Big Richard

The band began as a one-off. A private bluegrass festival in Colorado realized it had booked an all-male lineup and asked the fiddler Eve Panning, who had toured with the fiddle group Barrage, to put together a band of women; she called Sims, Adams and Rose, and the four first played together at the invitation-only festival in Castle Rock in 2021. They kept the band going, with dates at WinterWonderGrass and RockyGrass, and at Telluride in 2022 they won over a crowd that had mostly never heard of them; the set was released as Live from Telluride.

By the time of their first studio album the bass player was Hazel Royer, then a student at Berklee College of Music. Girl Dinner, recorded at Vermillion Road Studio in Longmont and released in January 2025, mixed the members’ own songs, which they arrange together, with quieter material than their stage shows, including the fiddle feature “Beards Brushing in the Night.” Their 2025 headlining tour followed appearances on the PBS series The Cavern Sessions, NPR’s World Cafe, Telluride, DelFest and Bourbon & Beyond, and a New Year’s Eve show at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. In December 2025 the band signed with Signature Sounds, which released Pet on 6 February 2026; to catch the energy of their live shows they recorded it live to tape, in single takes, opening with “It’s Gonna Fall/Old Daingerfield.”