White Water

“Whitewater” is a bluegrass banjo instrumental written by Béla Fleck, copyright 1988, and recorded as the opening track of his album Drive (Rounder Records, 1988). Fleck cut it with an all-star session band assembled at the tail end of his New Grass Revival years and before the Flecktones formed. The tune later entered the flatpicking repertoire through Tony Rice, whose recording appears on the Rounder compilation 58957: The Bluegrass Guitar Collection (2003).

Béla Fleck, born in New York City in 1958, came to bluegrass from outside the Southern tradition and built a career on extending the five-string banjo past its Scruggs-style vocabulary into jazz, classical, and West African music. He was inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2020 as a member of New Grass Revival.