Introducing the Tuttles with A.J. Lee was released on 7 September 2010 on the family’s own Back Studio label (BSR-002). The band was Jack Tuttle, a Palo Alto teacher who had taught at Gryphon Stringed Instruments for about thirty years, and three of his children: Molly on guitar, banjo and vocals, Sullivan on guitar and vocals, and Michael on mandolin and vocals. AJ Lee, from Tracy, California, sang and played mandolin. When the Mountain View Voice profiled the group in January 2010, Michael was eleven, AJ twelve, Sullivan fourteen and Molly seventeen. The Tuttles and the Lees had met at the California Bluegrass Association’s Father’s Day Festival in Grass Valley, and Jack then asked AJ to sing with the family. The band had by then drawn attention with a YouTube video of “El Cumbanchero” posted in 2006, which had more than a million and a quarter views.
Jack, Molly and Sullivan Tuttle produced and recorded the twelve tracks themselves, and Rainer Gembalczyk mastered them at Sienna Digital. The set includes “It Takes a Train to Cry,” “White Freightliner Blues,” “Train on the Island,” “Pins and Needles” and “Katie Cruel,” the instrumental “El Cumbanchero,” and “Gypsy Palo Alto,” a Jack Tuttle composition written with a solo for every member of the band. Molly Tuttle, who was fifteen when she joined the band, went on to become the first woman to win the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Guitar Player of the Year award, in 2017. The band followed this record with Endless Ocean in 2013.
Tracklist
- 1 It Takes a Train to Cry 2:37
- 2 Where the Wild River Rolls alt version 2:49
- 3 It's a Long Road 3:19
- 4 El Cumbanchero alt version 2:49
- 5 The Master’s Garden alt version 2:46
- 6 White Freightliner Blues alt version 3:42
- 7 Train on the Island alt version 2:18
- 8 Red Rose Bouquet 3:54
- 9 Gypsy Palo Alto 3:57
- 10 Wayside/Back in Time 3:08
- 11 Pins and Needles 3:27
- 12 Katie Cruel 3:05
