In his four-decade career as a professional musician, Peter Rowan has evolved into a mythical sort of character. Legends and rumors about his performances and personality continue to make their rounds amongst both fans and detractors.

This is, after all, a man who has worked with both Bill Monroe and Jerry Garcia. He's collaborated with flamenco guitarists, conga drummers, reggae musicians… and he still gigs with guys like Tony Rice and Vassar Clements.

He wasn't even a Blue Grass Boy for very long - less than two years, all told; he drove the bus, booked shows, and played music. But how could that experience not mark a man forever?

Listen to his covers of Monroe classics on 1986's The First Whippoorwill, or anything off Bluegrass Boy, Rowan's album of traditional originals released a decade later. It just doesn't get higher or more lonesome than that.

Peter Rowan's ancestors came to America from Ireland in the late nineteenth century, settling in Massachusetts. Born in 1942, Rowan grew up in a house his grandfather had built in a small rural town called Wayland, roughly ten miles from Thoreau's Walden Pond. “I have this memory of approaching this meadow at the top of a little road. Some years later, I walked up there early one morning after a sleepless night playing music. I realized that I had never been that tall since the time my father had carried me up there. I was being taken into the meadow, being shown the beauties of nature.”

Paul Donovan Rowan, a textile product salesman for the American Thread Company, noted the early presence of musical talent in his young son. “He saw me mesmerized by instruments and music,” Rowan recalls. “I would stand in front of a band all night and listen.”

Thanks to dancing lessons and attendance at square dances around New England, young Rowan was exposed to bluegrass and old-time music. Zany bandleader Spike Jones was one of his earliest influences. “I just loved that Dixie-outlandish style. I built a banjo out of a pie plate, a piece of wood and some wires and screws. It didn't tune very well, but it had great rhythm.”

When Rowan turned twelve years old, his father gave him an Arthur Godfrey plastic baritone ukelele. “There were a bunch of songbooks around the house, and I just started learning stuff,” he recalls. That summer, after eating half a blueberry pie, he wrote his first song - a woeful lament called “Blueberry Blues”.

Throughout their childhood, Rowan and his younger brothers Chris and Lorin lived in a sort of tuneful fantasy world. “It's like we shared this great game, better than Monopoly! It was called music,” says Lorin Rowan. “We all were just drawn to it.”

At 14, Rowan and a few friends formed the Cupids, playing Elvis and Buddy Holly tunes for dances and similar events. “The highlight was playing a real booking, a Catholic girls' school spring party. To be that age among 150 girls, playing music… they were a very supportive audience!”

Rowan's father continued to send young Peter to school, and to Colgate University for a time, but his plans for his son changed, particularly after he got polio in the early 1950s. “Dad began to see that the world wasn't gonna end up for me the same way it had for him. After he got polio, he lost his momentum. His attitude became more and more free. When he saw me trying to become a professional musician, I think the little spark in him was like, 'Yeah! Peter can give it a try.'”

That's exactly what young Rowan did. He left Colgate University in 1963 and joined the Mother Bay State Entertainers in Cambridge. He started playing with Bill Keith and Jim Rooney. Then Bill Monroe came to town, needing a band.

“I began to listen to his music exclusively,” says Rowan, who until then had listened mostly to Flatt and Scruggs and Jimmy Martin. “This strange, cranky, solitary vibe, this voice of his, had something to it that was more intriguing.”

By the early 1960s, Monroe's popularity had faded in the South, where he'd been a star for three decades. However, folk music's increasing popularity among a new demographic - the 18-25 year-olds in the Northeast - propelled him into the spotlight again. “Ralph Rinzler saw a way of promoting Bill as the Father of Bluegrass. We did a lot of shows with Doc Watson as two representatives of the mountain tradition. The kids responded. It was a whole new audience.”

Monroe returned to the South, but not before telling Rowan, “Pete, you ought to come to Nashville; I can hep you.”

“I didn't know what that meant!” laughs Rowan. “I took it as an invitation to join his band.” He made the trek to Nashville for the DJ Convention in October 1963. “I called him when we got into town. He said, 'Well, I have a man workin' for me now, and I'll have to see what I can do.' So I started living over in this little house on West End Avenue, waiting to hear from Bill.”

Rowan went to the Opry regularly, always making it a point to see what was going on with the band. After a few weeks, Monroe made his move. “He said, 'Well, come and play the Opry this Friday and Saturday night.' I was higher than a kite from the exhilaration! 'Can this be real? Am I really in Nashville? Am I really gonna play with Bill Monroe on the Grand Ole Opry?' I had to keep pinching myself.”

A 12-year-old kid named Sam Bush got his dad to take him to the Grand Ole Opry shortly after Rowan joined the band. “That is the first night I ever saw Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys,” Bush recalls. “I just remember hearing Peter and Bill sing. It was so tight. It sounded almost as if Bill was overdubbing with himself. Almost like two Bills.”

And so it began: life as a Blue Grass Boy. Former band members often describe their time with Monroe as a sort of bluegrass boot camp. “We were driving this old wreck of a bus; it had belonged to Lonzo and Oscar,” says Rowan. “It had a scene on the side with these blue geese flying through the air. It was variously known as the Blue Goose or the Blue Grass Breakdown. I don't think we ever got out of town where we didn't have to stop for repairs before the night was over.”

Right away, Rowan began learning to relate to his enigmatic new boss. “I was just beginning to articulate my own thoughts with my peers up in Cambridge. Then I went to Nashville where nobody talked! But I'd spent a lot of time in silence, growing up in the Massachusetts woodlands. And Bill was a very silent man. You'd sit on the bus, and maybe he'd pick up an instrument, and maybe you'd pick up an instrument… you wouldn't say two words for three days, but you'd play music.”

Sometimes Monroe would allow his young protégé a rare glimpse into his private world. “I started asking him questions about where he was from, his music, how he saw things. I was 22! I didn't know any better. He opened up, and that would make the silences more poignant.”

One morning, somewhere near Horse Cave, Kentucky, Rowan found himself standing outside the broken-down bus, watching the sunrise. “I remember looking over this valley. The mist was rising and it was silent, except for the birds singing. Bill walked up and said, 'Now, you listen good to this, and don't you ever forget it!'” Monroe sang two lines to a hauntingly beautiful melody:

The wind is blowing 'cross the mountains,
And down o'er the valley way below.

Thinking about Wuthering Heights, and the mystical motif of love beyond death that is the key ingredient in so many potent bluegrass tunes, Rowan added the next two lines:

It sweeps the grave of my darling,
When I die, that's where I want to go.

Sam Bush closely followed the Blue Grass Boys after he heard them at the Ryman, attending Monroe's weekly Brown Country Jamboree in Bean Blossom, Indiana, whenever he could make the trip. “I was in the audience one of the first times they ever performed 'The Walls Of Time,'” he remembers. “When they did it as a duet all the way through, it was incredible. I'm getting chills right now telling about it.”

The song was a showstopper. But after a seemingly inconsequential incident in which Rowan questioned the wisdom of adding a Tom Paxton tune to the band's repertoire, Monroe's attitude began to chill. “We never recorded 'The Walls Of Time,'” Rowan says quietly. “We'd gone into the studio, and all the things we'd worked on, except 'Midnight on the Stormy Deep', were excluded from the recording sessions. I began to feel that Bill had an agenda that was exclusive of what I was hoping to get out of the experience. When it came to creativity, Bill was used to the Blue Grass Boys contributing. That was just part of your gig.”

Rowan wanted more. In late 1965, he gave Monroe several months' notice, and began to think about life after the Blue Grass Boys. In Monroe's mind, Rowan had already moved on. He was given fewer solos and effectively frozen out of performances. In February 1966, he left the band for good. His next gig could not have been more different.

Earth Opera was a tremendous counteraction to the rigidly egocentric world of Bill Monroe. “David Grisman and I made a valiant effort to do something different. I had felt the racing, pulsing, driving rhythms of bluegrass. It was a transition of relaxing the groove, almost playing legato style. I was so interested in rebelling, striking out in a new direction from what I felt were the limitations of bluegrass, that I didn't consider relaxing and taking a baby step.” After recording and touring with Earth Opera (and opening frequently for The Doors), Rowan worked for a time with Sea Train, a rock-fusion band that would record in London with Beatles producer George Martin.

Paul Donovan Rowan passed away in 1970. “We had loving parents,” says Lorin Rowan. “They weren't perfect; they had marital problems. Alcoholism was there… They didn't work it all out. They came close to finding a way. I was the last to leave, and they were always talking: 'Lorin's gonna be moving out, and we'll see what it's like, just the two of us. Maybe it'll be better.' Then he died.”

Peter Rowan's father had lived to see some of his early successes; his mother died in the late 1980s. “It must have been stranger than anything they could have imagined. It was a whole new world,” he says. “Bill Monroe actually said, 'Pete, your dad is a fine man, and you ought to do exactly as he says.' I didn't understand what he meant [then], but I do now. It wasn't that you had to do everything your dad wanted you to. But while you had the opportunity to listen to everything he had to say, it was precious time.”

In 1973, Rowan got together with David Grisman, Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, fiddler Vassar Clements, and bassist John Kahn. Over a nine-month period, Old And In The Way performed at 30 shows attended by “Deadheads” and open-minded bluegrass lovers. Bootleg recordings of those shows became so popular that an official release was forced two years after the band's demise.

“Such a riotous experience!” Rowan reminisces. “I don't think it ever crossed my mind that anything about it would be classic. One of the things I was looking for was a strong experience of the moment. The recording process of Earth Opera was frustrating; in rehearsal, you'd find a moment, and then you'd get to the studio, and the moment would be portrayed. Same thing with Sea Train… a bunch of people wanting the sound to be their moment.”

With a band that never really got around to recording in a traditional setting, however, Rowan found the spontaneity and purity he'd been seeking. “We spent maybe an afternoon in the studio. We all looked at each other and said, 'No. That's not it.' It sounded forced.” Meanwhile, Owsley “Bear” Stanley, infamous sixties acid cook and sound wizard, was everywhere, “recording our every thought,” laughs Rowan. “In the dressing room, the hallway, wherever we were, constantly playing back what we sounded like. We were already going through the recording process in our live shows. In terms of unadulterated fun and the spark of the moment, we proved that when it's happening, it's there.”

Vassar Clements took the wild scene in stride. “As long as there's music involved, I don't pay any attention to much else,” he chuckles. “I think we rehearsed one night and started out the next night, and became real good friends before I even knew who was who. All the people in that band was from different types of music. When they got together and it gelled, it just came out some of the best I ever heard.”

The casual nature of the band's existence probably contributed to its demise. “It played a very important part in Jerry's life, and I think it could have [been] bigger, had we been willing to do more than just have the moment,” comments Rowan. “David wanted to do Dawg music, and that kind of ended [it]. Jerry said to me, 'David wants to do something else, but I still want to do this.' I just let it go, and started playing with my brothers.”

Since 1972, Peter, Chris and Lorin Rowan have collaborated on four “brother” albums. A fifth, Crazy People, has just been finished. Ten years in the making, it features guests Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, and Flaco Jimenez, and consists mostly of original tunes based on the music of the Boswell Sisters, a swing group popular in the 1930s.

Over the last three decades, Rowan's had his hands full with a variety of projects. He recorded Muleskinner with Grisman, Clarence White, and Richard Greene. He made his eponymous Flying Fish album with the timeless live versions of “Midnight Moonlight” and “Land of the Navajo”. He recorded two live Tex-Mex albums with Flaco Jimenez, and, after a visit to Ireland, The Walls of Time on Sugar Hill Records. He wrote hit songs for Janie Fricke, George Strait, and Ricky Skaggs. He toured Equador on a State Department-sponsored visit with Mark O'Connor, and performed in countless small English folk venues. He recorded New Moon Rising with the Nashville Bluegrass Band, a Grammy finalist for Best Bluegrass Album in 1988. He wrote and recorded Dust Bowl Children, his best-selling album thus far. He worked with Czech group Druha Trava on their critically acclaimed New Freedom Bell. He reunited with his brothers on Awake Me In The New World, an album with Afro-Cuban, Latin, and Caribbean flavors that recounted Columbus' discovery of the New World. He wrote dozens of tunes, including classics like “Panama Red”, “That High Lonesome Sound,” and “Midnight Moonlight.”

Two projects conceived late in this period merit special mention. Yonder, a collaboration between Rowan and Jerry Douglas, was released in 1996. The album was recorded in living rooms with classic Neuman tube microphones through tube mic preamps.

“It was just the two of us,” explains Douglas. “We felt more comfortable going into a living room situation than a sterile studio situation. My neighbor was gone to Hawaii for a week, so we moved into his living room.” The absent neighbor happened to be Béla Fleck, who'd just gotten married. “We ran a bunch of wires, figured out where the microphones could best serve us, and just went for it.” Ultimately, the project was nominated for a Grammy.

Bluegrass Boy, Rowan's 1996 album of original traditional bluegrass material, is an especially meaningful project. The late Charles Sawtelle and Roy Huskey, Jr. both worked on the album. “When my friends passed away, I felt I had said all I could say for the moment. The songs on that record talk about this sense of loss and 'weep not for the dead'… this whole sense of saying goodbye.”

Rowan took a step back from the creative process and mourned his friends. He decided that it was time for a break from recording, as well. “When I put out Bluegrass Boy, it was as if the whole bluegrass world had changed, and no longer wanted to hear about the deep high lonesome subjects that I love about bluegrass. They wanted bluegrass lite.”

This was terribly frustrating for a musician who always dug deeply for the raw essence of his music. Rowan withdrew from the race, but managed to stay busy with projects and activities that were personally and creatively fulfilling. He performed and meditated, went on long retreats, recorded several projects that he has been in no hurry to release, and spent time with his friends, brothers, wife, and children. He studied Buddhism with Tibetan monks, painted with Chinese brushes, read poetry, and listened to everything from Miles Davis and the Stanley Brothers to the Pilgrim's Chorus from Wagner's Tannhauser. And he started writing a book.

“The working title is The Walls Of Time. It's a book of vignettes, really, determined by contact with Bill Monroe.” With deep amusement, he adds, “A friend of mine wants me to call it Confessions of A Bluegrass Boy!”

One of his favorite recent projects is his foray into Jamaican music, the seeds of which were planted many years ago. “Me and Lorin and Chris got backstage passes to Bob Marley's show when he was here in San Francisco, and I spent one birthday stoned out of my mind, laying on the drum riser behind [Wailers drummer] Carlton Barrett. The only thought in my head was, 'If I'm ever gonna get reggae, this is gonna be a good way!'”

His first visit to Jamaica some years ago also pulled him in this new direction. “I hung out in the hills with the Rastas. Something was calling me about that. I just wanted to make music that was powerful and rooted in the African-Celtic tradition. These new words didn't need a banjo to carry the buoyancy; it would be carried by the earthiness of bass and drums.” He has just finished mastering his “reggaebilly” project, which includes Jamaican treatments of “Little Maggie” and “Cuckoo Bird” and new Rowan-penned reggae tunes.

Jerry Douglas believes that Rowan's Jamaican explorations are absolutely appropriate. “Reggae is a real natural thing for Pete. It is for a lot of bluegrass-related artists, because of the heavy backbeat. You just use that backbeat in the rhythm instruments, not really going for a full strum, not filling up all the space, and let the vocals carry it. That's really something he does well.”

Traditionalists will be delighted to hear that the third project in the Rowan pipeline is an acoustic recording. “I took Tony Rice and Billy and Bryn Bright into the studio in Portland, Maine, after we did the Thomas Point Beach Festival. We did nine new Peter Rowan songs in an evening and a half - just two guitars, mandolin, bass, and Bryn sings with me. It really sounds good.” The album includes an original tune about Charles Sawtelle's guitar, which Sawtelle gave to Rowan, and which Rowan still plays.

As he rambles through the diverse terrain of his musical life, Rowan remembers two additional unreleased projects that he worked on in the last few years. One is a collaboration with cowboy singer Don Edwards. The other?

“I was on a pilgrimage to India. I had a guitar and was able to get into the studio with my Nepalese musician friends. We got some good stuff, an hours' worth on tape. That's some of the so-called Buddhist spiritual stuff. Part of that's going to find its way into production.”

Over the years, Rowan seems to have reinvented his musical identity innumerable times. “In the mid- and late eighties, it felt like a real challenge, because he played in so many formats,” says his business representative Keith Case. “My agents wouldn't know what they were pitching at any given time! At this point, he has a regular band [the Texas Trio with Billy and Bryn Bright], the first he's had a regular band in all the time I've worked with him. And he's still performing in five or six different formats.”

Case notes that his work on Rowan's behalf has gotten easier. “He's grown enormously, which is really interesting, because he hasn't had a new record in five years. To have an artist that has built audience with no new recording material is a tribute to what a strong entertainer he is. He's probably doubled or tripled his business!”

“I've always looked for different kinds of roots. To me, it was all legitimate possibilities of who Americans are,” Rowan says. “We appreciate other cultures, because we come from a culture that's made up of other cultures. I think that's the slow dawning of America.”

What might Bill Monroe think of Peter Rowan's adventures with other musical genres? “Bill always talked about having another music,” Rowan says thoughtfully. “He told me he'd never play this other music for anybody, because he didn't want to disappoint his fans. [Former Blue Grass Boy] Wayne Lewis told me that when he was talking to Bill, he said, 'Is anybody doing the other music?' And Bill said, 'Pete Rowan!'” So in a weird way, Bill got me started doing all this stuff.” Chuckling, Rowan adds, “It was his idea.”

He insists he has not consciously encouraged the world to think of him as the next Big Mon. “Nobody can be Bill Monroe. Anybody who played with Bill is an heir to his musical legacy, whether you played one song with him, or two years for him. What I look for, in terms of carrying on that legacy myself, is a depth of performance... a raw nakedness in the vocal sound.”

Peter Rowan might be the only professional bluegrass musician who actively practices Buddhism. “Actually, I'm practicing practicing,” he laughs softly. “Buddhism is a path to meditation. It's not in conflict with any religion. The ultimate Buddhist path is to examine one's own mind to see how one has actually created the phenomena of one's life. It's not for everybody. You have to be dedicated. It becomes one's life work, actually.”

He's quiet about his studies, which are fairly unorthodox in the largely Christian bluegrass world. “If you're in conversation with him about life issues, maybe you see a little of the Buddhist side,” observes Keith Case. “But I don't think you see much of it unless you read it into what he does onstage. It affects how he lives his life, and how he thinks about things.”

Living in the moment, and being fully aware of it, is terribly important to Rowan these days. He says an occasional indulgence in a bottle of vin rouge is about as wild as he gets anymore, and claims to have moved beyond the anesthetic appeal of substance abuse, through he understands that appeal very well. “The sheer boredom of life in show business is enough to drive anyone to drugs,” he comments matter-of-factly. “We often joke that the hour and a half we play music in a night is for free; it's the eight hours of traveling to get there that we're being paid for. You're in hotels every night, or on the bus, going from here to there… You have to really regroup your energies and not fall prey to the distractions of substance abuse.”

Since September 11, Rowan, like so many other Americans, has been searching for answers and resolution. He visited his daughter, a student at NYU, shortly after the attacks. He's still working through his grief. “Truthfully, I'm at a loss to know what could possibly be relevant to what's going on. I watch TV more than I pick up the guitar now, because I am absolutely mesmerized by this unfolding horror. Yet I know it's up to us to give something to the world. We need to breathe the fresh air of true spiritual inspiration and move to the broadest plain of awareness. That's all we can do.”

Reaching out to old friends has had a healing effect. “We're counting ourselves among the living, because we lost a few. I'd been a little bit preoccupied with that loss. And now the world has lost something.”

His friends in the business seem to genuinely adore Rowan. “We love to play together!” enthuses Vassar Clements. “It just comes together every time. Oh, he knows so many tunes! I've played so much with him that it's just a joy to keep doing it. I think the world of him. He's one of my best friends.”

“Peter's always been a constant in my life,” muses Sam Bush. “He is one of my oldest musical big brothers now - by oldest, I mean that we've known each other the longest. We have crossed paths my whole playing life. He's allowed me to be stupid and irrational, and he's never gotten mad at me. I love him to death. I don't know what I'd do without him.”

He drove the bus, heard the voices through the walls of time, wrote the tunes, saw the light, played the Opry, smoked the grass, contemplated the jewel in the lotus… Peter Rowan has done it all, and he is acutely aware of his own good fortune.

“Am I lucky? Good God! I go to Jamaica, work with all these guys who worked with Bob Marley, who were on all the classic reggae you've ever heard… And I come back here, and play with Tony Rice!” His quiet laughter is filled with wonder and joy. “I got the luck of the draw, somewhere along the line.”