[Partner content]: The eighth annual Suwannee Spring Reunion is less than two weeks out, and the lineup gives attendees plenty of reason to start planning their itineraries. Running March 19th–22nd at the Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park in Live Oak, FL, the festival will bring together a mix of roots, bluegrass, jam, and Americana acts across multiple stages on the park’s 800-acre grounds along the Suwannee River [get tickets].

The most historically significant performance on the 2026 bill is Peter Rowan with Sam Grisman Project, celebrating the music of Old & In the Way—the short-lived but enormously influential bluegrass band that Rowan formed with Jerry Garcia, David Grisman, Vassar Clements, and John Kahn in 1973.

More than 50 years on, the legend of Old & In the Way has only grown. The band’s self-titled debut remains one of the best-selling bluegrass albums ever made. And yet, as Rowan explained in a recent conversation with Live For Live Music, the story of how Old & In the Way came together is, like so many of the most beautiful things, entirely accidental.

By the early 1970s, Rowan had already lived several musical lives. He’d played guitar and sung lead in Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys. He’d co-founded Earth Opera with David Grisman. He’d played with the roots rock group Seatrain. And he’d been slowly migrating west, drawn to California’s looser atmosphere and warmer weather. When he finally settled on the West Coast for good, Grisman—who was then living in Stinson Beach—suggested they go up the hill to see Jerry Garcia.

“One day we were picking guitar and mandolin on the beach, drinking coffee and enjoying being barefoot for probably the last time in our lives,” Rowan recalled. “David said that Garcia’s still up the hill and we could get together. So we did. We went up there and there was Jerry—just joyous and barefoot standing in his yard in a pair of dungarees and a t-shirt playing the banjo.”

That first encounter set the tone for everything that followed. There was no plan, no pitch, no business meeting. Just music.

“That was the beginning of Old & In the Way,” Rowan said. “We just, for the sheer love of doing it, got together every evening instead of watching TV or whatever people might do. We’d go up to Jerry’s house, the kids would be in bed. And we just sat around and played, me and David and Jerry.”

John Kahn joined soon after, and the quartet began making their way through every old bluegrass tune they could remember: “Salty Dog Blues”, Carter Stanley songs, old fiddle tunes—songs that had been sitting in the corners of American music for decades, suddenly lit up again.

“We just hung out and played. We didn’t talk much. It was mostly just being and enjoying the instruments and being free with the instruments.”

If you asked the members of Old & In the Way about their target audience, the answer would have been: nobody in particular.

“There was no bluegrass audience,” Rowan said flatly. “Old & In the Way came out of nowhere.”

And yet people showed up. As the band began playing local clubs, the crowds that materialized were mostly Garcia’s people, Deadheads who had followed Jerry into a new, strange, bluegrass world.

“We’d play over there and Wavy Gravy would be in the audience sitting in a corner with his one-string thing that he played,” Rowan remembered.

Garcia himself was characteristically unpretentious about the whole enterprise. “Jerry would hang around outside the dressing room door and just chat with people,” Rowan said. “He enjoyed chatting with people. But if there was too much groupieness—if he felt uncomfortable, he’d stay in the dressing room. But he was very affable. He was very much a people person.”

The songs Rowan brought to the band were ones he’d been carrying for years—”Midnight Moonlight”, “Panama Red”, “Land of the Navajo”, tunes that Seatrain had never wanted to record. “Seatrain didn’t want to do that kind of funky country kind of thing,” he said. “They were city boys from New York.”

But in Old & In the Way, those songs found their home. And Jerry, for his part, came with his own deep well of traditional material. “Jerry remembered songs and he came up with songs,” Rowan said, citing Carter Stanley’s “White Dove”, “Catfish John”, and others from the old repertoire.

The band reached its final form with the addition of what Rowan called “the magic ingredient”: Vassar Clements on fiddle. And that connection, too, had a quality of near-miraculous timing.

Years before Old & In the Way existed, Rowan had stopped at a party on his way home from New Orleans. Someone was playing a tape that immediately caught his attention.

“I said, ‘Who is that?'” Rowan recalled. “And they said, ‘Oh, that’s Vassar Clements.’ And I said, ‘Oh my God, can you give me his number?’ I don’t know why. I just thought I must have his number.”

He wrote the number down, put it in his wallet, and carried it there for five years. When Old & In the Way needed a fiddle player, he reached into his wallet. The number was still there.

Rowan is thoughtful about what Garcia specifically brought to the music. As a banjo player, he was sui generis. “He added a lot of guitar to the banjo, and perhaps even banjo to the guitar,” Rowan said. “I’ve always been impressed by the fact that he supported the chord changes like a rhythm guitarist. He just supported the song. It was fantastic.”

The band played together for roughly a year and a half before it began to dissolve. The Grateful Dead were picking back up after a brief hiatus, and Garcia’s time and attention were increasingly demanded. David Grisman was moving toward the pure instrumental jazz-grass sound that would become his signature. Rowan himself was finding his own voice as a songwriter.

“The band wasn’t about working things out,” Rowan said. “The band was a spontaneous way station of musical love.”

He paused, then added: “Maybe the innocence of Old & In the Way was just in the pure joy. If you can stay in the joy of it, you could probably go for a long time, but eventually dissatisfaction and ‘I want to do it my way’ and this and that…”

There was never any discussion of the band’s commercial potential—because that was never the point. “We never thought about that,” Rowan said. “Never ever thought about selling records. Old & In the Way was something completely different. It was really just based on love for the music and the buzz. It wasn’t based on any business ideas.”

That purity, Rowan believes, is the key to understanding why the music has lasted. “When I think about it now, it was based on love. We just loved getting together and playing those tunes, whatever tunes they were, old bluegrass tunes, every song we could remember.”

Contrary to what people might assume, Garcia was willing to continue with Old & In the Way—it was Rowan who declined. “Jerry said he wanted to keep the band going and I kind of turned him down, really. He was looking at me to be the organizer, and I just didn’t really feel like doing it.”

Rowan believes Garcia could have made room for it, too. “I think Jerry could have fit Old & In the Way into his schedule, but the Dead were becoming huge at that time. And New Jersey, New York, the East Coast, that was their stomping grounds. I remember we would go up to Jerry’s house and wait for his call from New Jersey from some giant stadium. I think there was a little speakerphone set up and [Jerry’s then-wife] Mountain Girl would turn up the volume and we’d all be with Jerry before the Grateful Dead show, but we were just 3,000 miles away.”

As the pressure of being a rock star mounted, Old & In the Way provided a much-needed outlet for Jerry, something Rowan said he failed to fully appreciate at the time. “Mountain Girl kept saying—and I’m a fool for not realizing what she meant—how important it was for Jerry to have that because it was … I’ll tell you what, it was pure music,” he said.

In the end, the band just drifted apart the way people sometimes do. “The thing about Old & In the Way was there was no leader. There was no leader. And Jerry and David had karma to work out,” Rowan said. “Once people decide that they are dissatisfied, you’re not old enough to know how to be diplomatic. You just kind of move on.”

Jerry Garcia’s presence, by then, had become something impossible to contain. Rowan described the bluegrass festivals they played on the East Coast toward the end of the band’s run—events where the fans and musicians were all in close proximity—and Garcia simply couldn’t handle it. “There were all these Jerry Garcia fans that looked like him. These little short guys in t-shirts with curly hair and they even had this sign that they would wave their hands like Jerry with his missing finger. And it made Jerry uncomfortable. He couldn’t leave the motel. He couldn’t enjoy himself.”

But in the final accounting, Rowan doesn’t dwell on what might have been. He described a late show at a concert hall in Eugene, OR—a difficult night with bad sound, some tension between him and Grisman—and what happened when they came offstage.

“We did our show and we came off stage. And I remember coming in the dressing room and there was this sort of disgruntled feeling, nothing real heavy. And Jerry just looked around and his eyes flared this flame and he just said, ‘No thoughts.’ He was like the Zen master. He just looked as if he had gone, ‘Ha!’ and just blown your mind.”

“And there were no thoughts. Thoughts went away.”

Fifty years later, Rowan has no regrets about letting Old & In the Way run its course rather than forcing it into something it wasn’t.

“It was true to itself,” Rowan said. “It was true to itself as far as it could go. And to have lived long enough to see 50 years of its effect—it was pretty cool.”

Which brings us to Suwannee, and to the reason this music is still alive and moving forward.

Sam Grisman is David Grisman’s son. He grew up inside this music in a way few people ever have—not just hearing Old & In the Way, but absorbing the whole lineage: the Grateful Dead, the Garcia/Grisman collaborations, the roots traditions that fed all of it.

“He grew up as David’s son,” Rowan said of Sam, “and so he knows all Garcia’s music. He knows all the Dawg, Jerry and the Grateful Dead stuff and Old & In the Way. But there’s knowing it and playing it. And then there’s something else that’s not really tangible, which is imperfect, but it’s more beloved. And that’s what Old & In the Way was, really.”

What Rowan finds in Sam’s project isn’t just a tribute band going through the motions—it’s something with its own life. “With Sam, he has a really stellar group of people he’s playing with and they give it their all. It’s almost like a different Old & In the Way,” Rowan said. “What I do with Sam is more of a celebration of these songs and he’s completely open to doing all these different tunes, whichever one, he knows them all. So yeah, it’s a great deal of fun.”

“Sam’s guys are great at spontaneous music,” he added. “And there’s no boundary to what can be done.”

The generational handoff feels right to Rowan—and carries its own kind of meaning. “I’ve spent a lot of time with Sam and I’ve spent a lot of time with his father and Sam is carrying something on that the world needs. The Sam Grisman Project—they’re young enough to go out there and keep doing it, doing it, doing it.”

Peter Rowan has been playing the Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park for a long time—nearly from the beginning, he said. He knows the ground, the trees, the feeling of the place at night.

“Every important part of my musical life has appeared there, from Tex-Mex music to my band The Walls of Time to Old & In the Gray,” he said, referring to Old & In the Way’s 2002 reunion featuring Herb Pedersen and Bryn Bright in place of Garcia and Kahn, respectively. “It’s much bigger than me, but it’s one of those festivals along with Telluride that is like, here’s where you can really do your thing. Here’s where you got some freedom. Nobody’s telling you what to do.”

He speaks of Suwannee with genuine affection—the kind that comes from decades of memories stacked up in a single place. “When we started playing there, what, 30-something years ago, there was still tree frogs chirping away at night and an owl that would fly across the outside stage area at sunset. It has its own folklore.”

The set with Sam Grisman Project will be a celebration of Old & In the Way, but it won’t be a museum piece. And this year, Rowan also has a Sunday set with Jerry Douglas, his collaborator on the album Yonder, which adds yet another dimension to what promises to be a remarkable weekend.

“It’s a reunion,” he said simply. “It’s what it is. It’s a get together and it’s grown into a very, very special thing.”

And to come back with the next generation—Grisman’s son carrying the music that Grisman and Garcia and Rowan made together in a house above Stinson Beach more than half a century ago—feels like exactly the kind of full-circle moment that only music can create.

“To come back there with Sam Grisman and the Project,” Rowan said, “is like full circle in the fact that we’ll do the Old & In the Way show, but Sam will also do the vastness of his repertoire.”

He paused. Then: “This will be the year we do it.”

Get your tickets for Suwannee Spring Reunion here.