A 17-year-old from New Jersey stepping on stage to play mandolin with Doc Watson is where this story begins. This episode follows David Grisman from a Hackensack childhood with a trombonist father, through piano and saxophone lessons that gave him a jazz horn player’s mindset, to the Greenwich Village folk scene, the Even Dozen Jug Band, Red Allen’s Kentuckians and the psychedelic band Earth Opera with Peter Rowan.

The hosts explain how Grisman’s move to San Francisco led to playing on the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty, forming Old and In the Way with Jerry Garcia, Peter Rowan and Vassar Clements, and picking up the nickname Dawg from Garcia. They unpack how dawg music mapped bluegrass picking onto the swinging rhythm of Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli, the original David Grisman Quintet with Darol Anger, Todd Phillips, Joe Carroll and Tony Rice, the 1979 album Hot Dawg on the jazz division of A and M, Grappelli’s guest appearances, the Car Talk theme Dawggy Mountain Breakdown, the founding of Acoustic Disc in 1990, his 2007 lawsuit against YouTube, his family’s creative careers, and his 2023 induction into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame.

• How piano and saxophone training shaped a horn-like approach to the mandolin
• Grisman’s role as a bridge between the acoustic folk world and Jerry Garcia’s rock counterculture
• The rhythmic secret that made bluegrass and gypsy jazz work together as dawg music
• Why he left the major labels to build Acoustic Disc as a sanctuary for acoustic artists
• How the bluegrass establishment finally embraced a lifelong rule-breaker