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There's a plaque at the International Bluegrass Hall of Fame in Owensboro, Ky., that lists 250 musicians considered to be founders of the music. Bill Monroe's name is prominent, as are Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, Del McCoury, and The Country Gentleman.

Somewhere on the plaque, Mac Martin's name is also etched. Most folks probably glance at the name and don't think twice about it in the reflection of all the stars.

Mac Martin? Probably one of those guys who helped forge bluegrass during its infancy, then disappeared.

But Martin is alive and well. He still performs with his band, the Dixie Travelers, and still records new music.

And he lives in the Brookline section of Pittsburgh. Almost anonymous, his profile is lower than US Airways stock -- unless you have a hankering for the music Monroe shepherded into the Grand Ole Opry in October 1939.

"He's a pioneer, No. 1," says Pete Kuykendall, editor and general manger of Bluegrass Unlimited magazine. "And in many ways Mac is a true pioneer, going back to the late '40s."

"The second you get involved with Pittsburgh bluegrass, you know about Mac," says Ben Hartlage, a local musician who has played with Martin. "He's the bedrock. He defined a regional sound for Pittsburgh, and we all look to him and listen to his records and know them inside out. He's the guy who connects us to the past."

IN THE BEGINNING

Martin was born in 1925 in Oakland as William Colleran, the son of Irish immigrants. Some of his earliest memories are the radio programs of the day that played what was then known as "hillbilly" music. He later discovered books of folk songs when he worked at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh in Oakland, and got his first guitar when he was 16.

"I had all this music already in my mind," he says. "I retain a lot, that's what I'm known for, and I still know a lot of these old ballads, songs that told a story."

During World War II, Martin enlisted in the Navy and ended up with the Seabees in Okinawa, serving from 1943 to 1946. When he returned home, he studied accounting and earned a degree from Robert Morris College before finding work as an accountant with the A&P grocery chain. In his spare time, he haunted second-hand and junk stores with a friend, Ed Brozi, looking for records by the Carter Family, the Blue Sky Boys, Maynard's Mountaineers.

Martin and Brozi formed the Pike County Boys with Bill Wagner and Bill Higgins in 1948. They played small clubs and radio stations, which back then, featured live programming.

"There weren't that many five-string banjos at the time because the style was just starting to be developed," he says. "And I wasn't that good then. But at least I gave that particular sound of the five-string banjo to the group."

In 1954 Martin formed what would become his calling card: the Dixie Travelers. The original lineup featured fiddler Mike Carson, Billy Bryant on banjo and bass player Slim Jones, and the band's home base became Walsh's Tavern in East Liberty.

Whenever country or bluegrass musicians played the area, word was the Dixie Travelers were not to be missed.

"I sang with Bill Monroe, played his mandolin at Hartwood Acres," Martin says. At Walsh's, he says, "on any given night, there'd be the Kingston Trio, David Grisman, Frank Wakefield ... Ralph Stanley, the Country Gentleman, the Lilly Brothers. Put it this way, the music was coming to us. It was great. They came through town, and they knew of us."

IN STRIDE

In 1963, the Dixie Travelers recorded their first record, "Folk and Bluegrass Favorites," on Gateway Records, a subsidiary of National Record Mart.

"There weren't that many bands," Martin says. "So if you were a collector of bluegrass, chances are you got our record, whether you liked it or not. If you were looking for it, there it was."

Martin says the Dixie Travelers fit in with the "folk and hootenanny craze" of the early 1960s, They toured the tri-state area, playing small clubs, and recorded numerous albums and singles that stayed true to the roots of bluegrass music.

Yet, while other bands of the era barnstormed across the country, the Dixie Travelers were content to stay put, rarely playing beyond eastern Ohio and West Virginia.

Martin says there's a simple reason for that: He liked having dinner every night with his wife, Jean, and their five children, and sleeping in his own bed.

"We could have gone places, played more," he says with a shrug. "But I always felt like I should be around here as much as I could."

While his emphasis on family prevented folks in far-flung places from hearing the Dixie Travelers live, the group's music still got in the hands of serious fans. Kuykendall thinks that as a traditional player, Martin is one of the best, the distinction being that he didn't play bluegrass full time. But, Kuykendall says, that's true of many musicians of various musical stripes.

"Mac wasn't an innovator like Bill Monroe," Kuykendall says. "He was a creator, a songwriter, and had a band that has stayed together for better than 40 years now. He just chose to stay around his home."

IN THE COMMUNITY

It's hard to quantify the appeal of any music.

"I'll say this: The music itself, if you listen to it, is gentle and beautiful and simple," Martin says, when asked about bluegrass. "You get a lot of those qualities in a lot of the people who play it.

"But of course," Martin adds, laughing, "we have egos, too."

If Martin exhibits any pride at all, you'd never know it in Brookline, where he's known by his birth name. Gail Lang, office manager at Our Lady of Loreto Church in Brookline, says he makes it a point to go to Mass every day, often traveling to different parishes in area.

"He's an exemplary Catholic, and one of the more devout, gentle, loving people you'll ever meet," Lang says. "My gracious, you never hear him complain about anything. He's determined not to let anything negative affect him."

Martin -- or Colleran -- was recently recognized by the Diocese of Pittsburgh with a Manifesting the Kingdom award, which honors Catholics who generously give of themselves to enrich the life of their parishes. He's also actively involved in a chapter of the St. Vincent DePaul Society, an organization that provides training and career opportunities for people with disabilities, and is a regular volunteer at the Jubilee Soup Kitchen in the lower Hill District.

"He is one of our most faithful volunteers," says Sister Ligouri Rossner, executive director of the Jubilee Kitchen, noting that Martin has been coming in on Mondays as long as she can remember. "He's a really pleasant man. Sometimes, it's difficult being in the soup kitchen for the staff, but he makes everything much better just by his presence."

INTO THE FUTURE

At 78, Martin is still spry, active and looking for his next chance to get on the bandstand. Earlier this year, he played in Wadsworth, Ohio, sharing a bill with Jimmy Martin, one of Monroe's former band members. The current version of the Dixie Travelers -- Martin, Carson, his son Bob, Norm Azinger ( a Traveler since 1972) and Keith Little -- are close to putting the finishing touches on an album to be released later this year.

Those who have heard him recently says he sounds as good as ever.

"He has a bit of a different sound than a lot of bluegrass performers," says Hartlage, "and that's the thing that attracted me and a lot of other people to his music. It's more of an old-timey sound mixture of the early founding fathers of bluegrass, of its transitional phase when it was still being explored. And Mac carries with him what I call a real mossy sound that's been recognized as his own."

It's also a sound that is still influencing musicians today. Recently, Martin joined the band Open Road, a Colorado-based bluegrass band, onstage for a few songs at the Quiet Storm Coffeehouse in Point Breeze.

"As often as possible, we try to admonish people to go out and look for the records of the people we love," says Caleb Roberts, who sings and plays mandolin in Open Road. "There's Bill Monroe, Ralph Stanley, and Flatt & Scruggs, the acknowledged fathers of the music. But there are also people such as Mac Martin, who just haven't had the luck, or the desire to kill themselves making a living out on the road. ... We encourage our fans to seek out and listen to people like Mac."

Martin plans to be around awhile to be sought out. There are still festivals he wants to play, still songs he wants to sing and write. For those who get the chance to see and hear him, it's a special event that links the past and the present, and keeps the very roots of bluegrass music alive and well.

But Martin refuses to see himself as anything beyond what he's always been.

"The fact is, everybody has a common-man attitude about bluegrass," he says. "And that's because everyone in bluegrass is a common man."

Almost everyone.

More From Mac Martin

Since 1947, Mac Martin has been playing bluegrass music in the Pittsburgh area. Here are some quotes from Martin about the music that has made him a legend in both national and local bluegrass circles:

On changes in bluegrass music: "When bluegrass bands became structured and took on an orchestral form, you had banjo, mandolin, bass, guitar and fiddle. The music that was played was just to highlight these instruments, so you had a lot of songs that were short, mainly love songs. But the songs themselves, the content of them, wasn't as important as giving everybody a break. So it became more like jazz, featuring the instruments. You had the older songs, and most of them told stories, most of them sad stories, and then you had the religious and gospel songs, and then the current contemporary songs. I don't like that as much as the older music."

About the origins of bluegrass music: "Everybody goes back to Bill Monroe. ... And it's kind of ironic, but some of the best music ever was played by his band. There was a unique combination of spirit and talent. Yeah, they were a lot like the Beatles. Who can top that?"

The effect of the movie "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" on bluegrass and old-timey music: "It was a good thing, but it didn't start an upsurge of new players coming in or new people coming to see you. The people who like this music have it in their bones. ... Your father played it, or you grew up hearing it as a child, although everybody has their source. Some people first heard it on 'The Beverly Hillbillies' with the Flatt & Scruggs theme song, or in the "Bonnie and Clyde" movie. But most people I know, their parents or uncle or someone in the family played it."

On bluegrass as a lifestyle: "If it's not their livelihood, it becomes their chief interest. You won't find too many bluegrass musicians on the golf course or skiing. This becomes a hobby that gets out of control."

On other bluegrass bands from the 1950s and 1960s: "There were a lot of little groups that came to see us. They'd jam and form a band, and they were OK. But we had really deep roots, and I can take credit for those roots because I delved into bluegrass so deeply. Any place in the country that I'd go, as far as being a historian, they'd know about me."

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