Wildfire

The four were working for Crowe, and playing shows at Dollywood, when they started Wildfire on the side, playing around east Tennessee and recording a first CD to sell at Dollywood. When they left Crowe to make it their full-time band, their banjo player was Barry Crabtree, the one founder who had not worked for Crowe. Dollywood gave them a base two or three days a week, Leadbetter handled the booking, and they were soon playing festivals. From the start, Leadbetter said, the aim was to sound unlike the New South, with songs chosen from well beyond bluegrass.

The first Pinecastle album, Uncontained (PRC 1114, 2001), had Hale singing most of the leads, Webb singing tenor and some leads and Leadbetter baritone, with Scott Vestal as guest banjo player and Sonya Isaacs on harmony vocals; it was mixed by Bil Vorndick, with liner notes by Jon Weisberger. Its songs included “Rough Edges,” “Bartender’s Blues,” “Moanin’ the Blues” and “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down.” By Where Roads Divide (PRC 1127, April 2003), recorded at Nightsong Studio in Knoxville, Barry Crabtree was the band’s banjo player. Rattle of the Chains (PRC 1148), released in late September 2005, was recorded and mixed by Vestal in his new home studio and dedicated to the memory of Jimmy Martin. It took its title from Darryl Worley’s “I Wouldn’t Mind the Shackles” and also drew on Tom T. Hall’s “Ballad of Forty Dollars,” Harley Allen’s “All in God’s Plan” and Jerry Salley’s “The Blame,” with three songs by Hale, among them “In Our Hearts,” written for his late father. The band was also one of the many acts on the charity collection Celebration of Life: Musicians Against Childhood Cancer (Skaggs Family, 2006), which IBMA named Album of the Year.

By the band’s fourth album, Crash Course in the Blues (Lonesome Day, 2010), Hale and Chapman were joined by Johnny Lewis on banjo, Steve Thomas on mandolin and fiddle, and Matt DeSpain on Dobro; Thomas also engineered and produced it. Its songs ran from Steve Wariner’s title track and Keith Whitley’s “Daddy Loved Trains” to two Vince Gill songs and Hale’s own “Lies That You Told” and “In This Town.” In July 2014 Wildfire returned to Pinecastle with a single, Hale’s “I Want to Go Back Home Again,” with Lewis, Chris Davis on mandolin and Greg Luck on fiddle, and the album that followed, Rented Room on Broadway (Pinecastle, 2016), mixed Hale’s songs with little-heard country numbers such as “They Don’t Make ’Em Like My Daddy Anymore” and “The Ghost of Jim Bob Wilson.”

Quiet Country Town (Pinecastle, 2022) had Hale, Chapman, Lewis, DeSpain and a new mandolinist, Scott Napier, with Vestal, Shawn Lane and Dale Ann Bradley as guests; it opened with Alabama’s “Ride the Train” and included Hale’s title song and “I’ve Been Through It All.” Crowe played some shows with the band over the years. As of June 2025 Wildfire was still performing, though less often than Hale would have liked, since its members had other work.