Clay Hess comes from Athens, Ohio. Many listeners first heard him as lead guitarist in Ricky Skaggs’s Kentucky Thunder. He has also played guitar and sung with Mountain Heart, Sierra Hull & Highway 111 and Tim Shelton, and he works in the studio as an engineer, producer and mastering engineer. His solo album Rain came out under his own name in September 2011, made with his longtime friend Randy Kohrs, and it led him to form the Clay Hess Band in 2012.
The band’s second album, Just Another Story, came out on Pinecastle Records in 2018. Clay’s son Brennan played rhythm guitar and sang lead on some tracks, with Irl Hees on bass, Brady Wallen on banjo and Dustin Frame on mandolin. Three of its tracks were picked up by bluegrass radio: “Cold and Lonely,” Jimmie Rodgers’s “Blue Yodel #2” and Waylon Jennings’s “Anita, You’re Dreaming.” The last two were also filmed as live videos at Bonfire Recording Studios in South Carolina. In 2019 Jacob Metz took over the reso-guitar and Brennan moved to bass. That year Hess also released Bound for Nowhere, an album with the singer Randy Murphy.
His recent singles have all come out on 7Flat Records. The first was Merle Travis’s “Sixteen Tons,” which he offered as a download from his website in March 2024 before its streaming release that May. Travis first recorded the song in 1946, and Hess learned it from his grandfather, “a Merle Travis man through and through.” He starts it with his guitar alone and sings the lead, with Ricky Skaggs on mandolin, Zak McLamb on bass and Randy Kohrs on reso-guitar. “Blue Night” followed in November 2024.
In December 2024 Hess joined the Seldom Scene, taking the place of guitarist and singer Dudley Connell, who had retired. His own singles kept coming. “Man, What a Woman” (February 2025) is a song Shawn Camp wrote with Dean Miller and recorded in 1993. On it Hess sings lead and plays guitar and mandolin, with Ron Stewart on banjo and fiddle, McLamb on bass, and Darrell Turnbull joining Hess on harmony. “The Likes of Me” followed on 12 June 2025.
Session details drawn in part from the Bluegrass Discography.
Tracklist
- 1 Sixteen Tons alt version 3:31
