Vassar Clements, 77; Bluegrass Fiddler Also Played Jazz, Rock and Country

Vassar Clements, a legendary fiddler who launched his career with Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry in 1949 and later toured or recorded with a raft of musical stars, including the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers and Paul McCartney, died Tuesday. He was 77.

Clements died in his home near Nashville after suffering from cancer, said his daughter, Midge Cranor. He last performed earlier this year in Jamestown, N.Y.

Born in 1928 in Kinard, Fla., and raised in Kissimmee, Fla., Clements began playing guitar as a child. He later switched to the violin, which he taught himself to play by listening to the Grand Ole Opry, especially Bill Monroe’s famed Blue Grass Boys with fiddler Chubby Wise.

“I copied Chubby’s licks down note for note,” Clements once said.

After playing locally as a teenager, he went to Nashville and dazzled Monroe with his knowledge of Wise’s playing. Monroe hired him for his band in 1949.

“Bill was like my father,” Clements told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2002. “We’d be riding in the car, and he’d hum a tune and say, ‘This reminds me of my Uncle Pen up in Kentucky. Why don’t you figure out how to finish it?’ We wrote a lot of tunes that way.”

Clements later toured with the Virginia Boys’ Jim and Jesse McReynolds, bluegrass musicians who also were regulars on Grand Ole Opry.

Although he was best-known for bluegrass, Clements played in a wide variety of musical genres, including jazz, rock and country. He recorded with French violinist Stephane Grappelli, Cream, the Monkees, Linda Ronstadt and dozens of other bands and artists.

Clements, who never learned to read music, also played with Jerry Garcia’s Old & In the Way band, and his distinctive fiddling could be heard on the Grateful Dead’s “Wake of the Flood” and hundreds of other albums in nearly every musical style.

“The bluesy bottom and dark tone that makes a Clements tune so recognizable and emotional evolved as he developed his own techniques, including a unique left-hand approach, unusual double and triple stops and heavy, yet economical bowing,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote of Clements in 1999.

A 1976 Times’ review called Clements “probably the best country fiddler alive.”

For much of the 1960s, Clements struggled with alcohol. During part of that decade, he worked at several jobs outside music including as a plumber, an insurance agent and a potato chip franchisee.

But by the late ‘60s he was back as a session musician in Nashville. In the 1970s, he signed on as a fiddle player in the Earl Scruggs Revue at a time when bluegrass music was enjoying wide popularity.

Clements joined with Scruggs, Merle Travis, Doc Watson, Jimmy Martin and others in 1972 on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s genre-breaking “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” The best-selling album helped “open the eyes and ears of pop fans to sounds that contributed to the birth of rock ‘n’ roll while opening doors in country music to new musical possibilities,” Times music writer Randy Lewis wrote in 2002 when the album was re-released.

Speaking of Clements, the Nitty Gritty’s Jeff Hanna told Associated Press that although Clements got his start in bluegrass, “he was equally comfortable playing bebop and jazz and rock ‘n’ roll, and he loved all those genres. He could sit in with anybody.”

Among his many albums are “Crossing the Catskills,” “Superbow” and “Hillbilly Jazz Rides Again.” He was nominated for Grammys several times, sharing with Scruggs and others in a “best country instrumental performance” award for Nitty Gritty’s “Earl’s Breakdown” in 2005. He appeared in Robert Altman’s 1975 film “Nashville.”

Clements’ wife and longtime manager, Millie, died in 1998. Besides his daughter Midge, of Goodlettsville, Tenn., he is survived by three other daughters -- Terry Mason of Tallahassee, Fla.; Renee Clements of Thomasville, Ga.; and Terri Swain of Fairview, Tenn. -- his son George Wilkerson of Orlando, Fla; and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Services are pending.