Louisa Branscomb

Recording Artist · Active 1993–present · Also a musician

Louisa Branscomb is a songwriter, banjo player and guitarist whose “Steel Rails,” written in her twenties and recorded by Alison Krauss in 1990, became one of the longest-charting songs in bluegrass. In the 1970s she co-led the band Boot Hill on banjo, and she has since had hundreds of songs recorded, won the IBMA’s Song of the Year in 2014 for “Dear Sister,” written with Claire Lynch, and received its Distinguished Achievement Award in 2017.

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She grew up in Alabama in a musical household; at eleven she won the Alabama Student Music Composition Contest and played her piece with the Birmingham Symphony. A cousin in Texas gave her her first Martin guitar and turned her toward country music, and she began playing bluegrass at nineteen. In Winston-Salem, North Carolina, she and the banjo player Sally Wingate formed an all-female band, Bluegrass Liberation.

In 1972 she started Boot Hill with the guitarist Sam Sanger, playing banjo and writing much of the band’s material, and the group toured until 1980. Its first album, Steel Rails (Atteiram, 1977), was cut at Studio One in Nashville with Gary Brown on mandolin, Steve Block on bass and Buddy Spicher on fiddle, and carried her title song. Blue Ridge Memories (Millwheel, 1978), recorded at Thunderhead Studios in Knoxville, has her singing lead on its title song, which became a chart hit in Japan; Fly Soul Away (Millwheel, 1979) followed, with Blaine Sprouse on fiddle and Branscomb singing tenor throughout. Mel Tillis, who had heard “Steel Rails” on a cassette, picked out songs of hers to publish and recorded the song himself, though he never released it, and the McPeak Brothers recorded it before Krauss did.

After Boot Hill she played for a time in Cherokee Rose, an all-female band with Missy Raines, then moved to Atlanta in the 1980s for graduate study in clinical psychology. She later led Gypsy Heart, playing mandolin as well as banjo, made the solo album It’s Time to Write a Song (Lodestar, 1992) and played with Fontanna Sunset. Krauss’s “Steel Rails,” recorded in Nashville with Jeff White, Stuart Duncan, Jerry Douglas and Dave Pomeroy, appeared on I’ve Got That Old Feeling, which won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album; the song was SPBGMA’s Song of the Year, and John Denver recorded it on his last album, the Grammy-winning All Aboard! She was inducted into the Georgia Country Music Hall of Honor in 2006.

Her songs have been recorded by Dale Ann Bradley, whose Don’t Turn Your Back (2009) took four of them including the title song, and by Claire Lynch, the McPeak Brothers, Valerie Smith, Nu-Blu and the Daughters of Bluegrass, among others. “Dear Sister,” written with and recorded by Lynch, won the IBMA’s Song of the Year in 2014. In 2005 she helped found what became the IBMA’s Bluegrass Songwriter Committee, and since 1989 she has run the Woodsong Farm songwriter retreats, working with adults and with children through her nonprofit, the ScreenDoor Songwriter Alliance. She moved the retreats from Georgia to North Carolina in 2021.

On her own records she issued I’ll Take Love on Compass in 2011, and her twelfth album, Gonna Love Anyway (Compass, 2019), co-produced with Missy Raines, set her songs with singers including Dale Ann Bradley, Molly Tuttle, Becky Buller, Claire Lynch and Sierra Hull. Its new “Steel Rails,” released ahead of the thirtieth anniversary of Krauss’s version, gave the lead to Buller, Celia Woodsmith, Bradley, Jeanette Williams, Hull and Tuttle, with Alison Brown on banjo and Stuart Duncan on fiddle.

  • 2006: Georgia Country Music Hall of Honor
  • 2014: IBMA Song of the Year, “Dear Sister” (with Claire Lynch)
  • 2017: IBMA Distinguished Achievement Award
  • 2019: Alabama Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame

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