Jim Mills

James Robert Mills was born in Raleigh on 18 December 1966, the youngest of the three sons of John Wesley and Shirley Curran Mills. His father and grandfather both played the banjo, but it was the original recording of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” on a record his brother brought home, that decided him, and at 12 he began teaching himself to play. He liked to tell people that, besides practicing Scruggs’s licks all day, he wedged a toothpick between his front teeth in the hope of growing the gap in Scruggs’s smile. He went to Mill Brook High School in Raleigh.

After high school he took up music full time with Summer Wages, and he played banjo and fiddle on the band’s Rebel album Can’t Stop Now (1987), with Barry Berrier on guitar, Rick Allred on mandolin and Garland Carter on bass. From there he went to Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver for five years. I Heard the Angels Singing (Sugar Hill, 1989) had Lawson on mandolin, Russell Moore on guitar and Ray Deaton on bass, and the same four, with Mike Hartgrove on fiddle, made My Heart Is Yours (1990) at Martin Recording in Nashville. Mills stayed with Lawson for two albums Brentwood issued in 1992, Pressing On Regardless and Treasures Money Can’t Buy, with John R. Bowman on guitar and Shelton Feazell on bass. He then played with the Bass Mountain Boys, whose Pinecastle album Love of a Woman, cut at Warehouse Studios in Galax, Virginia, came out in August 1994.

Mills joined Ricky Skaggs’s Kentucky Thunder almost at the start of Skaggs’s full-time return to bluegrass, and he held the banjo chair for fourteen years. His first album with the band was Ancient Tones (January 1999), recorded at MCA’s Nashville studios with Bryan Sutton on lead guitar, Paul Brewster on guitar, Bobby Hicks on fiddle and Mark Fain on bass. It was followed by the gospel album Soldier of the Cross (1999), on which Mills also sings baritone on one track, History of the Future (September 2001), with Clay Hess on guitar, Live at the Charleston Music Hall (2003), Brand New Strings (2004), the all-instrumental Instrumentals (2006), with Cody Kilby on guitar and Andy Leftwich on fiddle, and Honoring the Fathers of Bluegrass: Tribute to 1946 and 1947 (2008). Across his career he won six Grammy Awards. He never moved to Nashville: he kept a small apartment and a car there and went home to North Carolina after every trip with Skaggs.

The IBMA named him Banjo Player of the Year in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2005 and 2006; the two years in that run that he did not win went to Tom Adams and J. D. Crowe. His three solo albums all came out on Sugar Hill. Bound to Ride (1998), cut at Monkey Fingers Studio with Tim Stafford on guitar, Adam Steffey on mandolin, Stuart Duncan on fiddle, Barry Bales on bass and Jerry Douglas on Dobro on several tracks, was the IBMA’s Instrumental Recorded Performance of the Year in 1999. My Dixie Home (October 2002) was recorded at Hilltop Studios in Madison, Tennessee, with Dan Tyminski, Steffey, Duncan and Bales, and Tim O’Brien or Skaggs on mandolin on some tracks; Hide Head Blues (July 2005) used much the same band.

He was much in demand in the studio. He played banjo on Dolly Parton’s The Grass Is Blue (1999), which won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album, and on her Little Sparrow (2001), and on Dan Tyminski’s Carry Me Across the Mountain and Alan Bibey’s In the Blue Room (both 2000). He also appeared on two records made by Huber Banjos, Team Flathead (2004) and Cuppa ’Jo (2006), and Huber built a Jim Mills signature model, a copy of the “Mack Crow” RB-75 in his collection, the only gold-plated RB-75 that Gibson made at the factory. Over the years he played the Grand Ole Opry and Carnegie Hall.

His other field was the history of the prewar Gibson banjo. In 2009 he published Gibson Mastertone: Flathead 5-String Banjos of the 1930s and 1940s, and in June 2010 he left Kentucky Thunder to concentrate on his business, Jim Mills Banjo Inc., buying and selling prewar banjos and memorabilia. He built a showroom on the lower floor of his home with a dozen or more prewar Mastertones on display, along with Flatt & Scruggs memorabilia and banjos he kept for himself, such as the RB-4 that had belonged to Snuffy Jenkins. He also gave seminars on the subject, and in his last years he dealt in vintage Gibson Les Paul guitars as well. When Vince Gill put together a bluegrass tour in 2012, he called on Mills to play banjo.

Mills died at his home in Durham, North Carolina, on 3 May 2024, at the age of 57. In bluegrass circles he was known as “Smilin’” Jim.