The Nashville Bluegrass Band

In 1984 O’Bryant and Enright brought in mandolinist Mike Compton and bassist Mark Hembree, who had been playing with Bill Monroe, to join a two-month, 9,000-mile bus tour called the Grand Old Country Music Show, whose cast included Minnie Pearl and Vernon Oxford. The four played their first show as the Nashville Bluegrass Band at the Station Inn on 25 August 1984.

Bela Fleck, a former bandmate of Enright’s, got them a deal with Rounder and produced My Native Home (1985). Blaine Sprouse added fiddle during the sessions, and the band decided to keep a fiddle, inviting Stuart Duncan, a young fiddler they had met in Dayton, Ohio; he joined in the fall of 1985, just before the album came out. Fleck also produced Idle Time (1986) and the gospel album To Be His Child (1987). In 1986 the band went to Japan and then to Beijing, where it was hired for a nine-day American Days celebration at the Sheraton that ended on the Fourth of July, becoming the first bluegrass band to play in China.

The band signed with Sugar Hill in 1988. That year a bus accident near Roanoke, Virginia, led Compton to quit; Nick Haney filled in on bass for a time, and in the spring of 1989 Gene Libbea became the band’s bassist and Roland White its mandolinist. With that lineup the band won steady recognition from the IBMA, which named the band Vocal Group of the Year in 1990, 1991, 1992 and 1993 and Entertainer of the Year in 1992 and 1993, while Duncan was Fiddler of the Year in several of those years. “Blue Train,” from Home of the Blues (1991), which Jerry Douglas produced, was IBMA Song of the Year in 1992.

In the summer of 1990 the band first met the Fairfield Four, and the two groups went on to play Carnegie Hall together in April 1991 and record Standing in the Safety Zone in 1992. Waitin’ for the Hard Times to Go won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album at the 1994 ceremony, and Unleashed, produced by Douglas and including songs by Gillian Welch, won it again in 1996. Its other albums, New Moon Rising (with Peter Rowan), The Boys Are Back in Town, Home of the Blues, American Beauty (1998) and Twenty Year Blues (2004), were all Grammy nominees.

White left at the end of 1999, and Compton came back in January 2000. Libbea left that November and Dennis Crouch took over on bass. Enright, Compton and Duncan all took part in the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, Enright singing tenor and yodeling as one of the Soggy Bottom Boys, and in 2002 the band toured with the Down from the Mountain shows. On 20 April 2006 it played a White House luncheon for Chinese President Hu Jintao, chosen because it had been the first bluegrass band to play in China. Pat Enright, born in 1945, died on 18 August 2026. In July 2026 the IBMA announced the band’s election to the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame, and on 22 October 2026, in Chattanooga, it was inducted in a class with Byron Berline, Barry Lyle Poss and the Lost & Found.