Allen Watkins

Musician
Best known for Banjo

Allen Watkins is a North Alabama banjo player, guitarist and singer who played banjo in Claire Lynch’s Front Porch String Band in the early 1980s and later led the Allen Watkins Band. He is a three-time Alabama state champion in finger-style guitar.

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His banjo is heard on Front Porch String Band (Leather, 1981), recorded at Small World Recording in Huntsville, Alabama, with Claire Lynch on guitar and lead vocals, Larry Lynch on mandolin, fiddle and guitar and Terry Campbell on bass, all four of them singing; Rebel reissued it in 1983. He has also toured with Whetstone Run, played with the Lonesome River Band and recorded with Mark Johnson and Tony Rice, and by 2017 his recordings ran to nine albums. With his wife, the singer and multi-instrumentalist Connie Watkins, he formed the Allen Watkins Band, a North Alabama acoustic group playing original songs and covers that draw on bluegrass, folk, blues and Celtic music; the band celebrated the release of its debut album in late 2017.

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