Bill Emerson and Sweet Dixie

Emerson, a founding member of the Country Gentlemen, had retired from the U.S. Navy in 1993 after twenty years with its Country Current band and had largely stepped away from music by the end of the decade. Two people talked him back. Jimmy Martin, whom he visited at Bean Blossom, Indiana, told him to get a band together and call it the Sweet Dixie Band, and Tony Trischka, who invited him onto his Double Banjo Bluegrass Spectacular, gave him the same advice. Emerson had led instrumental and reunion projects before, but this was his first time as a bandleader.

The first album, Bill Emerson & the Sweet Dixie Band, came out on Rebel on 9 October 2007. Its core came from Emerson’s Navy past, with three members of the current Country Current, Wayne Taylor on guitar, Pat White on mandolin and Joe Wheatley on bass, along with the singer and songwriter Con Birch, and a long list of guests including Tony Rice, Jimmy Gaudreau, Paul Williams, Dudley Connell, Ray Legere and Pete Goble. Because White and Wheatley were still in the service, Emerson hired the husband-and-wife team of Wayne Lanham on mandolin and Teri Chism on bass, both formerly of Patent Pending, for the road band.

In August 2009 the band signed with Rural Rhythm, by then with Lanham, Chism and John Miller on guitar and touring mainly on the East Coast. Its first single for the label, “I Don’t Care Anymore,” came out at that year’s IBMA convention, and the album Southern followed on 12 January 2010, with Tom Adams also among the players and Rickie Simpkins and Frank Solivan guesting on fiddle. By The Touch of Time (31 January 2012) the band was a five-piece of Emerson, Lanham, Chism, Chris Stifel on guitar and vocals, who wrote the title song, and Jenny Leigh Obert on fiddle, playing a repertoire of originals and less familiar covers such as the Appalachian song “Little Pink.” On stage the group gathered around a single microphone for vocals and solos, as the earliest bluegrass bands had done.

Dancin’ Annie followed on 4 March 2014, and The Gospel Side of Bill Emerson & Sweet Dixie on 18 September 2015, the band’s last album. Emerson’s recordings of these years drew five IBMA nominations as late as 2015, among them Banjo Player of the Year. He entered the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2019 and died on 21 August 2021, aged 83.