The SteelDrivers

Henderson, a mandolinist, songwriter and blues harmonica player from Independence, Missouri, had played bluegrass in college with the banjo player Mike Fleming before turning to rock, blues and country songwriting in Nashville, where he co-founded the Dead Reckoning label in 1994 with the fiddler Tammy Rogers among others. The first SteelDrivers were Henderson on mandolin, Stapleton, his frequent co-writer, on guitar and lead vocals, Rogers on fiddle, Fleming, now on bass, and Richard Bailey on banjo. Rounder signed them in April 2007, when their debut album was already being mixed.

The SteelDrivers came out on Rounder on 15 January 2008, all new original songs, and reached No. 2 on Billboard’s bluegrass albums chart and No. 57 on the country albums chart. That May the band made its Grand Ole Opry television debut. “Blue Side of the Mountain” was nominated for the Grammy for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal, and the IBMA named the band Emerging Artist of the Year in 2009. A second album, Reckless (7 September 2010), brought two more nominations, for Best Bluegrass Album and, with “Where Rainbows Never Die,” again in the country duo or group category. Of the songs on the first two albums, only four were not from the Henderson and Stapleton catalog, which supplied “Drinkin’ Dark Whiskey,” “If It Hadn’t Been for Love” and “Midnight Train to Memphis.” The band also played “East Virginia Blues” and “Whiskey Before Breakfast” in Robert Duvall’s film Get Low. “If It Hadn’t Been for Love” and “Where Rainbows Never Die” were later certified platinum.

Stapleton announced in April 2010 that he was leaving, and the former Mercury Records artist Gary Nichols took over lead vocals and guitar. Henderson left in December 2011 and was replaced on mandolin by the Nashville musician and producer Brent Truitt. With Nichols singing, the band made Hammer Down (2013), which reached No. 1 on the bluegrass albums chart, and The Muscle Shoals Recordings (16 June 2015), which also topped that chart and won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album at the 58th Grammy Awards. In May 2017 Nichols took medical leave from touring, and he was later announced to have left; the band used fill-in singers until January 2018, when it hired Kelvin Damrell of eastern Kentucky, who had won an online Chris Stapleton cover contest. Damrell sang on Bad for You (Rounder, 7 February 2020), another No. 1 bluegrass album, and left in July 2021. Matt Dame, an Arkansas-born singer from Nashville’s studio scene, played his first show with the band on 17 July 2021.

With Dame, Rogers, Truitt, Bailey and Fleming, the band made its first gospel album, Tougher Than Nails, for the Gaither Music Group in September 2023: older songs such as “Just a Little Talk with Jesus” alongside six new ones by members past and present. In February 2025, marking twenty years together, the SteelDrivers signed with the revived Sun Records, which released Outrun on 23 May 2025, and the album was nominated for Best Bluegrass Album at the 2026 Grammys. Henderson died on 22 September 2023, aged 70.