The Sam Grisman Project was opening for Peter Rowan and the Sam Grisman Project when Rowan emerged from the wings to join the band that would back him later. 

Like privates when a general enters the room, the Project members snapped to attention. They played little harder, sung a little sweeter—the musicians deeper in concentration and louder in presentation even as they performed into microphones rather than through amplifiers—as Rowan led them through a joyous singalong of “This Land is Your Land” and dedicated a decidedly more-dour “Dustbowl Children” to the victims of Texas flooding. 

SGP’s 65-minute opening set focused on music associated with Sam Grisman’s father, David “Dawg” Grisman, and “Uncle Jerry” Garcia (both bandmates of Rowan in Old & on the Way) with such tracks as “Waiting for a Miracle,” “Jack-a-Roe” and “Anniversary Waltz.” Under the direction of the namesake leader, who cued solos with glances and playfully stared down his bandmates while peeking around his big double bass, the Project—fiddler Shad Cobb, guitarist Max Flansburg, banjoist Victor Furtado, mandolinist Dominick Leslie (Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway and Hawktail) and a Dobro player who came and went nearly as often as Rowan would across the night—shone whether alone or with the man Grisman called “Uncle Peter.” 

“It’s really a treat to get to make acoustic music in a venue like this,” Grisman said early in the July 6 gig at Nelsonville, Ohio’s, Stuart’s Opera House, where Jorma Kaukonen was on hand – he did not perform – to help christen the new home of his Fur Peace concert series. 

Alone, the Project rendered familiar melodies with unfamiliar instrumentation and two- and three-part harmonies from various combinations of singers. Leslie took over the band for a reverent take on Blaze Foley’s “Clay Pigeons;” Grisman turned to Ry Cooder’s songbook for a sinewy reading of “How Can You Keep on Moving” to mark this period of American “madness;” and Flansburg, who played back-porch leads all evening, interpreted Garcia the way Garcia interpreted others when the Project played “Rosalee McFall” during Rowan’s off-stage break in the second set. 

With Rowan, who at 83 remained a supple rhythm and lead acoustic guitarist and retained a broad range of vocals from low moans to high yodels, the band was supportive, sympathetic and awestruck. And though the former Blue Grass Boy  sat out about 30 minutes of the 80-minute main event, Rowan gave everything he had during his stage time. 

Rowan and bassist Grisman – whose many solos were jazzy and as natural as a guitar spotlight – began part two as a foreboding duo, with the former nodding to Kaukonen and admitting to copping his arrangement of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave is Kept Clean” from the Jefferson Airplane/Hot Tuna guitarist. Rowan described such blues standards as antecedents to bluegrass numbers, which quickly followed in the form of a balladic waltz on “The Mississippi Moon,” during which Rowan took a guitar solo before passing it around the six-piece Project, and Old & in the Way’s rambunctious “The Kissimmee Kid,” which found Rowan seated at the back of the stage, watching and listening as Cobb briefly took the reins, bending backward as he sawed like an amped-up lumberjack. 

Rowan, dressed in black, in bare feet and with a wide-brimmed hat, returned from backstage for the homestretch energized. “Land of the Najavo” expanded to the sonic horizon when the elder statesman took a solo and began calling for one from each of his six collaborators. And when Rowan kicked into the song’s trademark vocal incantation on the outro—trance-like, his eyes closed, head back, voice at the top of its register—the audience responded with a standing ovation. 

New Riders of the Purple Sage’s Rowan-penned signature song, “Panama Red” – sung as Ed on the initial verse in honor of the soundman – closed the set proper. And the elder Grisman’s “Old and in the Way” ended the evening in harmonious fashion with a nod to the band that united the bluegrass world and the Grateful Dead universe in a marriage that remains strong despite Rowan and the mostly retired David Grisman being the lone survivors of the titular supergroup.