Bill Nershi
Bill Nershi is an acoustic guitarist, singer and songwriter, a founding member of the String Cheese Incident, the Colorado band that began as a bluegrass and covers group in Crested Butte in 1993. During the band’s break from 2007 he co-led the bluegrass-based Emmitt-Nershi Band with Drew Emmitt of Leftover Salmon, and he also performs as a duo with his wife, Jilian Nershi.
He was born on 16 September 1961 and grew up in New Jersey, a teenager in the 1970s drawn to progressive rock, folk and bluegrass. A brother living in Telluride, Colorado, a hang-glider pilot, was his reason for first visiting, and he has lived in Colorado since 1981. In Telluride, where he spent twelve or thirteen winters as a ski bum, the Telluride Bluegrass Festival turned him toward music, and he began playing there; his bluegrass group, the Rusty Spring Band, was invited to open the festival.
For the winter of 1993–94 he moved to Crested Butte to ski a different mountain, driving his converted school bus over and parking it at the house where the bassist Keith Moseley, whom he knew from picking at festivals such as RockyGrass, was living; it turned out to belong to the drummer Michael Travis. Looking for a regular après-ski gig, Nershi found the mandolin and violin player Michael Kang, and their happy-hour duo earned them ski passes for playing in the lift line. With Moseley and Travis they became the String Cheese Incident; Nershi made the woodblock print that became the logo on the band’s first T-shirt, and in June 1994 the band used the Rusty Spring Band’s invitation to open the Telluride Bluegrass Festival.
Nershi was the band’s acoustic guitarist and one of its singers and writers through its rise as a touring jam band on its own SCI Fidelity label, from Born on the Wrong Planet (1997) and ’Round the Wheel (1998) to Outside Inside (2001), Untying the Not (2003) and One Step Closer (2005); the band’s keyboard player, Kyle Hollingsworth, has recalled that it was Nershi who taught him bluegrass. As the band moved further into electronic music, Nershi felt he no longer had a clear role as its acoustic guitarist, and in August 2007 the String Cheese Incident went on hiatus after he said he needed to step away.
He had already begun playing with Drew Emmitt, and the two formed the Emmitt-Nershi Band, with Tyler Grant on bass and Andy Thorn on banjo, playing bluegrass alongside String Cheese and Leftover Salmon favorites. Its album New Country Blues (SciFidelity, 2009) was written largely in a few days at a friend’s house in Estes Park, Colorado, and includes re-recordings of songs from both bands. The String Cheese Incident returned in the summer of 2009, with a warm-up show in late June and the first Rothbury festival in Michigan, and Nershi has toured with it since, through Song in My Head (2014), Believe (2017) and Lend Me a Hand (2023) and a long run of live releases that keep bluegrass standards such as “The Old Home Place” and “Steam Powered Aeroplane” in the sets. Speaking in 2024 about the band’s range, he described himself as the member at the end of the spectrum trying to keep its old acoustic sound alive.
