David Mansfield | |
---|---|
Born | September 13, 1956 |
Occupation(s) | Musician, composer |
Instrument(s) | Violin |
Years active | 1974–present |
David Mansfield (born September 13, 1956) [1] is an American musician and composer.
Mansfield was raised in Leonia, New Jersey. His father, Newton Mansfield was a first violinist in the New York Philharmonic. [2] David played guitar, pedal steel guitar and fiddle in his first band, called Quacky Duck and His Barnyard Friends, which also included two sons of Tony Bennett. [3]
Bob Dylan asked Mansfield to tour with him on his 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour; he remained in Dylan's band through their 1978 world tour. [4]
After the Revue ended in 1976, Mansfield and two other members of Dylan's band, T-Bone Burnett and Steven Soles, formed The Alpha Band. [5] The band released three albums, The Alpha Band in 1977, Spark in the Dark in 1977, and The Statue Makers of Hollywood in 1978. [6] While Mansfield in 1978 was working on the album, The Statue Makers of Hollywood with The Alpha Band, he appeared as a guitarist on Desire Wire by a struggling pop/rock artist Cindy Bullens that same year. [7]
In 1986, Mansfield was an initial member of Bruce Hornsby and the Range, [8] including playing the title instrument on the hit "Mandolin Rain". However, he left the Range before their first tour.
Since The Alpha Band broke up, Mansfield has continued to work as a musician in sessions for Dylan, Burnett, Johnny Cash, Nanci Griffith, Roger McGuinn, Sam Phillips, Mark Heard, The Roches, Edie Brickell, Spinal Tap, Lucinda Williams, Dwight Yoakam, Victoria Williams, Loudon Wainwright III, Willie Nile, Chris Hillman and Herb Pedersen and others.
Mansfield composed the music for the 1980 film Heaven's Gate – he appeared in the movie, playing the fiddle on roller skates – and has since gone on to write scores for a number of other films, including others directed by Heaven's Gate's Michael Cimino. [9] Mansfield cobbled together the soundtrack album for Songcatcher . [10] He also composed the music for the soundtrack to The Ballad of Little Jo (1993), a movie written and directed by Maggie Greenwald, whom he married in 1994. [11] Together they adopted two children. Maisie Mansfield-Greenwald (1997) and Lulu Mansfield-Greenwald (2000). He also composed the score with Van Dyke Parks for Walter Hill's Broken Trail (2006), and they were nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Music Composition for a Miniseries, Movie or a Special (Original Dramatic Score). [12]
The Alpha Band was an American rock band, formed in July 1976 from the remnants of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue.
Steven Soles is an American singer-songwriter, record producer, and guitarist.
Bread was an American soft rock band from Los Angeles, California. They had 13 songs chart on the Billboard Hot 100 between 1970 and 1977.
Jakob Luke Dylan is an American singer-songwriter. He rose to fame as the lead singer and primary songwriter for the rock band The Wallflowers.
Hard Rain is a live album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on September 13, 1976, by Columbia Records. The album was recorded during the second leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue.
Quacky Duck and His Barnyard Friends was an American country rock band of the early 1970s.
Songcatcher is a 2000 drama film directed by Maggie Greenwald. It is about a musicologist researching and collecting Appalachian folk music in the mountains of western North Carolina. Although Songcatcher is a fictional film, it is loosely based on the work of Olive Dame Campbell, founder of the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina, and that of the English folk song collector Cecil Sharp, portrayed at the end of the film as professor Cyrus Whittle. The film grossed $3 million in limited theatrical release in the United States, which was generally considered as a respectable result for an arthouse film release in 2001.
The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Bob Dylan Live 1975, The Rolling Thunder Revue is a live album by Bob Dylan released by Columbia Records in 2002. The third installment in the ongoing Bob Dylan Bootleg Series on Legacy Records, it documents the Rolling Thunder Revue led by Dylan prior to the release of the album Desire. Until the release of this album, the only official live documentation of the Rolling Thunder Revue was Hard Rain, recorded during the less critically well received second leg of the tour.
Seth Bernard Lakeman is an English singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, who is most often associated with the fiddle and tenor guitar, but also plays the viola and banjo. Nominated for the 2005 Mercury Music Prize, Lakeman has belonged to several musical ensembles, including one with his two brothers, fellow folk musicians Sam Lakeman and Sean Lakeman, but has most recently established himself as a solo act.
"Man of Constant Sorrow" is a traditional American folk song first published by Dick Burnett, a partially blind fiddler from Kentucky. The song was originally titled "Farewell Song" in a songbook by Burnett dated to around 1913. A version recorded by Emry Arthur in 1928 gave the song its current titles.
Maggie Greenwald is an American filmmaker.
The Never Ending Tour is the popular name for Bob Dylan's ongoing touring schedule which began on June 7, 1988. During the course of the tour, musicians have come and gone as the band has continued to evolve. The tour amassed a huge fan base with some fans traveling from around the world to attend as many Dylan shows as possible.
Stuart Ian Duncan is an American bluegrass musician who plays the fiddle, mandolin, guitar, and banjo.
Buddy Cage was an American pedal steel guitarist, best known as a longtime member of the New Riders of the Purple Sage.
Cidny Bullens is an American singer-songwriter, who is best known for serving as backup vocalist on tours and albums with Elton John and Rod Stewart, providing vocals on the soundtrack of the 1978 feature film Grease, and for nine critically acclaimed solo albums. In 2012, Bullens publicly came out as a transgender man and changed his name to Cidny Bullens.
The Alpha Band is the debut album by the rock group The Alpha Band, released in 1976. The band was formed in 1976 from the remnants of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue. The core band members were T-Bone Burnett, Steven Soles and David Mansfield.
The Statue Makers of Hollywood is the third and final album by the rock band the Alpha Band, released in 1978.
Joseph Henry "T Bone" Burnett III is an American recording artist, record producer, guitarist, and songwriter. He was a guitarist in Bob Dylan's band during the 1970s. Burnett has received multiple Grammy awards for his work in film music, including for O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), Cold Mountain (2004), Walk the Line (2005), and Crazy Heart (2010); and won another Grammy for producing the studio album Raising Sand (2007), in which he united the contemporary bluegrass of Alison Krauss with the blues rock of Robert Plant.
Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes is an album produced by T Bone Burnett featuring a collective of musicians recording under the moniker The New Basement Tapes—Elvis Costello, Rhiannon Giddens, Taylor Goldsmith, Jim James and Marcus Mumford.
Bob Dylan – The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings is a box set of 1975 live recordings by Bob Dylan, released on June 7, 2019. For this tour, Dylan assembled a loose collective of a backing band called Guam and played across North America for several dozen shows. The tie-in Netflix documentary film Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese was released the following week. A similar compilation was released in 2002 entitled Bob Dylan Live 1975, The Rolling Thunder Revue, as part of Dylan's ongoing Bootleg Series. That compilation was re-released on vinyl as a companion to the later release.