Noah Crase, RIP

Bluegrass lost another of its favorite sons last week. Noah Crase, former banjo player with Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys and The Boys From Indiana, died on April 13. He had been born in Barwick, KY in 1934.

He was an influential musician in the Dayton, OH area where he lived, and where he met and performed with the legendary Paul “Moon” Mullins while Crase was working for the Post Office in Franklin.

His obituary was published in the Dayton Daily News, and an online Guest Book is available on the Anderson Funeral Home and Legacy.com web sites for fans and friends to pay their respects.

Jon Fox published a lovely tribute to Noah in Inside Cityfolk, an online publication from Cityfolk, Ohio’s premier presenter of traditional music events.

Some of Crase’s best music of the 1960s and 1970s came in the company of Paul “Moon” Mullins, fiddler and legendary DJ on WPFB in Middletown. Crase played with Mullins in the Valley Ramblers (which had a weekly TV show on Dayton’s WKEF-TV), the Nu-Grass Pickers and, beginning in 1973, the Boys from Indiana, which was originally known as Noah Crase, Paul Mullins and the Boys from Indiana.

The Boys from Indiana was a powerful, dynamic and highly entertaining band in the mid-1970s, and Crase was a big part of the band for the first couple of years, playing on the albums We Missed You in Church Last Sunday and the highly popular Atlanta is Burning. Crase more or less retired from playing in a band in 1976, though he periodically picked up his banjo in later years for occasional shows, including The Dayton Bluegrass Reunion, Cityfolk’s 1989 bluegrass concert extravaganza, where he joined Mullins, guitarist Don Warmuth and bass player Bobby Gilbert for a reunion of the Valley Ramblers.

Read the full piece online.

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About the Author

John Lawless

John had served as primary author and editor for The Bluegrass Blog from its launch in 2006 until being folded into Bluegrass Today in September of 2011. He continues in that capacity here, managing a strong team of columnists and correspondents.