Jim Hurst

Recording Artist · Active 1998–present · Also a musician
Contemporary Bluegrass

Jim Hurst is a guitarist whose playing sits at the junction of bluegrass flatpicking and country session work, and who can do something most flatpickers cannot: play fingerstyle lead at the same tempos, with the thumb carrying a bass line under the melody. Twice the IBMA’s Guitar Player of the Year, he spent years as a first-call sideman before going out under his own name.

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  • Born July 27, 1954, in Kentucky, he grew up in a family band and learned to back singers before he learned to solo — an order of operations that still shows in his playing.
  • He worked as a touring and session guitarist for Trisha Yearwood, Sara Evans and Holly Dunn, a country résumé that gave him a broader harmonic vocabulary than the bluegrass circuit usually produces.
  • He joined Claire Lynch and the Front Porch String Band, where he played alongside bassist Missy Raines.
  • In 1998 he and Raines began working as a duo, left Lynch’s band in 2000 to pursue it, and made two Pinecastle records, Two and Synergy.
  • The duo was nominated for IBMA Emerging Artist of the Year in 2001 and 2002, and in both of those years Hurst took Guitar Player of the Year while Raines took Bass Player of the Year — the two halves of one band winning their instruments in the same ceremony, twice.
  • He has recorded with David Grisman, and his own albums — Open Window (1998), Second Son (2001), A Box of Chocolates (2007), Intrepid (2012) and Looking Glass (2014) — mix flatpicked instrumentals with his singing.
  • He teaches widely at camps and workshops, where the fingerstyle-lead approach is what students come for.
  • In this catalog he appears with Claire Lynch on “Up This Hill and Down” and “Wabash Cannonball,” with David Grisman, and on his own “Tall Pines” and “Big Iron.”

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