I’ve Always Been a Rambler

The Po’ Ramblin’ Boys began as the nightly house band at the Ole Smoky Distillery bottle shop in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Mandolin player C. J. Lewandowski put it together with Josh Rinkel on guitar and Jereme Brown on banjo, and Jasper Lorentzen soon joined on bass. That quartet is on their first records: a 2015 CD, Live & in Pointers, on TradGrass, and Back to the Mountains (Randm, 2016), recorded at Buckaroo Studios/Audio Farm Recording with Billy Hurt on fiddle. In 2017 TradGrass issued their single “Just as the Sun Went Down,” with Lewandowski singing lead and Brown and Rinkel in harmony.

Their next records were made at Sound Biscuit Productions in Sevierville, Tennessee, with Laura Orshaw as guest fiddler. They include God’s Love Is So Divine (Sound Biscuit, 2018) and Toil, Tears & Trouble, issued by Rounder in August 2019. That album was nominated for the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album, a year after the International Bluegrass Music Association named the band its new artist of 2018. In 2021 Sound Biscuit released two singles. The first was Rinkel’s “Missing Her Has Never Slowed Me Down,” in July. On 20 August came “East Bound and Down,” the Dick Feller–Jerry Reed song, with Lewandowski singing lead, Brown tenor and Rinkel baritone. Jason Carter and Bronwyn Keith-Hynes were the guest fiddlers, and Carter also sang. It was nominated for the IBMA’s Collaborative Recording of the Year in 2022.

Orshaw was a full member, on fiddle and vocals, when the band moved to Smithsonian Folkways. “Ramblin’ Woman,” the Hazel Dickens song with Orshaw singing lead, came out as a single in February 2022, ahead of the album Never Slow Down (March 2022). That album also includes “Missing Her Has Never Slowed Me Down.” Their second Folkways album, Wanderers Like Me (August 2024), was their first with an outside producer. Woody Platt produced it at Van Atkins’ Shop Studio in Candler, North Carolina, and Rinkel’s “Lonely Pine” was released from it as a single that May. In 2023 the band had also released singles on Sound Biscuit, among them “I Can’t Stand Me” and Ralph Stanley and Mike Kelly’s “I’m Going Home, It’s Christmas Time,” and made an album with Jim Lauderdale, The Long and Lonesome Letting Go, for Sky Crunch.

“I’ve Always Been a Rambler,” released by Sound Biscuit on 16 May 2025, was the first single by a changed line-up. Lewandowski, Brown and Lorentzen were joined by John Gooding on guitar and Max Silverstein on fiddle, with Dave Maggard producing at Sound Biscuit Productions. The song is G. B. Grayson’s, recorded by Grayson and Henry Whitter in 1928 and first issued in 1930. The band plays Earl Scruggs’s “Pike County Breakdown” for the instrumental breaks.

Session details drawn in part from the Bluegrass Discography.