Rhode Island lost beloved musician and teacher Rory MacLeod earlier this month, when he was struck and killed by a driver Dec. 6 near his home in Hope Valley. He was a dear friend of Ocean State Media afternoon host Mareva Lindo. She spoke with Rory and Sandol earlier this year for our Ocean State Sessions series. As we close out 2025, in Rory’s memory, we’re revisiting that conversation.
Though I only knew him for three years, Rory’s impact on me and many, many others was outsized – bigger than can be quantified or measured by any list of accomplishments.
It’s not enough to say that Rory was active in the local music scene for over 50 years, including playing bass with the Grammy-nominated band Roomful of Blues.
It’s not enough to say that he, along with his wife, fiddle player Sandol Astrausky, taught and mentored hundreds of students through the long-running old-time stringband class at Brown University.
But I can tell you that he was kind, funny, talented, humble, and generous to a fault.
When I spoke with Rory and Sandol earlier this year for our Ocean State Sessions series, I started by asking what attracted them to old-time music.
“My initial attraction had a lot more to do with how it’s presented,” Rory said.
Old-time is a kind of traditional American roots music that features instruments like fiddles, banjos, mandolins and guitars. A lot of it is dance music, originally made to accompany square dances. But I’d describe it as primarily social music – meaning music that’s made not so much for performing, but for just getting together and playing with other people. Rory, who played mostly guitar and banjo in old-time settings, said that’s what he loved about it.
“When I played music for a living, we’d either rehearse and we’d run things over ‘til we were pretty good with it, and then we’d try to perform it,” Rory said. “And with old-time, there’s no interest in selling it to anybody, really. It’s not that much fun to listen to unless you’re part of it, really, because if you play for, you know, even a couple sets of it someplace, it’s mostly background music, it ends up being. So I found the ensemble sound is, when it works in old-time, it is unbeatable.”
Sandol said she’s also drawn to the social, less presentational nature of the music.
“Because it’s not performance-oriented, we don’t play and expect an audience to be watching us,” she said. “It’s just so much more freeing to play when no one’s sitting there expecting you to say something, expecting you to be right on with every note or making beautiful harmonies. We’re just there playing. People can listen, they can enjoy it, they can walk out of the room. And that’s really important to me. I’m not a performance person. I just find I get uptight and the music just doesn’t come out the way I like it. (When) you’re just sitting there playing in a session, you can really let loose and just have a great time.”
Rory and Sandol have taught the long-running old-time stringband class at Brown University for many years. They took the reins from their mentor, Jeff Titan, who told them it was the oldest university-sponsored old-time stringband class in the country.
The class was always popular, and had for a long time allowed adults from the community to take the class, as well. But it got bigger under Rory and Sandol’s leadership, when they started allowing in more beginners.
“But then it got so big that we’d never really got to know the students for a couple of semesters,” Rory said. “We got to know the outstanding ones, but [not] the ones that were sort of in the background.” So, he said, they talked Brown into letting them have the space an hour and a half before the class, just for the community members not taking it for credit.
Over the years, Rory and Sandol have built a robust community through the many students and locals who have attended the class. And the ripple effect of that goes well beyond the classroom. Former students have become friends and bandmates. Some people who took the class started sessions of their own. And for the past few summers, Rory and Sandol have invited friends and students to camp on their land in Hope Valley for a multi-day old-time music gathering.
They’ve done so much for the old-time music community in Rhode Island. So I asked them, what do they love about it?
“Well, I like the friendships that we’ve made over the years,” Sandol said. “They’re really deep, long, long-made friendships. … I just love being part of a community, and old-time music for me, as well, is so much fun to play with a group of people. I love practicing. I love working on the tunes. But in the end, you want to play with people and just have a great, great time. … And when we get going, when we get chatting, and just comfortable, and we just get into a groove, that makes the music really fun. It comes to life. All that work, learning the tunes and putting them together, all of a sudden you’re just playing them, and they’re just coming out of you, and you’re having a great time. It’s just healing. I guess it’s, it’s medicine. It’s just medicinal.”
“Sometimes we’ll get together with someone and we’ll just talk and tell stupid stories for 15 minutes between tunes and up doing, you know, five or six tunes in an evening,” Rory said. “It’s part of being part of a community. It’s really fun.”
For Ocean State Sessions, Rory and Sandol played with Matt Pottle, David Luken and Greg Motta. Watch all of their performance on the Ocean State Media YouTube channel.
Watch more of their performance:
