(Editor’s Note: This essay by Jerry Douglas tells a bit of the story of Boone Creek, a bluegrass and Americana group formed in the late ’70s that released one eponymous album. That LP has been long out of print, but in June was reissued by Craft Recordings. To mark the occasion, Douglas shares memories of the making of the album, which on its reissued edition features four never-before-heard tracks that you can also listen to below.)
Once upon a time there was a band called Boone Creek. The name was taken from a beautiful white limestone-bottomed stream running past a house in the country just outside Lexington, Kentucky. The setting was also used as the location for what became the cover photo for Rounder 0044, JD Crowe & The New South.
The year was 1976 and my forever friend, Ricky Skaggs, and I had a dream for our own band. Our partners were Wes Golding for guitar and vocals and Terry Baucom for fiddle and vocals. A good start. We had no bass player, but soon recruited Freddy Wooten – who had never played bass, but played a mean Les Paul at the hot country bar downtown. He was soon cooking along with the boys, and our friends at Rounder Records offered a recording contract. We needed a banjo player and Terry remembered playing a little banjo when he was a kid. The “Bauc” style of playing this instrument would become an iconic mark on bluegrass music. Who would have thought of that?
We traveled together down to Nashville to the famous studio that housed Starday Records. We jumped right into recording so many songs, many penned by our guitarist Wes Golding and few old standards. Freddy made it through and even added some pedal steel to a couple tracks.
After finishing the Rounder Record, we felt as though we were just hitting our stride. We kept recording and Rounder kept paying to see what we had in us. A newly-formed record company also showed some interest. They were RSO Records and they sent A&R man Spencer Davis to Lexington to see us play, expecting to hear what we had recorded in our newly-minted ’70s soft rock band, Boone Creek. We failed miserably. We had a high-level meeting in the Pizza Hut next door.
We were playing as our bluegrass selves at a Food Town grocery store opening on a flatbed truck. Folks in the parking lot blew their car horns to show their approval. There was an old man named Jimmy Jones doing the emcee work. I kept telling him our band was called Boone Creek and he would wave his hand at me. He introduced us as The Rocky Road Boys for two days.
If only Davis could have heard us in all our soft-rock glory with horns, piano, and drums. Oh well, that’s bluegrass life. We were also offered a huge publishing deal by the Weinstein Bros. of NYC. That scared us back to Lexington and the recording stopped.
When it came time to collect the tapes, it was found that the engineer had absconded with them. We didn’t see them for another 35 years. Some of the tracks had another member, Vince Gill crooning some for-sure-in-our-minds hits. Unfortunately, these tracks did not survive.
Relentless sleuth and Rounder Records founder Ken Irwin located our tapes, but they were in terrible shape sitting on a shelf in a garage in Connecticut. After baking, de-molding, being prayed over by the local priest, and whatever else had to be done to bring them back to playable condition, we can credit the team at Craft Recordings, mixing engineer Steve Reynolds, and mastering engineer Paul Blakemore with a good bit of restoration and mixing these back to health.
We hope you again enjoy Boone Creek’s freshman effort, along with a glimpse back into the ’70s, where the personalities and young dreams of a band gone on safari were never to be completed. This effort formed who we are individually today, though unfortunately we lost Terry in December of 2023.
We thank everyone involved for their tenacity and forward thinking in bringing this remastered lost treasure back into the light. – Jerry Douglas
Image courtesy of Craft Recordings.
