The Charlie Sizemore Band

Sizemore, raised on Puncheon Creek in Magoffin County, had joined Stanley in November 1977, at seventeen, in place of Keith Whitley. When he left in 1986, at twenty-six, he started the band and enrolled in college at the same time. Its first album was cut in a single day, 8 August 1988, at River Tracks in Louisa, Kentucky: Gravel Road (Rutabaga, 1988), with Jeff Roberts on banjo, Buddy Griffin on fiddle and Heath Van Winkle on electric bass, Roberts and Van Winkle singing harmony. Singing with the Angels (Rutabaga, 1989), recorded at the same studio in September 1989, had Jack Williams on banjo, Shayne Bartley on mandolin and Van Winkle on bass, the three of them joining Sizemore in four-part harmony on songs such as “Old Country Church.”

By the mid-1990s Sizemore was a Nashville attorney and songwriter as well as a performer, and after a solo album for Rebel, Back Home (1994), he introduced a new Charlie Sizemore Band on In My View (Rebel, February 1996): Danny Barnes on mandolin, Will Parsons on banjo and John Berry on bass, with Rickie Simpkins on fiddle and Jimmy Stewart on Dobro as guests, recorded at Clubhouse Recording in Hendersonville, Tennessee. Sizemore spent two years gathering its songs, from writers such as Ernest Tubb, Vern Gosdin and Tom T. Hall, and wrote two himself, the title song and “Made in the Shade (If the Tree Don’t Fall),” with Jimmy Martin. Its opening track, Hall’s “That’s How I Got to Memphis,” went to the top of the National Bluegrass Survey and led to Sizemore’s album of Hall’s songs, The Story Is… (Rebel, 2002). He had taken a break from the road late in 1998 to finish law school.

Rounder signed the band in 2007 and released Good News on 14 August 2007, Sizemore’s first new studio album in five years. Co-produced with Buddy Cannon and recorded largely live at Tom T. and Dixie Hall’s studio in Franklin, Tennessee, it had Barnes on mandolin, Wayne Fields on banjo, Matt DeSpain on Dobro and John Pennell on bass, four new songs by Sizemore, among them “Alison’s Band” and “Silver Bugle,” and songs by the Halls, Harley Allen, Hank Cochran and Hugh Prestwood, whose “Hard Rock Bottom of Your Heart” Sizemore sang with DeSpain and Barnes. The band toured that year and played the IBMA World of Bluegrass in October 2007. Barnes, DeSpain and Pennell were still with him on Heartache Looking for a Home (Rounder, 2010), issued under Sizemore’s own name, with Josh McMurray on banjo and Ron Stewart on fiddle.