Abigail Washburn

She was born on 10 November 1977 in Evanston and grew up partly in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. A trip to China in 1996 set the course of her early adult life: she became the first East Asian studies major at Colorado College, learned Mandarin, lived in China and planned to become a lawyer there. She bought a banjo and began exploring folk and bluegrass music, and after moving to Nashville she started writing songs and met KC Groves, a founder of the all-women string band Uncle Earl. An offer of a record deal in the halls of the International Bluegrass Music Association’s convention in Kentucky turned her toward music for good.

With Uncle Earl, in which she played banjo and shared the singing, she recorded two Rounder albums, She Waits for Night (2005), produced by Dirk Powell, and Waterloo, Tennessee (2007), produced by John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin; she left the band on good terms in 2010. Her own song “Rockabye Dixie” took second place in the Chris Austin Songwriting Contest at MerleFest in 2004, which led to a contract with Nettwerk, and in 2005 Nettwerk released her first solo album, Song of the Traveling Daughter, produced by Fleck, with Sollee on cello and some songs in Mandarin.

That year she took the Sparrow Quartet to China: Washburn on banjo and vocals, Fleck on banjo, Driessen on fiddle and Sollee on cello. In the fall of 2007 the group became the first American band to make an officially sanctioned tour of Tibet, a trip jointly sponsored by the U.S. State Department and the American Center for Educational Exchange, and it played in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics. Nettwerk released its album, Abigail Washburn & the Sparrow Quartet, on 20 May 2008, produced by Fleck and arranged by all four, and the quartet followed it with festival dates at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, MerleFest and Bonnaroo. In 2009 its members took part in the Clearwater concert for Pete Seeger’s ninetieth birthday.

After volunteering in Sichuan following the 2008 earthquake, she made Afterquake with Dave Liang of the Shanghai Restoration Project, a benefit record built from electronic mixes of students’ voices and sounds from the disaster zone, released on 12 May 2009, the first anniversary of the quake. Her second solo album, City of Refuge, written with Kai Welch and produced by Tucker Martine, came out on Rounder in January 2011. From November to December 2011 she toured China’s Silk Road with her band, supported by grants from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, playing schools, theaters and town squares from Hohhot to Ürümqi with Han Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan, Hui and Uyghur musicians.

In 2012 she was named a TED Fellow and spoke at the TED conference in Long Beach about building relations between the United States and China through music, and in November 2013 Vanderbilt University named her the first fellow of its US-China Center. In March 2013 she premiered Post-American Girl, a theater piece commissioned by the Public Theater’s New York Voices series at Joe’s Pub, which drew on the folk arts of China and Appalachia, including shadow puppetry and Sacred Harp singing. She has also been an Andrew W. Mellon DisTIL Fellow at Carolina Performing Arts at UNC-Chapel Hill. With the guzheng player Wu Fei and Kai Welch she formed the Wu-Force, a trio that first played at the Yugong Yishan club in Beijing in late 2011, made its U.S. debut at Globalfest in New York in January 2014 and released an EP in January 2017.

From August 2013 she and Fleck toured as a duo, and their first album, Béla Fleck & Abigail Washburn, recorded at home with only their two banjos and voices, came out on Rounder on 7 October 2014. It debuted at number one on Billboard’s bluegrass chart and won the Grammy for Best Folk Album at the 58th Grammy Awards in 2016. A six-track EP, Banjo Banjo, followed in 2015 and a second album, Echo in the Valley, in October 2017, almost all of it written by the pair. Her album with Wu Fei, Wu Fei & Abigail Washburn, produced by Fleck and released by Smithsonian Folkways on 3 April 2020, sets traditional Chinese and Appalachian folk songs side by side. In 2023 she and Fleck premiered their first song cycle for full symphony orchestra, commissioned and performed by the Colorado Symphony.