic country and bluegrass chestnuts like "Lizzie Lou."

"I tried over and over to get ...Wildfire to do 'Lizzie Lou,' and they pretty much laughed me off and said, 'That song won't work,' - and I'm glad it didn't, I'm glad we got to do it with our band because Steve Gulley sings it so good."

"With this band, like I said, we're friends first, and we don't ever say, 'We don't want to do that' because sometimes bands have egos come into play, and we don't have that in this bunch. We don't have guys that think they have to sing 'X' amount of songs on an album or whatever. We just find what's there and what works and who sings it the best, and if it's Alan or it's Steve or whoever, it doesn't matter, we just do them the way we think they're the best and record them."

There have been satisfying individual accomplishments in recent times as well in addition to Bibey's mandolin award. In 2005, Leadbetter himself became the first - and so far, only - person to break the stranglehold of Jerry Douglas and Blue Highway's Rob Ickes on the IBMA Dobro Player of the Year Award.

And, both Bibey and Leadbetter currently have deals for "signature" models with Gibson, and in Leadbetter's case, it means that for the foreseeable future at least, all instruments bearing the Dobro trademark will have his name stamped on them as well. Capping it all off is the joy in seeing son Matt Leadbetter following in the old man's footsteps at age 22 as Dobro player for the venerable Lonesome River Band. In the end, though, Phil Leadbetter is content to be in a band that speaks in one voice.

"When you play in a band that it doesn't matter who's out there getting credits or what - I don't care about the credits I bring...it's more of a compliment to me when somebody comes up and says, 'The band sounds great,' as opposed to 'You (personally) sounded really good tonight.' I mean, that's all really good, but I'm all about the band."