Dwight McCall

His father, a singer and guitarist, recorded three albums for Rural Rhythm with Earl Taylor and the Stoney Mountain Boys in the 1960s and worked in the city for many years with Vernon McIntyre and the Appalachian Grass, Benny Birchfield and others. Dwight followed his father as a mandolin player and singer. In the mid-1990s he played mandolin and sang in Union Springs, whose album Next Train Headed South, recorded at Doobie Shea Studios in Ferrum, Virginia, with Tim Strong on guitar, Randy Pollard on banjo, Tim Smith on fiddle and Jon Weisberger on bass, was released by Copper Creek in 1995.

He joined J.D. Crowe and the New South around 1996, playing mandolin and singing tenor. On Come On Down to My World (Rounder, 1999), recorded at Hilltop Recording Studios in Nashville, he played mandolin beside Crowe, Rickey Wasson and Greg Luck, and sang lead or tenor; its songs include “White Freightliner Blues,” “Back to the Barrooms” and “I Don’t Know.” On Lefty’s Old Guitar (Rounder, 2006), with Crowe, Wasson, Ron Stewart on fiddle and Harold Nixon on bass, he again played mandolin; the album shared the IBMA Album of the Year award in 2007. In the same years he sang tenor on other artists’ records: Dan Tyminski’s Carry Me Across the Mountain (Doobie Shea, 2000), Darrell Webb’s Behind the Scenes (Lonesome Day, 2005) and Wasson’s From the Heart and Soul (Rural Rhythm, 2008). He was also one of the singers on Stanley Gospel Tradition: Songs About Our Savior (Doobie Shea), which the IBMA named Gospel Recorded Performance of the Year.

His first solo album, Kentucky Peace of Mind, came out on Lavenir in 2003, with “Tennessee Border,” “Yesterday’s Gone” and “Wildwood Flower Blues” among its sixteen tracks. In January 2007 Rural Rhythm, his father’s old label, signed him, and on 24 April it released Never Say Never Again, with Alan Bibey on mandolin on most tracks, Ron Stewart on banjo and fiddle, Brian Stephens on guitar, Harold Nixon on bass and Randy Kohrs on Dobro. McCall sang the lead and overdubbed most of the harmonies himself, with Steve Gulley, Lou Reid, Rickey Wasson and Missy Werner joining on some songs; the fourteen tracks include “Blue Eyed Boston Boy,” “Little Bessie,” Michael Martin Murphey’s “Lost River” and his own gospel song “He Never Turned Away.”

When Crowe retired from touring at the end of 2012, McCall, Wasson, the bassist Kyle Perkins and the resonator guitarist Matt DeSpain carried on as American Drive. Their self-titled debut, recorded with Justin Jenkins on banjo and Ron Stewart on fiddle, came out on Rural Rhythm on 16 October 2012, and McCall’s song “Long Haul Truckin’ Man” reached number one on the bluegrass radio chart in 2013. Josh Hymer took over the banjo for the first shows in January 2013; when Wasson and Hymer left that autumn, McCall, DeSpain and Perkins kept the band going with new members, until at the start of 2015 they put American Drive on hold. McCall said then that he had a solo album in the works. In 2013 he also sang harmony on “Darby’s Castle” for Jason Davis’s Second Time Around (Mountain Fever).