Alison Brown

She was born on 7 August 1962 in Hartford, Connecticut, took up the guitar at eight and the banjo at ten, after hearing Flatt & Scruggs’s album Foggy Mountain Banjo, and grew up playing bluegrass in Southern California, where she counted Byron Berline and John Hickman among her mentors. At twelve she met the young fiddler Stuart Duncan, and in the summer of 1978 she traveled the festival and contest circuit with Duncan and his father, winning the Canadian National Banjo Championship, which brought her a one-night spot on the Grand Ole Opry. Brown and Duncan made the instrumental album Pre-Sequel for Ridge Runner in 1981, with Steve Libbea on guitar and Gene Libbea on bass; it includes “The Great Lasagna Rebellion,” which the two wrote together.

In 1980 she went to Harvard, where she studied history and literature, and while there she played from 1982 to 1984 in the reunited Northern Lights. She then earned an MBA at UCLA and spent two years in investment banking with Smith Barney in San Francisco. In 1987 Alison Krauss asked her to join Union Station, and she gave up banking to play banjo in the band for three years; she is on Krauss’s I’ve Got That Old Feeling (1990), whose title track won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Recording. She moved to Tennessee in 1990, and in 1991 the IBMA named her Banjo Player of the Year.

Her first solo album, Simple Pleasures (Vanguard, 1990), produced by David Grisman, set Latin and jazz ideas alongside bluegrass and was nominated for a Grammy. It introduced “Leaving Cottondale” and “Mambo Banjo,” on which she was joined by Grisman, Mike Marshall and Alison Krauss. Vanguard released Twilight Motel (1992), Look Left (1994) and The Alison Brown Quartet (1996). In 1992 she was bandleader for the singer Michelle Shocked, and in 1993 she formed her own Alison Brown Quartet, with which she has toured the United States, Europe, Latin America and Japan, from the Kennedy Center, Newport and Telluride to Celtic Connections and the Cambridge Folk Festival.

Brown and West first ran a label called Small World Music and in 1995 launched Compass Records. The company bought the catalog of the Celtic label Green Linnet in 2006 and the Dublin label Mulligan Records in 2007, and in 2017 it acquired Red House Records of St. Paul, Minnesota. Its Nashville headquarters houses Compass Sound Studio, which Brown and West own and run. Her own albums moved to Compass with the quartet’s Out of the Blue (1998) and Fair Weather (2000), on which Vince Gill sang the title song and “Leaving Cottondale” was rerecorded as a banjo duet with Fleck, with Sam Bush, Stuart Duncan, David Grier and Todd Phillips; that recording won her the 2001 Grammy. Replay (2002), Stolen Moments (2005), Evergreen (2008), The Company You Keep (2009) and The Song of the Banjo (2015), with Keb’ Mo’ singing “What’s Going On?,” followed.

On Banjo (May 2023), all instrumental, paired her with guests from several fields: the classical guitarist Sharon Isbin, the clarinetist Anat Cohen on a Brazilian choro, Sierra Hull on “Sweet Sixteenths,” the Kronos Quartet, Stuart Duncan on a piece honoring Berline and Hickman, and Steve Martin, with whom she wrote “Foggy Morning Breaking,” his clawhammer set against her three-finger playing, its title borrowed from a John Hartford lyric. Her band on the album, the Alison Brown Quintet, had John Ragusa on flute, Chris Walters on piano, West on bass and Jordan Perlson on drums. On “Sun and Water” she played her Julia Belle low banjo, made with Deering and inlaid with Hartford’s artwork, in tribute to the sound Hartford used behind his voice.

As a producer, much of her work has been for Compass artists. She produced the Special Consensus’s Country Boy: A Bluegrass Tribute to John Denver (2014) and Rivers & Roads, the IBMA’s Album of the Year in 2018, and co-wrote the band’s “Chicago Barn Dance” with Becky Buller and Missy Raines, the IBMA’s Song of the Year in 2020. She produced Bobby Osborne’s Original (2017) and his “White Line Fever” (2021), co-produced with West, and Missy Raines’s “Swept Away” (2018) and “Darlin’ Pal(s) of Mine” (2019), playing on several of those records herself.

Her partnership with Steve Martin, with whom she co-chairs the Steve Martin Banjo Prize, produced a run of chart-topping singles after “Foggy Morning Breaking,” among them “Bluegrass Radio” and “Wall Guitar (Since You Said Goodbye).” Their “5 Days Out, 2 Days Back,” with Tim O’Brien, drew three IBMA nominations in 2025, and on 18 September 2025 the two hosted the IBMA Bluegrass Music Awards at Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Auditorium in Chattanooga. Their first full album together, Safe, Sensible and Sane, came out on Compass on 17 October 2025, recorded live at Compass Sound Studio and co-produced by Brown and West, with guests including Jackson Browne, Vince Gill, the Indigo Girls, Tim O’Brien, Jason Mraz, Della Mae, Sam Bush, Stuart Duncan, Molly Tuttle and Sierra Hull. By then she had made twelve solo albums and received four Grammy nominations besides her win.

She has also received a United States Artists Fellowship, taught as adjunct faculty at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music, and served as president of the Nashville chapter’s Board of Governors of the Recording Academy.

• 1991 – IBMA Banjo Player of the Year
• 2001 – Grammy Award, Best Country Instrumental Performance, “Leaving Cottondale” (with Béla Fleck)
• 2015 – IBMA Distinguished Achievement Award
• 2018 – IBMA Album of the Year, as producer of the Special Consensus’s Rivers & Roads
• 2019 – American Banjo Museum Hall of Fame
• 2020 – IBMA Song of the Year, “Chicago Barn Dance” (co-writer and producer)
• 2025 – Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s Louise Scruggs Memorial Forum award
• 2025 – IBMA Instrumental Recorded Performance of the Year, “Ralph’s Banjo Special,” with Kristin Scott Benson and Gena Britt