Barry Reed

Musician
Best known for Bass

Barry Reed is an upright bass player and harmony singer who played with the Lonesome River Band from September 2010 to July 2021, on the band’s albums from the three-volume Chronology (2012) to Singing Up There (2021). Before that he worked with the fiddler Michael Cleveland’s band Flamekeeper and with Audie Blaylock.

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Reed studied jazz and classical bass in college. After playing with Blaylock and with Cleveland and Flamekeeper he left the road for a time, and in September 2010 he began traveling with the Lonesome River Band, joining its leader, the banjo player Sammy Shelor, with Andy Ball on mandolin, Brandon Rickman on guitar and Mike Hartgrove on fiddle. Shelor said he was loving the sound of the upright bass in the band. Randy Jones replaced Ball on mandolin in March 2011.

With Shelor, Rickman, Hartgrove and Jones he recorded the Rural Rhythm series Chronology, issued in three volumes in 2012, and Turn on a Dime (Mountain Home, 2014), on which he sang harmony on every track. Jesse Smathers took over the mandolin for Bridging the Tradition (2016), Mayhayley’s House (2017) and Outside Looking In (2019), all for Mountain Home, and in 2021 the same five made Singing Up There, a tribute to the Easter Brothers. On Turn on a Dime he sang harmony with Shelor behind the leads of Rickman and Jones.

In July 2021 the band announced that Reed was leaving to take a job outside the music business; Shelor said a change of career was needed for the stability of his family, and called him “our master bass player.” Kameron Keller took over on 9 July 2021. Some of Reed’s last recordings with the band, among them “Cumberland River Shore,” appeared on Heyday (2022).

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