The Petersens

The band’s own account traces it to a family trip to the Gettysburg battlefield, when a bluegrass festival happened to be on. Jon Petersen, then an Air Force officer whose postings moved the family every two or three years, watched families playing music together there, decided his own would become a bluegrass band, and bought Ellen a banjo at the festival. Each child had started on piano at seven. Katie had already taken classical violin and was sent to a fiddle camp, while Matt switched from classical guitar to flatpicking lessons, with his father playing rhythm guitar until he was ready; Ellen, who had chosen drums, learned banjo largely from tablature books; and Karen took up the mandolin. The family first performed in 2005 at the First Christian Church of Mountain Grove, Missouri, and went on to local festivals, churches and cafés. On 5 September 2010 they won the CAM Gospel Sing-Off at the Sight & Sound Theatre in Branson.

In 2015 the band went full-time, and Ellen Petersen competed that year on season 14 of American Idol and reached the Top 48. In 2017 Julianne, who had started on fiddle, moved to mandolin, and Karen to bass. Emmett Franz, who had grown up in the Franz Family band, first filled in on dobro in the summer of 2017, played with them again that fall when they released Shenandoah, and joined full-time in 2018. In the band’s arrangements Katie sets the basic layout, Karen writes the chord chart and Franz adds many of the counter-melodies.

Finally Going Home (2014) was followed by Shenandoah (October 2017), which mixes “The Ballad of John and Becky” and “The Ring Song” with the title song, “She’s Got You” and “Fields of Gold,” and Homesick for a Country (August 2019). Covers released as singles in 2019, among them “Jolene,” “High Sierra” and “Gentle on My Mind,” came out as the YouTube channel took off. Since 2020 the band has issued a series of Live Sessions albums (seven volumes by August 2026), the holiday albums Christmas with the Petersens (2020) and We Don’t Need Anything This Year (2023), the EP The Greenest Grass (2024), and in May 2026 a gospel album, Father, A Moment With You, of original songs and hymns.

Besides the Branson shows the band has toured in Ireland, the United Kingdom and Finland (2019), New Zealand (March 2025), and in Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium, France and Germany.