Laurie Lewis

She was born on 28 September 1950, and her family settled in Berkeley, California, when she was eight. Already trained as a classical violinist, she heard Doc Watson, Jean Ritchie, the Greenbriar Boys, Mississippi John Hurt and others at the Berkeley Folk Festival and took up the guitar and the bluegrass banjo. Hearing bluegrass fiddlers on stage at Paul’s Saloon in San Francisco showed her what she could do with the instrument she already played, and in her early twenties she joined the Bay Area bluegrass scene.

In the early 1970s she played in the Phantoms of the Opry, a Bay Area band that also included Pat Enright, later of the Nashville Bluegrass Band, and for years she played bass and sang in Dick Oxtot’s Golden Age Jazz Band. In 1975 she and Kathy Kallick were among the founders of the Good Ol’ Persons, a band of women that grew out of an open-mic set. She stayed only a short while, and in 1979 she formed the Grant Street String Band with Beth Weil, Tom Bekeny, Greg Townsend and Steve Krouse, the band in which her own songs came to the fore. She also twice won the California Women’s Fiddling Championship.

She was thirty-six when she made her first album under her own name. Restless Rambling Heart (Flying Fish, 1986) was produced by Tim O’Brien, who also played mandolin and fiddle on it, and seven of its songs were hers; she played fiddle and bass, with Greg Townsend on guitar. That year she began working with the mandolinist and singer Tom Rozum, who has played and sung in all of her bands since. Love Chooses You followed on Flying Fish in 1989, the year Kathy Mattea had a hit with its title song, and Laurie Lewis & Grant Street’s Singin’ My Troubles Away came out on the same label in 1990. In 1989 she also produced her first album for another musician, the guitarist Scott Nygaard’s No Hurry.

Her years with Rounder began with True Stories (1993), recorded mostly at Tomland Studios in Pacheco, California, with Rozum, Todd Phillips, Rob Ickes and Mike Marshall among the players. It included “Who Will Watch the Home Place?,” which she sang and played fiddle on with Rozum, Peter McLaughlin and Cary Black. Together, her 1991 duet album with Kallick, was reissued by Rounder in 1995, the year the label released The Oak and the Laurel, a duet album with Rozum that was nominated for the Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album. Earth & Sky: Songs of Laurie Lewis (1997), Seeing Things (1998) and Laurie Lewis & Her Bluegrass Pals (1999) completed her Rounder run. To launch Seeing Things in June 1998 she put together a band with Darol Anger, Mike Marshall, Rozum, Nina Gerber, Todd Phillips, Mary Gibbons and Kallick, and a recording of those shows came out more than twenty years later as Freight ’98.

She also played on other artists’ projects in those years. On True Life Blues: The Songs of Bill Monroe (Sugar Hill, 1996), produced by Todd Phillips, she sang lead and played fiddle on “True Life Blues” and sang tenor on “Used to Be,” both with Kallick. The album won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album and the IBMA’s Recorded Event of the Year. For Ralph Stanley’s Clinch Mountain Country (Rebel, 1998) she played fiddle on “Old Love Letters” and sang its verses, with Stanley leading the choruses, and she was among the singers on Follow Me Back to the Fold: A Tribute to Women in Bluegrass, the IBMA’s Recorded Event of the Year in 2001.

She moved to HighTone for Guest House (2004), a duo album with Rozum, and The Golden West (2006), credited to Laurie Lewis & the Right Hands, the name she gave her band that year. From then on she issued her records on her own label, Spruce and Maple Music. Live (2008) was recorded over three nights in Oregon and Washington in March 2007 with Rozum, Scott Huffman on guitar, Craig Smith on banjo and Todd Phillips on bass. Blossoms (2010), Skippin’ and Flyin’ (2011) and One Evening in May (2013) followed. In 2014 she and Kallick recorded Laurie & Kathy Sing the Songs of Vern & Ray, drawn from the repertoire of Vern Williams and Ray Park, the Arkansas-born pair who had been early mentors to them both.

Another early example came from Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard. In her early twenties, she later wrote, she had noticed how few women sang bluegrass in the hard-edged style of its first-generation men, until someone gave her their first LP, Who’s That Knocking?. The Hazel and Alice Sessions (Spruce and Maple, 2016), by Laurie Lewis & the Right Hands, was recorded in Berkeley with Lewis on guitar, Rozum on mandolin, Patrick Sauber on banjo, Andrew Conklin on bass, and Tatiana Hargreaves and Chad Manning on fiddle, and it was nominated for the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album. Its version of “Pretty Bird” came from sessions she had recorded with Linda Ronstadt for a Rounder tribute to Dickens that was never released. and Laurie Lewis (2020) is a set of duets with Kallick, Rozum, Molly Tuttle, Mike Marshall, Nina Gerber, Barbara Higbie, Craig Smith, Todd Phillips, Hargreaves and Leah Wollenberg. Her twenty-fourth album, Trees, came out on 31 May 2024. O California!, released on 13 February 2026 with her bandmates Brandon Godman on fiddle, George Guthrie on banjo and Hasee Ciaccio on bass, has five new songs of hers, five traditional pieces and Alice Gerrard’s “Sweet South Anna River.”

She has produced more than a dozen albums for other musicians. Among them are Charles Sawtelle’s Music from Rancho DeVille, which she finished after his death, Alice Gerrard’s Bittersweet, and records by the T Sisters and by Melody Walker and Jacob Groopman. Kathy Mattea, Patsy Montana and the First Ladies of Bluegrass have recorded her songs, and at Wendell Berry’s request she has set some of his poems to music. She directed Bluegrass Week at the Augusta Heritage workshops from 1986 to 1996, and with Rozum she ran the Bluegrass at the Beach camp on the Oregon coast from 1992 to 2007. Among the younger musicians who count her as a mentor are Tatiana Hargreaves and Kimber Ludiker. In 2020 she was one of the musicians on Becky Buller’s “The Barber’s Fiddle,” the IBMA’s Collaborative Recording of the Year.

• 1992 – IBMA Female Vocalist of the Year
• 1994 – IBMA Female Vocalist of the Year; IBMA Song of the Year, “Who Will Watch the Home Place?”
• 1996 – Grammy nomination, Best Traditional Folk Album, The Oak and the Laurel (with Tom Rozum)
• 1997 – IBMA Recorded Event of the Year, True Life Blues: The Songs of Bill Monroe (also the Grammy winner for Best Bluegrass Album)
• 2001 – IBMA Recorded Event of the Year, Follow Me Back to the Fold: A Tribute to Women in Bluegrass
• 2017 – Grammy nomination, Best Bluegrass Album, The Hazel and Alice Sessions
• 2020 – IBMA Collaborative Recording of the Year, “The Barber’s Fiddle”
• 2024 – IBMA Distinguished Achievement Award