Rachel Eddy
Rachel Eddy is an old-time fiddler, singer and multi-instrumentalist from West Virginia who plays fiddle, banjo, guitar, mandolin and bass. Eddy spent six years in Sweden, toured Europe and Australia with Uncle Earl in 2010, and has since played in the Ken and Brad Kolodner Quartet and the trio the Early Mays, as well as teaching at old-time camps on both sides of the Atlantic.
Eddy grew up in a musical family just outside Morgantown, West Virginia, steeped in Appalachian music and dance, learned the fiddle there and played for years in local bands, picking up guitar and banjo along the way. The first full-length album was The Morgantown Rounders (2006). In 2008 Eddy went to Nashville to make a solo record, Hand on the Plow, backed by Tim O’Brien, Mark Schatz and others; its thirteen tracks mix fiddle tunes such as “Shag Poke,” “Sarah Armstrong,” “Elk River Blues” and Bill Monroe’s “Jerusalem Ridge” with songs including “Two Sisters,” “Gospel Plow” and “Blue Diamond Mines.”
From 2008 to 2014 Eddy lived in Sweden, based in Stockholm, and was active in the Swedish old-time scene, bringing dozens of new players to Appalachian music and dance. Those years brought heavy touring in Europe, with the traveling world-music festival Klangwelten and with Uncle Earl: after Abigail Washburn and Rayna Gellert left the band in 2010, Eddy joined KC Groves, Kristin Andreassen, Stephanie Coleman and Paula Bradley on banjo, fiddle and bass for tours of Europe and Australia that year. With the Danish-born banjo player Kristian Herner, of the Stockholm band the Rockridge Brothers, Eddy recorded the duo album Chilly Winds (August 2010), and with Herner and friends won the traditional band contest at the Appalachian String Band Festival in Clifftop, West Virginia, in 2011. A second solo album, Nothin’ But Corn, followed in 2014.
Back in the United States and based in Washington, D.C., Eddy joined the Baltimore father-and-son duo Ken and Brad Kolodner in a quartet with the bassist Alex Lacquement from 2016, playing fiddle and guitar on The Swift House (2017) and Stony Run (2020). With the Early Mays, the trio led by Ellen Gozion and Emily Pinkerton, Eddy recorded Chase the Sun (2017). Eddy also produced and played on Roger Netherton’s first album (2018), helped create the soundscape for the Indiana Repertory Theatre’s 2019 production of Amber Waves and performed in it, and with the fiddler Erynn Marshall released the two-volume Old Time Sweethearts (2021). Eddy has taught at the Augusta Heritage Center, the Alabama Folk School, Common Ground, Steve Kaufman’s Kamp, the Nashville Fiddle and Banjo Camp and Sore Fingers.
