The Crowe Brothers

Their father, Charles “Junior” Crowe, was a banjo player whose band, the Sunshine Melody Boys, won a talent contest that took it from Georgia to the Grand Ole Opry in 1960, and the brothers learned under his guidance; Josh recalled their first paid job, at a department-store opening, when he was about ten. Early on they played in bands such as Oliver Rice and the Blue Ridge Mountain Boys, with Josh on bass and Wayne on banjo.

In 1975, with Josh now on guitar and Wayne on bass, they teamed up with Raymond Fairchild, the banjo player from Cherokee, North Carolina, who was based at the Maggie Valley Opry House. The trio played the Grand Ole Opry regularly for a time, and the brothers’ records of those years, with Fairchild on banjo, include Picking & Singing in Maggie Valley (Atteiram, 1978, shared with Frank Buchanan and Fairchild’s Maggie Valley Boys), Sing “Always True” (Skyline, 1981), Sing the Gospel Way (Skyline, 1984), The Winds Are Blowing in the Maggie Valley (Atteiram, 1985), with Jesse McReynolds on mandolin and Glen Duncan on fiddle, and the gospel album Jesus Is Coming (Atteiram, 1988), with Buddy Spicher on fiddle and mandolin. Josh wrote “The Winds Are Blowing in Maggie Valley,” a No. 1 single on Bluegrass Unlimited’s Top 30 chart, and “I Knew It Wasn’t You (The Telephone Song),” the title song of a 1989 Atteiram album. In the 1990s Josh won the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music of America’s award for Best Bluegrass Rhythm Guitar, and the brothers and Fairchild were named its Best Instrumental Band. The trio lasted until 1991, when Fairchild formed a new band with his son Zane.

Wayne retired from music in 1993. Josh then teamed up with the mandolinist David McLaughlin for Going Back on Rounder, which won Album of the Year at the 1994 Washington, D.C., music awards, and later led the Josh Crowe Band. Around 2004 the brothers came back together. Their Rural Rhythm album Brothers-N-Harmony (2008), with Ronnie McCoury, Don Wayne Reno, Steve Thomas and Randy Kohrs among the guests, opened with “Cindy Mae,” which went to No. 1 on several charts including Sirius XM. Bridging the Gap (2011), dedicated to their mother, Margie Crowe, with Steve Sutton on banjo, Brian Blaylock and Ashby Frank on mandolin, Thomas on fiddle and Kohrs on Dobro, produced another No. 1 in “He Could Pick the Hound,” along with new versions of Josh’s songs “Grandma’s Little Boardside Cabin” and “The Winds Are Blowing in Maggie Valley.”

The brothers, by then 68 and 71 and working in Josh’s trucking and excavating business around Waynesville, North Carolina, decided to dissolve the band in 2026. Their final show was at the Boxcar Pinion Forever Bluegrass Festival at Mountain Cove Farms in Chickamauga, Georgia, on 2 May 2026, with Brian Blaylock on banjo, Cody Shuler on mandolin and Darren Nicholson on guitar and mandolin.