The Roland White Band

Roland White’s Five-Decade Journey
by Timothy Jones, March, 2004

No one would have guessed in 1954 the remarkable road stretching ahead of Roland White.

Even the sixteen-year-old Roland himself, already dreaming of playing professionally, could hardly imagine what might happen: sharing the stage with legendary pioneers of bluegrass, for example, or stints with Grammy-winning bluegrass bands, or status as one of the pre-eminent mandolin players of our time.

All that the almost scrawny Roland knew late that year was that he was about to walk onto a southern California TV studio stage. Brothers Clarence and Eric joined him for the weekly County Barn Dance Jubilee, as the show was called. The host, Ralph Hicks, had just dubbed them The Country Boys.

“A week or two before our television debut,” Roland recalls, “we had played a Pasadena-based radio program called Squeakin’ Deacon’s Talent Show.” The appearance on the Los Angeles-area radio program with the unlikely name would change their lives unalterably. For while winning that talent show brought no monetary prize, it paved the way for their debut on Ralph Hicks’ Saturday night TV program.

That night under the eye of the television camera, the White brothers looked every bit the youngsters they were. While the family had just moved to California from Maine, they wore straw hats and overalls for their act. Roland, the only one old enough to join the musicians’ union (and thereby get paid) led with a Kalamazoo mandolin while Clarence, at an awkward ten, looked barely able to hold his auditorium-sized guitar. The bass towering over not-quite-twelve-year-old Eric looked more like it held him than the other way around.

That didn’t keep the fresh-scrubbed boys from plowing into a two-song set list now lost from anyone’s memory, including Roland’s. Their first appearance on the Jubilee went so well they got invited back weekly—their first “paying gig.” Old-time songs such as “Ragtime Annie” or “Soldier’s Joy,” taught them by their musical father, became performance mainstays. They drew songs from their Mom’s record collection, heavy on country numbers that spanned the 1920s to the 1940s.

“Soon lots of people knew who we were,” recalls Roland. “We would play store openings at shopping malls. Or community fund-raising events.”

And because Roland actually got paid for the appearances on the Barn Dance Jubilee, he counts them as the beginning of his professional career. So it is that he celebrates 2004 as the fiftieth anniversary of a professional music journey that exceeded his—or anyone’s—earliest dreams.


A guest who sorts through old snap shots and publicity photos with Roland and his wife and band mate, Diane Bouska, at their Nashville home on a hilly, treed street, finds that Roland rarely stands front and center on the stages. Still, Roland not only played with some of the most popular bands in bluegrass music’s history, he has helped create that history.

Never prone to call attention to himself, he nevertheless has counted as friends and colleagues the most revered names in bluegrass. Sometimes a genre’s most influential mentors and creators are the most unassuming. And recent years have seen him prominently add songwriting to his reputation as a mandolin player and vocalist. Roland is now known in the bluegrass musical community for an unpretentious musical brilliance that combines with an accessible affability.


While perhaps no one saw it coming at the very beginning, the professional track Roland tentatively started in 1954 would soon branch out in new directions. Once Roland and his family band hit the stage, it did not take long for word to spread. The Country Boys morphed into the Kentucky Colonels. Clarence White continued on guitar while Roland held down the mandolin, joined by Billy Ray on banjo, Roger Bush on bass and banjo, Bobby Sloane on fiddle, and Leroy Mack on dobro. It is no exaggeration to call the 1964 album the Colonels recorded, Appalachian Swing!, one of the definitive instrumental albums in bluegrass history.

While never straying from the traditional music they grew up on, they incorporated in their recording and stage appearances from that time a rhythmic variety, syncopation, and chordal experimentation spoken of reverentially by bluegrass players to this day.

Roland’s work caught the attention of Bill Monroe, and in 1967 Roland joined Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boy as a rhythm guitarist. Roland took part in landmark recordings while a member of the band. And while his time with Monroe spanned less than two years, Roland absorbed much from the Father of Bluegrass in repertoire and feel.

“After being with Bill,” Roland reflects, “I got my improvising to make more sense and tell more of story. Before, it didn’t hold together sensibly all the time. A phrase might not go with the rest of it.’” Rubbing shoulders with Monroe on stage and on tour bus, Roland noticed his instrumental technical v - Bluegrass Now Magazine