Chris Jones and the Night Drivers

Jones had sung lead with the Special Consensus, Whetstone Run and the Lynn Morris Band, and had moved to Nashville in 1989 with the Weary Hearts, before starting the Night Drivers. Their first album, No One But You (Rebel, July 1997), had Doug Knecht on banjo and lead guitar, Jesse Brock on mandolin and Markie Sanders on bass, with Ron Stewart on fiddle and Rob Ickes on Dobro as guests. Jones’s next Rebel records were billed to him alone: Follow Your Heart (1998), which closes with the gospel song “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” sung with Paul Brewster and Darrin Vincent, and Just a Drifter (2000).

By the late 2000s the band had settled around Stoffel on mandolin, Ned Luberecki on banjo and Jon Weisberger on bass. Cloud of Dust (GSM, September 2009), recorded at the Rec Room in Nashville with Aaron Till on fiddle, was followed by Lost Souls & Free Spirits (Rebel, 2012) and Lonely Comes Easy (Rebel, August 2013), with Jeremy Garrett and Ivan Rosenberg as guests, and by Live at the Old Feed Store (GSM, 2014), recorded in front of an audience in Cobden, Illinois, on 12 July 2013. The band moved to Mountain Home for Run Away Tonight (August 2015), Made to Move (February 2017), recorded at Crossroads Studios in Arden, North Carolina, with Gina Clowes on banjo, The Choosing Road (March 2019) and Make Each Second Last (October 2021), with Gina Furtado on banjo. Marshall Wilborn took over the bass at the end of August 2019, and Grace van’t Hof, on banjo and tenor guitar, joined Jones, Stoffel and Wilborn for the EP Pages in Your Hand (October 2023).

A run of Mountain Home singles followed, among them “Plenty Ventured” (April 2025), a play on the old proverb with Carley Arrowood on fiddle. By mid-2025, the band’s thirtieth year on the road, Nelson Williams had replaced Wilborn on bass. Chalk Lines and Dust (Mountain Home, July 2026) gathers six top-five singles, four of which reached No. 1—“Under Over,” “Plenty Ventured,” “What If You’re Wrong” and “Mama Bake a Pie (Daddy Kill a Chicken)”—with five new tracks, Stoffel’s instrumental “Sugar Creek,” van’t Hof singing lead on “It Scares Me Half to Death,” Wilborn singing his own “Wishing Well Blues,” and guests including Jim Lauderdale, Chris Scruggs and Carley Arrowood. The songs on it earned Jones a nomination for the IBMA’s Songwriter of the Year in 2026.

Alongside the band, Jones has been a host on SiriusXM’s Bluegrass Junction, as have Luberecki and Weisberger, and he writes a regular column for a bluegrass news site. The IBMA named him Broadcaster of the Year in 2007, 2015 and 2022 and Writer of the Year in 2014 and 2023, and “Fork in the Road,” which he wrote with John Pennell for the Infamous Stringdusters, was its Song of the Year in 2007.