Acclaimed blue grass artists Franklin Delano “Del” McCoury and David “Dawg” Grisman will perform at the  The Back Porch Festival at the Academy of Music in  Northampton on March 4.

The lead singer/guitarist for Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys from 1963 to 1964, McCoury was the International Bluegrass Music Association’s “Male Vocalist of the Year” in 1991, ’92, and ’93. The Del McCoury Band, with his sons Ronnie and Robin Floyd “Rob”  was “Entertainer of the Year” from 1994 to 1997. Nominated for ten Grammys, McCoury scored “Best Bluegrass Album” awards for The Company We Keep (2006) and The Streets of Baltimore (2014).

“I played with David and my brother at a college in Troy, NY fifty years ago,” McCoury told this writer` in November 2016. “The banjo player was Winnie Winston. Chris Warner replaced Winnie when we played at Carlton Haney’s bluegrass festival. We weren’t there the first year [1965] but we came the second. We weren’t booked but Ralph Rinzler was emceeing and I knew him. I asked if we could play and he said, ‘I’ll put you on last.’ We played the Birchmere Hotel the next night.

“David was mischievous when we met. [Grisman’s mentor and Monroe’s manager] Ralph [Rinzler] had the Blue Grass Boys stay at his house. David’s parents were away on vacation. My brother was with me but he didn’t usually travel with us. He’s three years younger so he would have been 15. It was hard to wake him one morning; we’d been up almost all night. David threw a cherry bomb under his bed.”

York, PA-born McCoury will be rejoining Grisman at the Academy of Music, in Northampton, on Sunday, March 4, the closing night of the fifth annual Back Porch Festival. A founding member of Earth Opera and Seatrain, with Peter Rowan, Old & in the Way, with Garcia and Rowan, and the leader of the David Grisman Quintet (DGQ) and DGBX (David Grisman Bluegrass Experience), Grisman collaborated with Sebastian on a CD in 2007. “I didn’t know he played mandolin,” recalled McCoury, “until he and my brother were playing with Red Allen. He asked Jerry, after I quit Bill [Monroe], if I’d play with him. He was already a great mandolin player.”

Jerry Garcia, whom Grisman met at a Monroe concert in Everson, PA’s Sunset Park, gave him the name “Dawg.” Between classes at NY University, in 1963, he played with the Even Dozen Jug Band. The group recorded only one album but its members would make history. Leader of the Lovin’ Spoonful in the sixties, John Sebastian scored solo success in the seventies. He reunited with Grisman and recorded a duo album, Satisfied (2007). Maria Muldaur (D’Amato) joined Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band, which included her then-husband Geoff Muldaur, and later became a respected, roots-oriented soloist. Steve Katz became a founding member of the Blues Project and Blood, Sweat & Tears. Stefan Grossman broke new ground with his blues/ragtime guitar playing, while Joshua Rifkin gained fame by rearranging Scott Joplin ragtime classics.

McCoury has consistently worked with great mandolinists. His son, Ronnie, who joined the Del McCoury Band in 1981, is an eight-time IBMA “Mandolinist of the Year.”

A longtime friend of “the Father of Newgrass,” Sam Bush, McCoury “was the one who got him singing,” he claimed. “We were playing Carlton Haney’s festival. Sam was booked with his band (the Bluegrass Alliance). He came to where I was jamming and I said, ‘Play one with us.’ He said, ‘I can’t; I mashed my finger in a car door’– one of his picking fingers. He couldn’t play the mandolin. I said, ‘You can sing, can’t you?’ and he said, ‘I’ll try.’ It’s the same with [Grisman]. He has no confidence in his singing. He said, ‘If I sing something wrong, let me know. I know I’m not a good singer.’ I said, ‘No, man. I like singing tenor to your lead. Keep doing what you’re doing.’ David’s a great showman. He’s written some great melodies. He can direct a band with his hair. Of course, he doesn’t have as much as he used to. We get along good but he and Sam don’t – them both being mandolin players. They talk but they can’t be together too long.”

One year shy of his eightieth birthday, McCoury continues to tour with his sons when not playing with Grisman. “David and I have the same booking agent,” he explained. “They book his sextet, his bluegrass band, my band, and Del and Dawg. We have fun when we get together. We tell stories onstage but the best ones we can’t tell in public.”