The Tuttles with AJ Lee

Jack Tuttle had played bluegrass since his teens in Illinois, and in California he played mandolin and fiddle in the Gryphon Quintet and fiddle with the Fog City Ramblers, and taught jam classes and private lessons around Palo Alto for decades. He taught his children to play, and the family band, with AJ Lee on mandolin and vocals, became the last band he played in. Molly joined at fifteen, playing guitar and banjo and singing; Sullivan played guitar and Michael mandolin. Jack at first split his time between fiddle and bass, bringing in another bass player for the fiddle numbers, but as the band’s arrangements grew more varied he settled on bass and harmony vocals.

The band’s first album came out in the fall of 2010. At the Northern California Bluegrass Society’s awards in January 2012 it was named Best Band for the second year running, the first band to win twice in a row; Molly was Best Female Vocalist, an award AJ Lee had won the two previous years, Michael won Best Mandolin Player and Jack Best Fiddler. Jim Roe of Roe Entertainment heard the band at IBMA’s convention in 2011 and signed it for booking, announced at the end of January 2012. By then Molly was studying at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, but she kept playing with the band.

Endless Ocean, released in the summer of 2013, has thirteen tracks led by Molly’s and AJ’s voices, mixing bluegrass staples such as “White House Blues,” Cowboy Copas’s “Alabam” and Hazel Dickens’s “A Few Old Memories” with Gram Parsons’s “Hickory Wind,” Conor Oberst’s “Temazcal,” the duet “Oh, Mandolin” and Molly’s own title song. That July the band played the Freight & Salvage in Berkeley, with a new song of Molly’s, “Another Side.” Jack Tuttle recalls playing the Strawberry Festival, the California Bluegrass Association’s Father’s Day Festival and an IBMA showcase in Nashville, and a tour of the UK as just the Tuttles.

Molly Tuttle went on to a solo career: in 2017 she became the first woman to be named the IBMA’s Guitar Player of the Year, won it again in 2018, and with her band Golden Highway won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album for Crooked Tree and City of Gold. AJ Lee leads AJ Lee & Blue Summit, with Sullivan Tuttle on guitar, and Michael Tuttle went to work in computing. Jack, who no longer plays in bands, still teaches and jams, and in late 2024 Molly turned a Christmas show in Jack’s town into a family-and-friends set with Jack, Sullivan, Michael and AJ Lee.