Barry Berrier

In 1977 he and Kenneth Berrier began playing with the brothers Mitchell and Mark Freeman in a band called Interstate Exchange; after a couple of years Kenneth moved on and the sixteen-year-old Eric Silver joined. He later worked in Don Parmley’s Bluegrass Cardinals, one of the players for whom that band served as a training ground and springboard.

By 1992 he was the guitarist and a lead singer in Lost & Found. On January Rain (Rebel, November 1992) the band was Berrier on guitar, Lynwood Lunsford on banjo, Dempsey Young on mandolin and Mills on bass; on “Sawmill Road” Mills sings lead with Young on tenor and Berrier on baritone, and elsewhere Berrier sang lead. He shares the guitar work with Scottie Sparks on It’s About Time (Rebel, 2002), and his tracks are among those collected on Rebel’s retrospective Down on Sawmill Road (2010).

In 2005 he was playing bass with David Parmley & Continental Divide when Sammy Shelor brought him into the Lonesome River Band, again on bass, alongside Shannon Slaughter on guitar and Jeff Parker on mandolin; a reviewer of the new lineup’s first shows that autumn singled out his singing. The band introduced the lineup in February 2006 with five free re-recordings of earlier LRB songs, and in July 2006 released The Road With No End on Mountain Home, its tenth album, which included songs by Slaughter and Berrier. Tracks from that period were reissued on LRB’s 2015 compilation Coming Back Home to You.

He sings harmony on Shannon Slaughter’s first solo album, The Sideman Steps Out (2011), and under his own name recorded Whitey Shafer’s “High Steel and Memories.” In 2026 he was among the former Lost & Found members at Allen Mills’s celebration of life.