Russ Carson

His father built banjos by hand and played old-time fiddle and banjo from the early 1970s, so music was always being played around him, and he started playing bluegrass at ten. As a boy he learned “Bugle Call Rag” from a video his father had taped of a television special on which J. D. Crowe played it. His main banjo since the start of his career has been a 1981 Gold Star J. D. Crowe model, the “81 Crowe” that gave his channels their name. In 2009 and 2010 he toured and recorded with the band Gold Heart.

In the summer of 2010 he joined Audie Blaylock & Redline. He is on the band’s I’m Going Back to Old Kentucky: A Bill Monroe Celebration (Rural Rhythm, 2011), with guests including Del and Ronnie McCoury, Bobby Osborne, Carl Jackson, Glen Duncan and Lou Reid, and on Hard Country (2012). His first solo album, Last Chance (Patuxent, 2011), had Jake Stargel on guitar, Marshall Wilborn on bass, Dominick Leslie on mandolin and Michael Cleveland and Patrick McAvinue on fiddles, with Brandon Rickman, Jeff Parker and the Gold sisters singing. Its fourteen tracks mixed bluegrass songs such as “Redwood Hill,” instrumentals such as “Shenandoah Breakdown,” less familiar old-time fiddle tunes and his own banjo piece “Sullivan County.”

Carson joined Kentucky Thunder in March 2014, playing his first show with Skaggs at the Bijou Theatre in Knoxville; he was hired on a ninety-day trial, and in May Skaggs cut the trial short and made him a full member. Later that year Patuxent released Avenue of the Giants, recorded with his Redline bandmates Jesse Brock, McAvinue, Jason Moore, who produced it, and Blaylock, with Kenny Smith on lead guitar. On it he played both three-finger and clawhammer banjo, including “New River Train” on a copy of an 1863 Joel Sweeney fretless banjo, covered Tony Trischka’s “New York Chimes,” and wrote “Pat Made Me Do It” and the title piece, in a tuning of his own. He has also recorded with Ricky Skaggs and Sharon White (Hearts Like Ours, 2014), Chris Jones & the Night Drivers, Gene Watson, Mike Compton, Robbie Fulks and Jake Workman.

In 2022 he signed with Engelhardt Music Group, which issued his “Bugle Call Rag” that August and “Awesome Sauce,” the theme of his video channel, in 2023, both with Workman, Aaron Ramsey, Stuart Duncan and Mike Bub. The full album, Songs That Birds Don’t Sing, came out in October 2025 after five years in the making; it includes the Cox Family’s “Look Me Up by the Ocean Door,” sung by Ron Block, Sonny Osborne and Dale Sledd’s “Sidesaddle” and Richard Underwood’s “Five Speed.” In January 2025 Huber Banjos introduced a Russ Carson signature model.