It's often said that sequels seldom live up to the originals that spawned them.

Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. Only time - perhaps more importantly, some very picky, eclectic fans - will tell whether David Grisman, Peter Rowan and Vassar Clements made the right move by daring to record Old & in the Gray, a follow-up to the seminal 1975 bluegrass-folk classic "Old & in the Way."

That album featured a banjo-picking, high-lonesome crooning Jerry Garcia, who had forged a fanatical following as the leader of the Grateful Dead.

Old & in the Way, like most anything Garcia touched, turned legions of Deadheads in a new musical direction. Naturally, Garcia, Grisman and Rowan didn't set out to record what in a short period of time became one of bluegrass music's most influential records.

Yet, within several months of its 1975 release, the album, which had been pared down from two nights of live recordings at the Boarding House in San Francisco into a single 10-song disc, hit the pop charts and sent thousands of Deadheads rifling through record bins searching for the music of Bill Monroe and Ralph and Carter Stanley.

In the same sense, this year's Old & in the Gray doesn't pretend to be a groundbreaking record. Grisman, Rowan and Clements recruited veteran banjo picker and vocalist Herb Pedersen to replace Garcia, who died in August 1995. They also needed a new bassist, since John Kahn died 10 months after Garcia. The choice was Bryn Bright, who along with brother Billy Bright, plays alongside both Rowan and Tony Rice. For the record, she isn't gray or necessarily old, but she does thump a fine stand-up bass.

Old & in the Gray's 14 tracks offer a rather free-spirited collection of tunes - several penned by Rowan, a fiddle tune from Clements and, like the original, a selection from the Rolling Stones.

While it may lack the spontaneity of Old & in the Way, Grisman, Rowan et al go to great lengths to retain the musical and vocal qualities that made the original album so endearing.

As much as Kahn was a part of Old & in the Way, it was Garcia's contribution that created the legacy. And Rowan acknowledges the contribution.

"Jerry was a one-man universe," says Rowan while he was on the road, headed for a gig with Grisman, Clements, Bright and Rice in north Florida.

"Jerry allowed us to be part of his universe. We all had a love for music and for each other. But ultimately, we each had to consider our own musical growth. The Dead was the band that owned our banjo player. Jerry just grew faster and sooner than everybody else."

Rowan became familiar with Pedersen's music in the late 1960s through Grisman, who'd picked in various ensembles in the Bay Area with Pedersen several years earlier. But it wasn't until the mid-'90s that Pedersen and Rowan finally performed on stage together during the earliest stages of Old & in the Gray. He was pleased Pedersen took the challenge of filling Garcia's rather large shoes along with a musical legacy few have attained.

"Herb was part of Dave's early bands in the '60s," Rowan says. "Our first gig together was in 1996 at one of Dave's Birthday Bashes. Jerry had just died, and Dave had wanted to put out more of the Old & in the Way tapes. We wanted to memorialize Jerry, but we also wanted to carry on Old & in the Way.

"Dave suggested Herb. He's a brilliant singer. He hit the tenor parts, and his banjo playing was so..." Rowan pauses to find the words, "right in there. He has timing like Earl Scruggs. To be part of Old & in the Way, you have to have roots. What gives Old & in the Gray its pedigree is who we stood next to."

Pedersen likewise admires Rowan's talents.

"Dave and Pete go way back to (Bill Monroe's) Blue Grass Boys," says Pedersen during a phone interview from his home in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley. "Pete's the consummate Irish tenor. He has a wonderful voice, but he's not just stuck in bluegrass. And Dave has his jazz talents."

After Old & in the Way fell apart, Grisman's quintet began its lengthy run of Dawg music - the name Garcia gave him in Old & in the Way - which over the years included the likes of Mark O'Connor, Tony Rice, Mike Marshall, Darol Anger, Richard Greene, Todd Phillips, Russ Barenberg, John Carlini and Rob Wasserman

After Garcia died, Pedersen got a call from Grisman to gauge his interest in Old & in the Gray.

"I was a logical choice," he says, "since Jerry and I came from the same background both musically and geographically."

Pedersen and Garcia ran in ' the same musical circles in the early '60s, though Pedersen was from Berkeley, and Garcia had grown up across the San Francisco Bay in Palo Alto. Grisman ultimately joined that same circle after moving to Berkeley in the early 1960s.

"I met first Dave when I was in the Pine Valley Boys in Berkeley," says Pedersen, who joined Grisman's Smokey Grass Boys and went on to be a key member of Southern California's early country rock scene, playing on two of The Dillards' most influential albums - "Wheatstraw Suite" and "Copperfields." "We started our friendship back then, and we've been in touch all those years."

Pedersen recalls that even though Garcia was picking a banjo when they first met, he was into fiddle tunes.

"We had different styles; we'd play together from time to time, but it was like two piano players. We both approached it differently."

Nonetheless, Pedersen was a huge fan of Garcia's.

"Jerry was a good banjo player," says Pedersen, who along with Chris Hillman founded the Desert Rose Band in the late 1980s. "He had a bouncy style; it was different, but he came from a different place."

Pedersen said he added his two cents to Old & in the Gray, as everyone brought ideas to the table for the new record. Pedersen sings lead vocals on the first part of Townes Van Zandt's "Pancho and Lefty" and also takes lead on "Let Those Brown Eyes Smile at Me" and on "Childish Love."

With all that talent in the studio, much of the recording was done live, Pedersen says.

"We would take three or four stabs at each tune and take the best one," he says. "That's the way Dave works."

Pedersen never saw Old & in the Way live - the band only performed 18 club dates, 4 auditorium concerts, 3 school performances, a radio show and a bluegrass festival. But he appreciated their music.

"They each came from diverse backgrounds, so the bluegrass was kind of loose," Pedersen says. "I'm kind of a note nazi, but the music had a great feel to it. It appealed to the second-generation Dead audience. It was from the hip, but it was also from the heart."

For Rowan's part, there was never any hesitation to rekindle Old & in the Way, even after Garcia had died.

"I was always prodding Dave, 'When we going to do it?'" he says.

It's been almost 30 years - Old & in the Gray's release date coincided with Old & in the Way's original live recordings in October 1973 - and it's just a new chapter in the band's evolution, he says.

"Gray is the next move," he says. "The first Old was a move. We just didn't have a next move at the time."

Ironically, Old & in the Way's recordings took place the same year the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band released "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," which also featured Clements on fiddle and is still considered as one of the historic bluegrass albums of all time. The original album was re-released earlier this year, along with a third volume that came out this fall.

It's a point not entirely lost on Rowan.

"Old & in the Way opened it up," he says. "The Dirt Band brought out all those Grand Ole Opry stars like Roy Acuff. It's like hitching a ride on a comet. If you can play that naked music with all its realities, it's a very good feeling."

"When Old first came out, we were na•ve fools. It was on the pop charts. We probably could have done more with it, but we did it because we really loved it. It was a project where we didn't have to worry about marketing it."

A fun, loose collaboration it may have been. Yet it seemed to mean a little more for Grisman, Rowan says.

"With Dave, the next move was to reunite with Garcia," he says. "It gave him recognition, which was something he craved."

Ultimately Grisman and Garcia reunited in the early '90s for several albums on Grisman's Acoustic Disc label. It also spawned last year's documentary "Grateful Dawg."

Shortly after Garcia's death, Grisman released "That High Lonesome Sound," a 14-song collection of previously unreleased live Old & in the Way songs. The following year Acoustic Disc issued another collection, "Old & in the Way: Breakdown," 18 more live songs culled from the same San Francisco club dates that provided the tapes for initial release.

Grisman was quoted in another interview how their performances and recordings in the 1990s came about:

"Jerry came over to my house one day, checked out my home studio and asked me, 'How about putting out some more Old and in the Way tapes?' I said, 'Frankly Jerry, I'd rather see us put out something new, we can put out old tapes when we're in wheelchairs.'"

As well as being artistically successful, the Garcia and Grisman partnership also gave Grisman the finances needed to continue his Acoustic Disc record label. As Grisman noted in another interview, "Jerry kind of takes care of the profitable part."

Rowan sympathizes with that aspect as well.

"Dave has an entire band to support and a record label to run," Rowan says. "Old & in the Gray might cause a conflict for him with his quintet. We'll hopefully have our own shot, but it's getting to an agreement to do something with it."

"I hope we do some shows. But we won't just be a cover band for Old & in the Way. We don't want to do that. We'll peel back the skin and get to the meat."

By Jon Johnson
To most of the world, Douglas Green is better known as Ranger Doug, Idol of American Youth and the yodeling guitarist of cowboy trio (sometimes a quartet) Riders in the Sky. Longtime readers of country music journalism, however, know him as a first-rate scholar of singing cowboy films and records, even predating the formation of his band in late 1977.

And though the Riders keep Green on the road for much of the year, over the past 5 years, the 56-year-old Green has found the time to write "Singing in the Saddle: The History of the Singing Cowboy," published in October by Vanderbilt University Press and the Country Music Foundation.

It's an impressive volume; close to 400 pages detailing the roots of cowboy songs in the late 19th century and tracing the rise and fall of the genre on stage, screen, radio and records through the 20th century.

It could easily be said that it's the book Green was born to write given his vocation of the past quarter-century.

"I felt then - as I feel now - that singing cowboys are kind of overlooked by music historians," says Green in a telephone interview from his band's tour bus while en route from Nashville to an engagement in Minnesota. "They've been touched (upon) by film historians, but it was mostly the 'Oh-gosh-aw-shucks' school. I think (music historians) thought it was 'too Hollywood.' Too slick. Not folk enough."

"That is true, but ignores, for example, everything the Sons of the Pioneers did or wrote, because they certainly came out of a folk or authentic background. As authentic as could be, really."

Born in Illinois in 1946, Green was just old enough to catch the tail end of the singing cowboy era.

"I was a Saturday afternoon front-row kid. I loved those movies," says Green. "I loved watching Roy and Gene on television, and music was a big part of our house. We spent a lot of time in California when I was a kid, and I think that's where I got into going to the movies. Going to Knox Berry Farms and hearing guys actually singing this stuff live made a big impression on me."

Following college (during which time Green served two brief stints as one of Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Boys) and graduate school, Green signed on as editor of the prestigious Journal of Country Music between 1974 and 1977.

During this time, he wrote the 1976 book "Country Roots: The Origins of Country Music." More important, though, was his lengthy essay, "Singing Cowboy: An American Dream," which appeared in a 1978 issue of the magazine and served as the genesis of his new book.

Green says that he had considered expanding the original essay into a book soon after the essay had been published, but a lack of time due to family and band commitments kept the project on a slow track until relatively recently.

"I had two publishers approach me, but neither wanted to pay any kind of advance. And I was just starting Riders in the Sky at the time, so naturally I didn't have the time or energy to do it. So, I just kept reading, collecting information, got to know people, did interviews and collected pictures - but with no particular plan in mind. The things that sent it over the top were the invention of the laptop computer and bookings at casinos that lasted (up to) two weeks, where you really don't have anything to do but go down and do a show between 8 and 10. And boy, that's a lot of free time."

Dating the start of the singing cowboy era is a little difficult since there was a thin line between a traditional western featuring a few songs (1929's "In Old Arizona" was the first of these) and the full-blown musical westerns that began appearing in 1933, including Ken Maynard's "The Strawberry Roan" and John Wayne's lone film as Singin' Sandy, "Riders of Destiny," in which Wayne's singing voice was overdubbed by Bill Bradbury.

In any event, by 1934, film studios were tripping over each other trying to make singing cowboy movies, partly because it was far cheaper to film someone singing and playing guitar than it was to film action sequences such as fights, Indian raids and horseback chase scenes.

Intriguingly, a few key figures in Green's book - particularly Gene Autry and Bob Nolan - were notorious for a certain reluctance to talk much about their careers.

Autry, for example, was generally uninterested in discussing his early recordings of the late '20s and early '30s, many of which were strongly influenced by Jimmie Rodgers.

"I really don't know why that is," says Green. "He was a lot more interested in talking about who he'd met. He scarcely mentioned Jimmie Rodgers at all, and he goes into loads of stuff on Kate Smith. He was an odd duck in that way. Maybe it was so long ago that he was much more interested in talking about the future of the California Angels (who Autry had owned until his death in 1998)."

Manitoba-born Bob Nolan, co-founder of and chief songwriter for the Sons of the Pioneers, also comes across in Green's book as a little mysterious, resisting at least one attempt by Columbia studio head Harry Cohn to spin the ' handsome, strapping Nolan off into feature roles of his own.

Following the departure in 1948 of another of the group's founding singer/songwriters, Tim Spencer, Nolan too left the group, recording only on rare occasions after the '50s until his death from a heart attack in 1980.

"He had a famous reputation as a recluse," says Green of Nolan, who wrote timeless cowboy numbers such as "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" and "Cool Water," among others. "He was apparently an artist and a dreamer. But he was more of a regular guy than you'd think. He wasn't a hermit or a grouch. He was a very nice man. He seemed very open and honest with his feelings. I wish I'd had more time with him, really."

One singing cowboy who Green not only got to know well, but actually performed and recorded with was Roy Rogers. Forever linked with Autry both in terms of sheer popularity and the success of his post-war business dealings, it was perhaps appropriate that Autry and Rogers died within three months of each other in 1998.

"I try not to be starstruck, but it was very hard not to be that way around him. He was very much the guy you see on screen. He was not pretentious; just the guy next door who happens to be a cowboy hero. I think he enjoyed working with us because we reminded him of the days when he started the (Sons of the) Pioneers. The last 30 years of his performing career, he mostly had country bands (with) drums, that steady beat. And with us, it harkened back to that airy acoustic sound. We did 'Hee-Haw' (with him in 1988) and sat around the dressing room singing the old songs. And, man, he looked 20 years younger. He kept saying, 'This is great! This is just like when we started!'"

Though it seems that no one set out to make 'the final singing cowboy picture,' most saw the end coming, and Rex Allen's 1954 release "Phantom Stallion" marked the finish of the singing cowboy, at least as far as films were concerned.

As Gene Autry later wrote, "There were no farewell toasts, no retirement dinner with someone handing out a pocket watch for 20 years of faithful service."

The movies simply stopped being made. Autry had hung up his spurs the previous year with "Last of the Pony Riders," and Roy Rogers had called it quits in 1951, except for a few cameo roles here and there in later years.

Most of the others had quit even before that; Tex Ritter closed the bunkhouse door for the last time in 1945, for instance.

Asked why it all ended, Green replies that the answers are really fairly simple.

"Well, my supposition in the book was partly (because of) television, which is what everybody blamed at the time. And partly because public tastes change. What was popular in the '70s and '80s isn't popular now. Same thing with singing cowboys. The sunny depression-era 'forget-your-troubles' fantasies of those movies didn't really suit people who'd been overseas in World War II, had seen real death firsthand and were genuinely worried about the future of the world. It wasn't a fantasy that sustained itself too much after the war."

After their last musical westerns appeared, most of the singing western heroes moved into other areas of show business.

The great black singing cowboy of the late '30s, Herb Jeffries, gained wider fame with Duke Ellington's band between 1940 and 1942 before going solo, and was still recording as recently as the mid-'90s. Rogers and Autry both made successful TV shows that ran until later in the '50s, and both continued to record and perform even after their TV shows ended, though Autry had retired even from these activities by the early '60s.

Others, such as Jimmy Wakeley and Tex Ritter, pursued successful careers as country performers, only occasionally recording western material.

The last few years have taken a deep toll on the remaining ranks of the singing cowboys of the pre- and post-war years. In the past four years alone, Autry, Rogers and his wife Dale Evans, and Rex Allen have all passed away.

And though a number of singing cowboys whose careers began on TV in the late '40s and '50s - such as Rex Trailer and Kenny Roberts - are still alive, Green says that only 81-year-old Monte Hale and Jeffries, 91, survive from the pre-television era.

Still, western music has enjoyed something of a revival over the past couple of decades. Much of that can be credited to the efforts of Green and his bandmates; "Woody Paul" Chrisman, Fred "Too Slim" LaBour and Joey the CowPolka King.

Though other western-oriented acts perform and record today with distinction, including Michael Martin Murphey, Sons of the San Joaquin and Don Edwards, there's little doubt about which act has the highest visibility.

Interestingly enough, Green's book is being published on the eve of his own group's 25th anniversary, with plans for a new album and the impending publication of a book covering the group's history.

"You hope that what you do will leave a lasting enough mark to give you a career," says Green. "But no musician with any sense at all can really expect it. Certainly I didn't. It's both a vindication and a real delight. Whatever it is, it's still working," adding that he attributes the group's longevity to "separate hotel rooms."

Asked if children today still look at cowboys with awe in the same way that he did when he was a boy, Green says, "Yeah, I think so. Very much. They don't see them as much as when I was a kid, but I think the image and the appeal of the cowboy is the same to little kids as it ever was. We play for kids now, and they love the big hats, the furry chaps and that western beat."

"I'm glad John Lasseter tapped into that with Woody in the 'Toy Story' movies. I think that kids still react to that sense of wonder that he had - the cowboy hero who's a little bit corny, but you still love him."

Photo by Rob Bleetsein