AMERICANA AMBASSADOR

David Grisman details the historic mandolins, guitars and banjos he played on the Acoustic America album, as exhibited at Arizona's Musical Instrument Museum.

- JIMMY LESLIE

DAVID GRISMAN EMBODIES the concept encapsulated in Acoustic America, the Musical Instrument Museum's new exhibition. The iconic mandolinist, gear collector, musicologist, and former Frets columnist has lived the life Americana.

Inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2023, Grisman has worked with a litany of legends, including guitarists Jerry Garcia, Tony Rice, and Martin Taylor. He founded the Acoustic Disc label in 1990 and has remained dedicated to the preservation and integrity of acoustic music, musicians, and instruments. 

And now, through a partnership with the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, he is presenting the Acoustic America project, an exhibition featuring 90 iconic folk instruments associated with heroes of American music. About a third of the show's pieces come from Grisman's personal collection and appear on a new Acoustic Disc compilation of the same name.

Highlights from Grisman's collection include the 1925 Gibson F-5 "Fern" mandolin he played exactly 50 years ago with the highly influential supergroup Old & In the Way, featuring Garcia on banjo, Vasar Clements on fiddle and Peter Rowan on guitar. There's also the 1918 Gibson MB-4 mandolin-banjo Grisman played on "Stealin'," from the seminal 1996 Garcia/Grisman album, Shady Grove. Rice plays Grisman's 1930s Le Domino flat-top guitar on "Vintage Gintage Blues," a track culled from the sessions that produced the first of Grisman and Rice's three landmark Tone Poems albums that present "The Sounds of the Great Vintage Guitars and Mandolins." "It Had to Be You," from Tone Poems II, features Martin Taylor on Grisman's Gibson Lloyd Loar L-5 while

Grisman conjures a full string section using a trio of Loars - a mandolin, mandola, and mandocello - from the roaring '20s.