Bryan Sutton

He was born in Asheville in 1973 into a family of fiddlers: his grandfather and father were both regionally recognized players, and he grew up in the family band, the Pisgah Pickers. He took up the guitar at eight, played at family and community jams, and studied some jazz guitar in North Carolina. He had plans to go to the Berklee College of Music, but invitations to record as a sideman got in the way. In 1991 he played guitar for the gospel group Karen Peck and New River, and he then moved to Nashville to work as a session player.

A friendship with the bassist Mark Fain, made in the studio, led to a job with Ricky Skaggs, who was then taking his band from country to bluegrass. Sutton was the lead guitarist in Kentucky Thunder in the late 1990s, in a large, loud band with three guitarists, and left after about three years. His debut as a leader, Ready to Go, came out on Sugar Hill just before 2000, with Rhonda Vincent among the guests, and in 2000 the IBMA gave him the first of his Guitar Player of the Year awards. Further wins followed in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016.

In the studio his credits came to include Dolly Parton’s The Grass Is Blue, Dierks Bentley’s Up on the Ridge, Charlie Haden’s Rambling Boy and the Dixie Chicks’ Home, as well as records by Garth Brooks, Taylor Swift, Blake Shelton, Eric Church, Brad Paisley and Carrie Underwood; he also played with the Chieftains, Patty Loveless, Rhonda Vincent, Jim Lauderdale and Adam Steffey. A last-minute call to stand in for an injured Tony Rice on a tour supporting Béla Fleck’s Tales from the Acoustic Planet put him on stage with Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas and Stuart Duncan, a group that went on to become a regular draw at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival.

His second album, Bluegrass Guitar, was made up of nine traditional standards and one original. In 2006 came Not Too Far from the Tree, a set of duets with David Grier, Norman Blake, Ricky Skaggs, Tony Rice, Earl Scruggs, Dan Crary and Doc Watson, and the track he cut with Watson, “Whiskey Before Breakfast,” won the 2007 Grammy for Best Country Instrumental Performance. In 2007 and 2008 he toured with Chris Thile and the How to Grow a Band, the group that later became the Punch Brothers.

Hot Rize asked him to fill the guitar chair of the late Charles Sawtelle for its reunion shows, playing alongside Pete Wernick, Tim O’Brien and Nick Forster. Around 2012 the band decided to make a new album and tour more, and Sutton became a full member; he also plays the deadpan Slade in the band’s alter ego, Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers. In June 2011 he had launched an online bluegrass guitar school with ArtistWorks, recording lessons and critiquing videos sent in by students. With T. Michael Coleman and David Holt he formed Deep River Rising, a Doc Watson tribute trio, which recorded Ready for the Times in 2013.

His later solo records include Almost Live, with seventeen guests among them Fleck, Douglas, Russ Barenberg, Thile and Duncan; Into My Own, with Bill Frisell, Ronnie McCoury and Noam Pikelny, which was nominated for the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album; and The More I Learn (2016), which put his own singing and songwriting in front of the Bryan Sutton Band. He has produced records for others, Della Mae among them, and played on the Fleck-led “Vertigo,” the IBMA’s Instrumental Recorded Performance of the Year in 2022. In 2025 he and Billy Strings released Live at the Legion, and in 2026 Mountain Home Music Company issued From Roots to Branches, Vol. 1, duets with Strings, Sierra Hull, Trey Hensley, Chris Eldridge, Cody Kilby, Joe Bonamassa, Tommy Emmanuel and others, along with unreleased tracks with Doc Watson and Tony Rice.