An Interesting Post Brings Back Memories

The following post and reply were taken from the Western Pennsylvania Bluegrass Committee discussion site. I thought it would be of general interest.


Hard to believe it's been almost 20 years... I'm sure there are at least a few on this list who used to attend the Beaver Valley Bluegrass Festival that the Beaver Creek Bluegrass Band used to hold at Brady's Run Park in Beaver County back in the eighties and nineties. And what a festival it was. I sorely miss it.
Some of the biggest names in bluegrass were playing in our own back yard each Memorial Day weekend. It was there I first saw Bill Monroe, Ralph Stanley, Tony Rice, Hot Rize, Doyle and Quicksilver, and many other top bluegrass acts of the day. You don't really appreciate something like that until it's gone.
Rich or Randy Ord, if you're reading this, thank you. Anyway, Del McCoury was one of the headliners in 1989, and one of his sets, during which David Grisman and Sam Bush sat in on a few numbers, was recorded, and can now be downloaded freely and legally from this page:http://www.archive.org/details/del1989-05-27lateflac
A few words of caution:The files are huge and are in FLAC format, which is a lossless audio format that you probably can't play directly in Windows Media Player (I can't) and probably can't play directly in WinAmp either (I can't). You'll need to download a decoder to convert them to WAV files, which you can play directly, burn to a CD, or convert to MP3. There are probably lots of free decoders available; I got one from here:http://flac.sourceforge.net/download.html
The interface is non-intuitive, so you should probably be fairly handy with computers before attempting to use it. If you're not, enlist a friend who is. It's well worth the effort. The sound quality isn't superb, but it isn't bad either. And Del and the boys are absolutely on fire for this set.

Reply:

I was back on the side of the stage when this took form. David Grisman was playing with Del McCoury. David broke a string and came off stage to change it. Sam Bush was hanging out backstage so David told Sam to grab his mandolin and go back up with him. They would do a 3 mandolin thing with Ronnie McCoury. Sam grumbled that David and Ronnie where warmed up and he was coming up cold but he did it.It was amazing.I am glad there is a recording of it.
Rich Ord-